blaming Reagan
My Left Wing's konopelli lists 20 things that we won't be [weren't] reminded of on today's fifth anniversary of Reagan's death, including the "October Surprise," selling weapons to Iran and Iraq, Iran/Contra, backing al Qaeda in Afghanistan, propping up right-wing dictators and terrorists in Central America, instituting the global gag rule, and the ever-popular trickle-down economics--not to mention the appointment of Randite Alan Greenspan to chair the Fed.
Konopelli also wrote that "the outpouring of sanctimonious twaddle, gratuitous propaganda and lugubrious schmaltz over the anniversary of the death of Ronald Reagan [...] will surely occupy virtually the entire news spectrum of the day...and the obsequious drone of the sycophants [...] will be reciting their eulogies." This horrid Alaskan hagiographic mess is a case in point, I think.
Paul Krugman's "Reagan Did It" from earlier this week was rather harsh in going back to Reagan for the roots of today's economic crisis, writing that "the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn -- the turn that made crisis inevitable -- took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years:"
Attacks on Reaganomics usually focus on rising inequality and fiscal irresponsibility. Indeed, Reagan ushered in an era in which a small minority grew vastly rich, while working families saw only meager gains. He also broke with longstanding rules of fiscal prudence. [...] There's plenty of blame to go around these days. But the prime villains behind the mess we're in were Reagan and his circle of advisers -- men who forgot the lessons of America's last great financial crisis, and condemned the rest of us to repeat it.
Robert Scheer's "Reagan Didn't Do It" observes that Reagan's culpability "pales in comparison to the damage wrought fifteen years later by a cabal of powerful Democrats and Republicans who enabled the wave of newfangled financial gimmicks that resulted in the economic collapse:"
Reagan didn't do it, but Clinton-era Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, now a top economic adviser in the Obama White House, did. They, along with then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and Republican congressional leaders James Leach and Phil Gramm, blocked any effective regulation of the over-the-counter derivatives that turned into the toxic assets now being paid for with tax dollars.
There's plenty of blame to go around, and Reagan certainly deserves his share--but let's not over-react to the acolytes who treat his presidency like the Second Coming. His two terms were filled with failures, but he was nowhere near as bad as W.