- Reagan was the man who kept Saddam Hussein in office during the first
years after his coup d'tat. He approved the sale of anthrax, West Nile and
other chemical and biological warfare niceties to Hussein's Iraq, laying the
base of Hussein's WMD and helping to kill thousands of Iraqis and tens of
thousands of Iranians.

- Reagan was the man who brought military instructors into Afghanistan to
train the militia of the warlords and Islamic extremists; the name of one of
the early blue-eyed boys was Osama Bin Laden.

- Reagan was the man who covered Central America with proxy wars lead by
death squads that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians with
weapons they got from Washington for free. 200,000 were killed in Guatemala
alone, a country of less than 7 million inhabitants in those times.

- Reagan was the man who trashed much of the Social Security system of the
U.S. He slashed civil rights protections, especially for colored people.

- Reagan's criminal Iran-Contra scam helped flood the American ghettos with
cheap drugs from Central America.

- Reagan was the man who tried to establish ketchup as a vegetable in
schools to save money, to name just one of his absolutely crazy ideas of how
to take advantage of the poor.

- Reagan had delusions that were downright ridiculous, such as the SDI, aka
Star Wars Project, now revived by another wacky president. He related
stories about himself having freed the Auschwitz concentration camp and
other stories that showed to everybody that he couldn't tell truth from mere
fantasy.

- During his presidency the number of prisoners in the U.S. rose from
300,000 (by far the highest figure per capita worldwide) to 800,000, and he
was proud of that. Meanwhile, under Bush, the figure has exceeded 2 million,
which means that 50 % of all prisoners worldwide can be found in the U.S.
(50 % of all practicing lawyers too, by the way).

I guess the worst thing was the fact that it was Reagan who brought the Bush
clan into the core circle of American power.

Actually the list of Reagan's malefaction could fill volumes. The only
"good" thing was that during his presidency US citizens began to again feel
like they were the greatest race on earth, after the humiliating experience
of NIXON'S (R.) Watergate.

And Reagan (R.) sure didn't end the Cold War. It was Mikhail Gorbatchev who
did that. Without Reagan (R.) it might have taken a year or two longer, but
that wouldn't have made much of a difference.

Americans tend to make their former presidents heroes when they die. Quite
right. Some presidents like to make themselves heroes already before they
die. Reagan (R.) liberated Auschwitz, and Bush liberated Afghanistan and
Iraq. Ha ha.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040628/cockburn

Reagan had absolutely no moral sense about truth or falsity. Forty years
after Fort Wacky in Hollywood during WWII, as Commander in Chief, R.R. told
Yitzhak Shamir, then prime minister of Israel, that he had helped to
liberate Auschwitz, had returned to Hollywood with film footage of the
ghastly scenes he had witnessed, and if in later years anyone controverted
the reality of the Holocaust over the Reagan dinner table, he would roll the
footage till the doubts were stilled. It was all fantasy, but I'm sure
Reagan believed it, the same way he regarded his trip to the SS cemetery in
Bitburg as a useful reminder to Europeans of the great days of World War II,
when the people of the Free World--American, British, French and
German--fought shoulder to shoulder against Soviet totalitarianism.

The problem for the press was that Reagan didn't really care that he'd been
caught out with another set of phony statistics or a bogus anecdote about
Auschwitz. Truth, for him, was what he happened to be saying at the time.