http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-slansky-/spoiler-alert-i-was-not-a_b_818948.html?ref=fb&src=spSpoiler Alert! I Was Not A Reagan FanPaul Slansky
Writer; Contributor to The New Yorker
Posted: February 4, 2011 04:56 PM
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Bush and Cheney, of course, were more obviously awful -- the beady-eyed schoolyard bully and Dr. Strangelove. But it was Reagan -- sunny, head-waggling, unthreatening Ronald Reagan -- who made their disastrous reign possible by appointing three of the five Supreme Court Justices who put them in power. Reagan is the godfather to the bitterly regressive party of shameless greed, unabashed bigotry, proud ignorance, shrieking hypocrisy, and brazen disregard -- no, contempt -- for truth and law that the Republicans have become. Wherever you look, he was there first.
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Did Bush preside over the obscene transfer of money from the poor to the rich that led to the destruction of the U.S. economy? Reagan set in motion the across-the-board deregulation that caused it.
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For anyone who wasn't alive or politically aware during the Reagan years and has any curiosity about them, I wrote a book in 1989 that conveys, on a day-by-day basis, what it was surreally like. The title, The Clothes Have No Emperor, addressed the perception that the president was an empty suit -- an observation that, inconvenient and therefore unpopular as it was, was far from mine alone. No less an expert than Edmund Morris, author of the brilliantly definitive Reagan biography Dutch, articulated this insight most eloquently to a group of fellow historians while he was still struggling, after many years of studying him, to comprehend his subject. "Ronald Reagan," he said, "is a man of benign remoteness and no psychological curiosity, either about himself or others. He considers his life to have been unremarkable. He gives nothing of himself to intimates (if one can use such a noun in such a phrase), believing that he has no self to give. In the White House he wrote hundreds of personal letters, and obediently kept an eight-year diary, but the handwritten sentences, while graceful and grammatical (never an erasure, never a flaw of spelling or punctuation!) are about as revelatory of the man behind them as the calligraphy of a copyist."
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Oh, and starting on Sunday I'll be posting an item from the book on Facebook every day until I get tired of doing it. So, to paraphrase Alice Roosevelt Longworth, if you haven't got anything good to say about Ronald Reagan, come be my friend.
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