{"id":22206,"date":"2011-02-06T11:23:07","date_gmt":"2011-02-06T15:23:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=22206"},"modified":"2011-02-06T11:23:38","modified_gmt":"2011-02-06T15:23:38","slug":"washpost-five-reagan-myths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=22206","title":{"rendered":"WashPost: Five Reagan myths"},"content":{"rendered":"

First of all, I can’t imagine the Washington Post running an article on five myths about Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter, yet on Reagan’s 100th birthday, they have the gall to run an article entitled “Five myths about Ronald Reagan’s legacy<\/a>“. Of course, none of those myths are about Democrat charges against Ronald Reagan – that would be too much to expect, I suppose. So, author Will Bunch begins;<\/p>\n

1. Reagan was one of our most popular presidents.<\/p>\n

It’s true that Reagan is popular more than two decades after leaving office. A CNN\/Opinion Research poll last month gave him the third-highest approval rating among presidents of the past 50 years, behind John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. But Reagan’s average approval rating during the eight years that he was in office was nothing spectacular – 52.8 percent, according to Gallup. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, we’ll just disregard the poll and go with the polls that were taken during his presidency. I was on Pennsylvania Avenue the day they brought Ronald Reagan’s mortal coil to lie in state at the Capitol building – along with about a million other people. The Metro ridership record was shattered that day – the record it shattered was Bill Clinton’s inauguration.<\/p>\n

2. Reagan was a tax-cutter.
\nad_icon<\/p>\n

Certainly, Reagan’s boldest move as president was his 1981 tax cut, a sweeping measure that slashed the marginal rate on the wealthiest Americans from 70 percent to 50 percent. The legislation also included smaller cuts in lower tax brackets, as well as big breaks for corporations and the oil industry. But the following year, as the economy was mired in recession and the federal deficit was spiraling out of control, even groups such as the Business Roundtable lobbied Reagan to raise taxes. And he did: The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 was, at the time, the largest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, Reagan signed the tax hikes because the Democrat Congress promised that they’d cut $3 of spending for every $1 of tax increases. Of course, they never did.<\/p>\n

3. Reagan was a hawk.<\/p>\n

Long before he was elected president, Reagan predicted that the Soviet Union would collapse because of communism’s inherent corruption and inefficiency. His forecast proved accurate, but it is not clear that his military buildup moved the process forward. Though Reagan expanded the U.S. military and launched new weapons programs, his real contributions to the end of the Cold War were his willingness to negotiate arms reductions with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his encouragement of Gorbachev as a domestic reformer. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“It is not clear”, but apparently it’s clear enough to dispute it it an article, huh? When I first went to Germany, also the day of the Desert One fiasco, we were wearing clothes and cold-weather gear left over from the Korean War and equipment left over from fighting in the jungles of Vietnam. The Soviets, in the meantime, were two generations ahead of us in armor. When I left Germany the second time, on the day that the Soviets also left Afghanistan, we had surpassed the capabilities of the Soviets. If we had gone to Desert Storm with Jimmy Carter’s army, we’d have won, but just barely.<\/p>\n

4. Reagan shrank the federal government.<\/p>\n

The number of federal employees grew from 2.8 million to 3 million under Reagan, in large part because of his buildup at the Pentagon. (It took the Democratic administration of President Bill Clinton to trim the employee rolls back to 2.7 million.) Reagan also abandoned a campaign pledge to get rid of two Cabinet agencies – Energy and Education – and added a new one, Veterans Affairs. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, making the Department of Veterans’ Affairs a Department instead of an agency is what swelled federal government. Never mind that Defense is one of the things that government should be doing. Reagan increased the size of the Defense Department because Jimmy Carter allowed it to atrophy to a dangerous condition. Witness: Desert One. Bill Clinton reduced the ranks, not the civilians at the Pentagon, by buying out careerists, and then within a few years he was trying to bring them back on active duty when his meals-on-wheels programs were affecting morale.<\/p>\n

5. Reagan was a conservative culture warrior.<\/p>\n

Reagan’s contributions to the culture wars of the 1980s were largely rhetorical and symbolic. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Um, aren’t culture wars “largely rhetorical and symbolic”. I know Democrats are famous for legislating morality and behavior, but that doesn’t mean that Republicans should do the same just to prove their point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First of all, I can’t imagine the Washington Post running an article on five myths about … WashPost: Five Reagan myths<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberals-suck","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}