Behind the Ronald Reagan myth: “No one had ever entered the White House so grossly ill informed”

[HughBeaumont]

42. Wikipedia has some awesome quotes regarding his idiocy . . . .

. . . . from others and sadly, the dumbfounding statements made by Rea-gone himself . . .

The doctor begins to lose freedom. . . . First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then doctors aren’t equally divided geographically. So a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him, you can't live in that town. They already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it's only a short step to dictating where he will go. . . . All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man's working place and his working methods, determine his employment. From here it's a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay. And pretty soon your son won't decide, when he's in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do. Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine (1961 LP).

Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders. California Governor Ronald Reagan, Sacramento Bee, April 28, 1966.

All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk. Ronald Reagan, Burlington (Vermont) Free Press (15 February 1980).

Evolution] has in recent years been challenged in the world of science and is not yet believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was believed. But if it was going to be taught in the schools, then I think that also the biblical theory of creation, which is not a theory but the biblical story of creation, should also be taught. Press conference at evangelical event in Dallas, Texas. (22 August 1980).

My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes. Joking during a microphone check. The joke was later leaked to the general populace. [7][8] (11 August 1984).

Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's "bold new imaginative" program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx—first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother to us all. Hitler called his "State Socialism" and way before him it was "benevolent monarchy." In a 1960 letter to the GOP presidential candidate Richard Nixon, quoted in Matthew Dallek's The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics (2000), p. 38.

I've spoken recently of the freedom fighters of Nicaragua. You know the truth about them. You know who they're fighting and why. They are the moral equal of our Founding Fathers and the brave men and women of the French Resistance. We cannot turn away from them, for the struggle here is not right versus left; it is right versus wrong. Speech to the annual conference of the Conservative Political Action Conference, New York, speaking of the rebels (or Contras) seeking to overthrow the Nicaraguan Government (1 March 1985); reported in "Reagan Terms Nicaraguan Rebels 'Moral Equal of Founding Fathers'" in The New York Times (2 March 1985).

Oh, and then the ones about Reagan . . . .

President Reagan doesn't always check the facts before he makes statements, and the press accepts this as kind of amusing. President Jimmy Carter, March 6, 1984, cited by Paul Slansky, The Clothes Have No Emperor.

He has the ability to make statements that are so far outside the parameters of logic that they leave you speechless.

I'd heard my parents [Ronald and Nancy Reagan] read their horoscopes aloud at the breakfast table, but that seemed pretty innocuous to me. Occasionally, I read mine, too — usually so I can do the exact opposite of what it says. But my parents have done what the stars suggested — altered schedules, changed travel plans, stayed home, cancelled appearances." Patti Davis (formerly Patricia Ann Reagan) talking about her father, The Way I See It.

Reagan's theory was really "trickle down" economics borrowed from the Republican 1920s (Harding-Coolidge-Hoover) and renamed "supply side." Cut tax rates for the wealthy; everyone else will benefit. As Reagan's budget director David Stockman confided to me at the time, the supply-side rhetoric "was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate." Many middle-class and poor citizens figured it out, even if reporters did not. William Greider, "The Gipper's Economy", The Nation, June 28, 2004.

Reagan, who more than any president in history railed against government benefits and spending, set the standard for all members of his administration. In addition to his presidential pension of $99,500 a year for life and his annual pension as a former governor of California of $30,800 … he received Secret Service protection from forty full-time agents and other security at a cost to the government estimated at $10 million annually, more than double that of other living presidents. A suite of offices atop a new thirty-four-story office building twenty minutes from his home, commanding a view that extended from the Pacific Ocean to the towers of downtown Los Angeles, cost the government $173,000 a year to lease. Haynes Johnson, Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years.

He knows less about the budget than any president in my lifetime. He can't even carry on a conversation about the budget. It's an absolute and utter disgrace. House Speaker Tip O'Neill, http://www.quickchange.com/reagan/1981.html

Reagan's boys called Jimmy Carter a weanie and a wuss although Carter wouldn't give an inch to the Ayatollah. Reagan, with that film-fantasy tough-guy con in front of cameras, went begging like a coward cockroach to Khomeini, pleading on bended knee for the release of our hostages. Greg Palast (June 13, 2004), Reagan, fact and fantasy, The Observer.

And there are much . . . MUCH more at the link. Oh, it's bad.

I mean . . . Iran/Contra was technically high treason and no one seems to get that. He disgraced America, defanged unions, allowed Wall $treet to take the front door to the White House and terrorists to take the back door, made racism fashionable, quashed the progress of education and destroyed any hope of us having Universal Health Care in this country . . . and we're naming national fucking LANDMARKS after this guy????