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just as America was starting to break that link because of Viet Nam. Reagan began his campaign in a city famous ONLY for the murder of civil rights activists (although now it is famous for Jerry Rice, too). Reagan told the South that it was okay to be racist just as the South was sruggling to overcome that heritage. Reagan cut funding for education, school lunches, the arts, crime prevention, drug prevention, drug rehab, mental health treatment and just about everything else that helped our society deal with its complexities. He single-handedly (well, with the help of Congress) created the homeless problem-- people weren't living on the streets in such great numbers before Reagan. We spent most of the 90s trying to clean up the social ills Reagan created during the 80s.
Reagan's economy drove wages down (because it favored big over small business), which made families have to have two incomes to survive, and then he blamed feminism for destroying the family, trying to make women feel bad because they had to work to survive in his economy. He turned us into a debtor nation for the first time, and we've never recovered.
He did kill a lot of people (more than Bush? who knows, who counts anymore?), but he created a legacy that made Bush possible, and that turned power in this nation over to unbridled corporate greed (not that corporations were ever out of power, but he broke down all the safegaurds built after the Great Depression).
And he was a horrible, petty, racist buffoon. He was optimistic if you were white, rich, conservative, Christian, hetero, and male, but the further you varied from that ideal, the more Reagan explicitly blamed you for the world's problems. Before I even knew the difference between conservative and liberal, back when I just believed in the Jesus ideals of love, foregiveness and charity, I had to listen to Reagan blame those characteristics of myself that gave me my greatest pride as the root of all evil in America.
He was a despicable animal. W is just weak and stupid.
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