Reagan, in 1987, presided over the most severe stock market crash since 1929.
In support of South Africa’s apartheid regime, Reagan vetoed bi-partisan legislated economic sanctions against that government, sanctions that were intended to pressure South Africa into abolishing its apartheid policies.
Backing South Africa’s apartheid government, Reagan called Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela a “terrorist” and had his National Congress officially listed as a “terrorist organization.”
In 1983, Ronald Reagan responded to the murder of 241 Marines in Lebanon by retreating from Lebanon, and by invading in October that year the island nation of Grenada.
In 1983 Ronald Reagan, three times sent Donald Rumsfeld to Iraq to provide that country’s brutal dictator with the seeds of some of the most horrific chemical weapons known. When in March of 1988 the Iraqi dictator employed the weapons he’d been given by Reagan to murder somewhere around 100,000 of his own citizens, no one in the administration, including the president, made an objecting remark on the slaughter.
Ronald Reagan supported the brutal dictatorships of Pinochet in Chile and Suharto in Indonesia.
His “deregulation” mantra of “getting government off the backs of Americans,” resulted in Drexel-Burnham-Lambert's Michael Milken junk-bond fiasco and the Savings & Loan crisis that necessitated US taxpayers bailout the self-correcting free-market “private enterprise” S&L industry with billions and billions and billions.
Reagan’s hands off, don’t look, don’t ask, don’t care philosophy — in 180-degree opposition to Republican President Teddy Roosevelt’s concern that business-grown-monopolistic/all-powerful would eventually prove the evisceration of republican democracy — is the genesis of the business scandals from then onward to today; Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, Arthur Anderson accounting, the no-bid contracts of Haliburton, KBR, and the “lost billions” that have gone uninvestigated, the 2006-2007 mine cave-ins, the Sallie-Mae student loan kick-back disgrace, the current sub-prime mortgage loan mess, and so much more than can be recounted here.
The verdict is inescapable: Ronald Reagan was not any near even a sub-prime president. And unless those of us who know full well he was at best a poor facsimile of a B-grade actor portraying a president counter each and every effort to redefine the 40th president and to rewrite history in some super-hero/Mayberryesque mythologizing image, we may well find our nation suffering through Reagan II, the sequel starring Fred Thompson.
— Ed Tubbs
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