How Reagan Wrecked The American Middle Class, And Came Out Smelling Like A Rose

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/02/09/how-reagan-wrecked-the-american-middle-class-and-came-out-smelling-like-a-rose/

“Government is not a solution to our problem government is the problem.” — Ronald Reagan

February 6th marked the would-be birthday of Ronald Reagan, the beloved Republican icon who passed away in 2004. He would have been 101 years old. The charismatic, two-term Republican president from 1981-1989 defined the modern conservative movement and became the benevolent face of a harsh philosophy. For those of you who either weren’t following politics or weren’t born yet, Reagan’s star rose as drugs, crime, and mass upheavals in the late 1960′s and 1970′s put liberalism in a bad light. When Reagan defeated incumbent President Jimmy Carter in 1980, our country was demoralized by the Vietnam War, Watergate, rising oil prices, rampant inflation, and the never-ending hostage crisis in Iran. Never mind that Richard Nixon, a Republican president, caused the Watergate scandal, and that conservatives from both parties (the GOP actually had liberals and moderates back then) supported Vietnam and the foreign policy positions that pissed people off in the Middle East. Everyone was blaming liberals for our woes, and here’s this cheerful, grandfatherly guy telling us it’s “morning in America.” Yeah, Good f*cking morning.

Reagan honed his political positions as California’s governor from 1967-1975. During his 1966 campaign, he promised to “send the welfare bums back to work” and “clean up the mess in Berkeley” (impose some law and order on those danged hippie protestors), and a resounding 57.65% of voters sent him to Sacramento. And “clean up the mess” Reagan certainly did on May 15th, 1969 — otherwise known as “Bloody Thursday” — when Reagan sent the California Highway Patrol and National Guard to quell the People’s Park protests in Berkeley. One dead student and blinded man later, Reagan snapped, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.” The abortion debate had also begun, and although a relatively new Governor Reagan signed a pro-abortion bill, he later said he regretted it and took a pro-life position. He also strongly supported capital punishment, but only got to perform one retroactive abortion due to a Supreme Court of California decision that invalidated all death sentences from before 1972. Reagan also famously joked about hoping for a botulism epidemic when a radical Berkeley group demanded a food distribution for the poor (the Symbionese Liberation Army later went on to kidnap Patty Hearst.

In 1980, Reagan launched a presidential campaign based on states rights (a dog whistle for thelynching murder of three activists who were registering African-Americans to vote Philadelphia, MS), a strong military, supply side economics, and his signature cheeriness. By then, he’d learned to cloak then he’d learned to cloak his mean philosophy with an easy-going demeanor and off-the-cuff witticisms. He famously won in a landslide (carrying 44 states and 50.8% of the popular vote), and became the United States’ 40th president. Even many liberals and former hippies-turned-yuppie — like this writer’s father and stepmother — pulled the lever for him. Yes, this writer still holds a grudge, and yes, voting booths still had levers back then.

We now have Reagan to thank for following legacies — many of which have caused our current woes — but he rarely gets blamed because he always was the “teflon president”: