I totally heart Castro, it's true!

That's a clever and insightful response, harDCore. But would it be alright with you if I went down on Fawn Hall instead?

Hey Sterling - Go tell it to your boyfriend Oliver North. And when your done, eat his cock.

Haha. What do you have against National Review? And Castro is clearly an object of great affection for the American left - I can't imagine how you can question that.

whoa castro is the left's hero? dammit, the secret lefty meeting last weekend made no mention of this...nader's gonna be pissed!

as soon as i hear ridiculous statements like "castro-the left's hero" and links from the national review, all hope for any sort of objective discussion about the complexity of government and politics in america goes out the window...

for what it's worth, the most even-handed media stuff about the gipper was found in newsweek, of all places...and that slate article was good reading as well (for the negatives, of course.) but then again slate was probably given clearance to run the article by fidel himself, after some lefty "fact-checking" by hillary clinton, right? right.

I agree.

Waaay to early to put Ron on any currency.

Jeez!

There are many older, more historical, better choices.

Ron just didn't do anything near the significance of the older guys.

Keep Hamilton!

(besides if anyone should go on currency in connection with Reagan, it should be Paul Volcker!!!!! lol)

Enough with the Ron nostalgia! He's dead. I'm sorry, too. Alzheimer's sucks, but you don't replace a guy of Hamilton's stature.

Yeah, I'm sure Reagan was personally involved in the decision to cut babies out of wombs. He was real big on that. I'm told he actually used to eat baby-guts on toast for breakfast.

It always amuses me when you lefties try to convince people that some conservative president "supported" the Junta in Argentina or "supported" Marcos in the Phillipines, or arranged the assassination against Allende.

There's a concept called "The lesser of two evils". I'm sure if Reagan had his choice, he'd have wiped the slate clean and installed a Jerffersonian democracy in Argentina. But since the presidency of the United States doesn't come with a magic wand, he had to make do and deal with the conditions that were down there.

harDCore - You have no idea what you're talking about. Iran-Contra MIGHT have been a minor violation of the "Boland Amendment" - a Congressional funding provision, but Reagan did it to achieve two worthy foreign-policy ends - freeing hostages and financing anti-communist freedom fighters in Nicaragua (who eventually declared victory when free elections were held). Reagan betrayed nothing. And the Sandanistas was the Communist dictatorship in Nicaragua - John Kerry supported them but Reagan did not.

Also, I'm not sure what Reagan's position on the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was, but those 1960s laws generally passed because of Republican support, since at that time the "deep south bigot shit holes" were all Democrats. Happily, they've mostly passed on, except for Robert Byrd, the senior Senator - DEMOCRAT - from West Virginia. The only former KKK member in Congress.

" Just wondering - how did this guy win 49 states? "

The same way that most tyrants gain power. Through lies, propoganda, and more lies. And what works effectively on American boobs, put a "common man" as the public face for the lies.

Oh, and running against Mondale doesn't hurt either. Why the Democrats keep sending up nerds like him, Gore and now Kerry (although he's not a social misfit) is beyond me. What happened to the Kennedy "I'll Fuck Your Daughter and Laugh" Democrats ? They were cool.

typical conservative response.

Thanks hater, I enjoy a good laugh at the end of the day. It's one thing to debate the pros and cons of Reagan's tax cuts and military buildup, but your attempt to pin every problem in the world on Reagan is great comedy. Just wondering - how did this guy win 49 states? You must despise your fellow citizens. Or were they just helpless dummies who were convinced to vote for Reagan by those staunch conservatives at the New York Times and CBS? Please keep posting, before the men in white suits drag you away.

1. IRAN CONTRA - the bastard is a traitor!

2. SANDINISTAS - supported and financed terrorists that killed my friends' dad.

3. RACIST - Opposed the 1965 Civil Rights Act and campaigned for states rights of deep south bigot shit holes.

Hater - you're wrong on nearly every point, but I don't have time to contest them all. Your comparison of Volcker and Greenspan, for instance, is incoherent and suggests that you have no grasp of basic monetary policy.

