Reply #12: Yeah, no kidding!

[calimary]

I live on the Westside. That bastard was always wrecking the commute through here. HAD to come in on Marine One from LAX to Santa Monica Airport (a little community airport catering mainly to civil aviation). That was because most of the time the reagans stayed at the Century Plaza Hotel when they weren't going up to Santa Barbara. So streets all around the Santa Monica Airport would be blocked off for his majesty's motorcade all the way from Santa Monica to Century City. BIG-ASS commercial district with freeway on- and off-ramps that made for a ferocious amount of traffic on just even the average day without any reagan interruption. It was already dicey driving around there, and his need for passage just fucked everything up even worse. The 405 Freeway - HUGE freeway cutting through the busy Westside - ramps on and off there would be closed, cops everywhere, just MADNESS! And VERY frequently during rush-hour. Fucking bastard!

And he was ALWAYS coming out here. Again and again and again and again and again. They weren't living in Bel Air yet, so it was always the Century Plaza if they were in town. For extended vacations they'd go up to the ranch, but even then, they'd often stop for a couple of nights at the Century Plaza before heading up to Santa Barbara. That schmuck took more vacations than anybody I've ever seen or heard of - well, at least until george w bush - who basically took at least a full year's worth of his "terms" on vacation, once it was all added up. I was on the air at the time, and it really galled me, and while I was usually more meticulous about keeping my opinions out of it, I found myself many many many many times repeating the same phrase at the end of some news item about him - "... for YET ANOTHER California vacation."

HATED that bastard. I remember feeling such outrage at the time, watching what he was doing, watching while he systematically started killing the union movement, watching while his rat-bastard of an "Interior Secretary" was some born-again cretin who honestly believed that it didn't matter what you did to the Earth. Because "when the last tree is felled, Jesus will come back!" Swear to God he actually said that. :scared: reagan had this "Kitchen Cabinet" (an off-the-books, behind-closed-doors, private set of "advisors" - many of them based here in SoCal, all of them big-ass industrialists and business tycoons) who advised him in addition to the usual appointee suspects. One of them was a guy named justin dart. He had the typical reagan-gang rape-and-pillage attitude toward the environment. justin dart thought it was important to save about 100 acres of redwoods - "for the kids." Everything else in his mind was fair game.

justin dart's attitude drove me to develop one of my own. I think we should save about 100 of the justin dart types and put THEM in a nice tidy little sequestered zoo - "for the kids." Like he wanted to see done with our precious old-growth forests.

I absolutely and fiercely believe that the only good thing about ronald reagan is that he's dead. That's the only good thing I can say about that fucker. In many ways HE was and is our Worst President Ever - even more than dubya. He represents everything that's gone seriously wrong with America. He initiated it, aggressively nurtured it, and damn near sanctified it - really cemented our national image as "America the Money-grubber."

I HATE ronald reagan with a fiery passion. I will to the day I draw my last breath.