It’s hard to speak ill of a dead person, especially one whose failures can be ascribed to a crippling degenerative illness. Still, Reagan was not a good president. He was not as bad as he could have been, he may not have been any worse than his rivals, and he was not the worst ever, but he was not a good president. His were the years when my father bought a book on how to survive nuclear holocaust. His were the years when the word “AIDS” was never mentioned. His were the years of ballooning deficits, the foundations of “soak the poor” policy, the libertarian rhetoric used to destroy basic social services. Yes, he spent the USSR into the ground, but I don’t know that Carter or Mondale would have done any worse. At least he wasn’t as much in the thrall of theocrats and end-times lunatics as our current regime.
Secretly Ironic 