The Reagan remembrance reached a fever pitch this weekend. I haven’t been around for too many president deaths, but aren’t we going a little overboard with this?
It’s customary to overlook someone’s faults when they die, but I think the media is going too far the other way. Most of my teenage view of Reagan was shaped by Bloom County and punk rock. I’m still waiting to see Jello Biafra’s take on the whole thing. The consensus from those with any sense outside the mainstream media seems to be that he had his faults both domestically and in foreign policy, but he’s not nearly as bad as our current elected leader. I wholeheartedly agree. All of the nostalgia over the weekend seemed to gloss over Regan’s neglect of the AIDS crisis, Iran-Contra, the ballooning deficit and failure of trickle-down economics for the poorest of americans, the fact that the Soviet Union was already on it’s last legs before he started spending tons of dough on ridiculous things like the star wars defense program and that it was his foreign policy in both the Middle East and Afghanistan that helped get us into the terrorist mess that we’re dealing with today.
Check out a few opinions from people better informed and more eloquent than I.