Ronald Reagan

About

Ronald Reagan was the 40th president of the United States.

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Many people see his administration as being the beginning of the latter-day neoconservative takeover of the US government which segued smoothly into George H.W. Bush's presidency, was interrupted only slightly (with much empty scandal stirred up by unhappy neocons hoping to knock the reins of power back into the right hands) by the presidency of Bill Clinton, and subsequently rekindled during the evangelistic, opaque administration of George W. Bush.

Acts

sources needed (copied from meme):

• signed the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982, resulting in the largest peacetime tax increase in American history
• granted amnesty to nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants
• signed the Therapeutic Abortion Bill in California in 1967, 6 years before Roe v Wade
• tripled the national debt
• negotiated with terrorists twice:
  • traded arms for hostages with Iran
  • Iran Contra scandal
• cut and run from Lebanon

Quotes About

The kindest thing you can say about Reagan is he may not have known what the policies of his administration were, but I'll pretend he did. The Reagan years was a period of devastation and disaster in El Salvador. Maybe seventy-thousand people were slaughtered. The decade began with the assassination of the archbishop. It ended, rather symbolically, with the brutal murder of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, by an elite battalion, trained, armed, run by the U.S., which had a huge, bloody trail of murders and massacres behind it. The priests are also shown in the picture along with their housekeeper and her daughter, who were also murdered by the same elite battalion, and in between tens of thousands of the usual victims. That was El Salvador. And, as I say, people south of the border know what it is; people north of the border haven't a clue.

— Noam Chomsky, War Crimes and Imperial Fantasies, 2004-06-11

Links

Reference

• Wikipedia
• Conservapedia
• dKosopedia
• SourceWatch

Commentary & Sources

• Cowboys and Idiots - The Reagan Years
• The Mis-Communicator

Related

• 2019/10/29 [L..T] The Long Shadow of the 'Welfare Queen' “When Ronald Reagan and his advisors wanted to undermine the very institution of social programs, he turned to a news story out of Chicago – the tale of one Linda Taylor, who'd bilked the government benefits system out of so much money she was dubbed the "welfare queen."”
• 2004/09/01 [L..T] Operation Coffeecup: Ronald Reagan's Effort to Prevent the Enactment of Medicare Ronald Reagan may have crystallized, in the minds of Republican strategists, the political ability of popular myth to be more powerful than the truth – as exemplified by his well-documented history of working against social programs (Medicare, Social Security) while convincingly denying it in debates with Jimmy Carter.