Ronald Reagan is still dead

Or as Huck Finn might say, alright then I'll go to hell. We've had to wait a couple of days for people to start saying it but finally it's trickling out (or, if you like, trickling down). Greg Palast David Corn and Michael twice now are all over it. Not to put too fine a point on it, Ronald Reagan was an awful awful president. And now he is dead. This is, of course, no excuse. There is no excuse for the legacy that Reagan left us, one that still soils our politics today. Reagan, the actor, practically invented the manipulative hyper-spin, style over substance sound bite campaigning that has become a fact of life for us today. One could argue that the current state of affairs is an inevitability of the zero attention span style of media that has arisen over the past quarter century but Reagan and his people were pioneers in taking advantage of this and screw them for it. There is no excuse for what Reagan's politics did to the poor and working classes in America. Reagan symbolically ended the labor movement in the U.S. by breaking the air traffic controllers union. He was able to muster the political muscle for this action because his racially exploitive politics had already broken the resolve of most rank and file union households. Reagan's white working class coalition was based on a divisive thinly veiled racism that blamed the poor for poverty in this country and set back organized labor fifty years. Reagan's victory in this arena was so complete that subsequent officeholders (including Bill Clinton) have cheerily treated the poor and middle classes with indifference at times, but mostly with all out hostility.
There is no excuse for the arrogance and disregard for human rights and the rule of law displayed by Reagan's foreign policy. The Reagan administration supported brutal dictatorships and trained and supplied terrorists in numerous proxy wars including Afghanistan where the U.S. agent was Osama Bin Laden's Mujahadeen, Iraq where the U.S. supplied Saddam Hussein chemical weapons and looked the other way when he used them, and most famously in Nicaragua in which case the Constitution was ignored and the Congress was lied to in the interest of selling weapons to one particularly nasty government in order to raise the money to arm more particularly nasty terrorists.
We are still paying for these policies in so many ways. The slick political hatchet work of the Karl Rove's of the world, the uber-capitalism of the Bushes or the Cheneys, The neocons running the Pentagon today are all Reagan's babies. And today he is dead. And that is no excuse.

Note: Blogger spellcheck suggests replacing "neocon" with "necking." I don't know why this is funny but it is.