CSPAN has Lou Cannon's son on this morning. He

works for the Reader's Digest. He has a lot of nice things to say about Ronald Reagan. I think I saw a list that featured Reagan as one of the three best presidents. Reagan was facile and spoke like Jimmy Stewart if Congressman Smith had made it to the White House. But he was the friend of the rich and the powerful and therefore the enemy of the working class. Today's economic malaise results from Reagan's tax polices. If chief executives and investment bankers only got to keep 10% of their income in excess of 250,000, the heartless export of American jobs and financial chicanery on Wall Street would not have occurred. The financial incentive wouldn't have been sufficient to over-ride traditional moral and social principles. Remember the euphimism "down-sizing" was coined during the Reagan years.

Internationally, he was a criminal. His administration broke domestic and international law by selling weapons to the Iranians to fight Iraq. He allowed Israel to transfer US provided weaponry to Iran and make a nice profit and receive more up to date replacements. Reagan and Bush used the net proceeds to fund the Contras in Nicaragua, a disgraceful act of war on a struggling democracy. The brutal and indiscriminate killing of poor peasants in Latin America has been one of the most shameful episodes in modern American history. And the administration supplemented the Iran funds with profits on cocaine the CIA flew out on the same aircraft they used to fly weapons in. While George Bush, the former CIA chief, was more hands on these policies, that circumstance was designed to allow President Papa Noel to cloak himself in culpable deniabilty. Reagan knew exactly what he was doing when he selected Bush as his running mate. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were all involved in these programs, and also in programs providing Iraq in the early eighties the chemical-biological technologies which they all were so worried about 10years later. Here's a more informed write-up (starting around p 302)

Oh, and the one great success attributed to Reagan was winning the cold war. We didn't win it. Russia lost it, by bankrupting thmselves in their ten year campaign in Afghanistan. (Sound familiar?) The USSR was broke and demoralized when Lech Walesa, a union leader, with the support of a Polish pope rejected Soviet hegemony.

Sorry to have to issue so strident a denunciation at time of good will and grace. I simply have to set the record straight in so far as I am able. Now CSpan is carrying the current President's address to the American Enterprise Institue on the "Universality of Freedom." God help the American people.