Reagan: A legacy of lies

RK: The real problem for conservatives today is not their nostalgic admiration of Reagan, but their distance from Reagan’s moral clarity.

DS: I don’t think the nostalgic admiration is helping matters. The distance from Reagan’s moral clarity comes from seeing the true aftermath of his policies.

Until [GWB] side-stepped into the White House, Reagan was the worst American leader since Herbert Hoover.
Six years into Reagan’s presidency… Reaganomics had “accomplished” quite a bit: doubled the national debt, caused the S&L crisis, and nearly wrecked the financial system.
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Here’s the truth: we’d already won the Cold War before Reagan took office. All Reagan needed to do was continue the tried-and-true containment policies Harry S. Truman began and all subsequent presidents employed. The Soviet Union was Collapsing from within. The CIA actually told this to Reagan as he took office.
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Reagan hired over 100 crooks to run our government, and broke several laws himself. His policies were almost uniformly self-defeating, wrong-headed, immoral and unfair.

But you can keep working on that moral clarity.