Also, regarding the tax burden, it's true that tax revenues increased during Reagan's term - you count this as an "a-ha!" moment. But the truth is that Reagan's tax policy was aimed at this outcome, and relied on the Laffer Curve. The goal was to increase economic growth and THUS tax revenues by lowering tax rates. You lefties mocked this all through the 80s, even as you complained about Reagan's defense debt. BUT AS HAS BECOME OBVIOUS, Reagan was correct - the lower tax burden spurned economic growth, and the Federal debt crisis predicted by the left never happened - our economy grew so quickly that the government has been able to repay the Reagan era debt easily.

You should stop reading Ted Rall and try a real history textbook.

What he said!

Its too limiting to focus on the AIDS thing, Reagan was severely deficient in many other ways, and the right wing controlled media has hyped him and created a false legend about how great he was since Bush lost his re-election to Clinton. Theyve been waiting for his death for 14 years to pull this kind of shit.

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. Economic growth indices -- GDP, jobs, revenues -- were all positive when Carter left office. All plunged after Reagan policies took effect.

Reagan didn't cure inflation, the main economic problem during the Carter years. Carter's Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker tried when he raised interest rates. That's the opposite of what Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan has done to keep inflation low.

Carter's policies and people fought inflation, but maintained real growth. On the other hand, Reagan's policies helped cause the worst recession since the Great Depression: two bleak years with nearly double-digit unemployment! Reaganomics failed in less than a year, and it took an entire second year for the economy to recover from the failure.

Another major myth: Reagan cut taxes on all Americans, and that led to a great expansion.

Here's the truth: the total federal tax burden increased during the Reagan years, and most Americans paid more in taxes after Reagan than before. The "Reagan Recovery" was unremarkable. It looks great only contrasted against the dismal Reagan Recession -- but it had nothing to do with Supply Side voodoo.

With a red ink explosion -- $300 BILLION deficits looming as far as the eye could see -- GOP Senators, notably including Bob Dole, led the way on tax hikes. The economy enjoyed its recovery only after total tax increases larger than the total tax cuts were implemented. Most importantly, average annual GDP growth during the Reagan 80s was lower than during the Clinton 90s or the JFK-LBJ 60s!

Here's the biggest myth of them all: Ronald Reagan won the "Cold War".

In reality, Reagan did nothing to bring down the Soviet Union.

By 1980, the Soviet Union was trying to cut its own defense spending. Reagan made it harder for them to do so. In fact, Reagan increased the possibility of a nuclear war because he was -- frankly, and sadly -- senile. He thought we could actually recall submarine-launched nuclear missiles (talk about a Reagan myth), and bullied the Soviets to highest alert several times.

Critically, Reagan never even tried to bring down the Soviet Union.

Wasteful overspending on defense didn't end the Soviet Union. In fact, it played into the hands of authoritarian "Communist" hard-liners in the Kremlin. Reagan thought the Soviet Union was more powerful than we were. He was trying to close what he called "the window of vulnerability."

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.

Here's an example: the Soviet Union military couldn't deal with a weak state on its own border, the poor, undermanned Afghanistan. Most of the Soviets' military might had to make sure its "allies" in the Warsaw Pact and subjects along the South Asian front didn't revolt. Even Richard Nixon told Reagan he could balance the budget with big defense cuts.

Reagan ignored this, and wrecked our budget.

We didn't have to increase weapons spending, but Reagan didn't care. He ran away from summits with the dying old-guard Soviets, and the new-style "glasnost" leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev baffled the witless Reagan and his closed-minded extremist advisors.

Maggie Thatcher finally cajoled the Gipper into meeting Gorby, and Gorby cleaned Reagan's clock. Reagan's hard-right "handlers" nearly had to drag Reagan out of the room before he signed away our entire nuclear deterrent. Reagan -- and the planet -- was lucky Gorbachev sought genuine and stable peace. Had Yuri Andropov's health held, Reagan's "jokes" and gaffes might have caused World War III.

Eventually Reagan even gave Gorbachev his seal of approval. Visiting Moscow before the August Coup, Reagan said the Soviet Union was no longer the "Evil Empire." He predicted his friend Gorbachev would lead the Soviet Union for many years to come.

As usual, Reagan was wrong. A few months later, disgruntled military officers kidnapped Gorbachev, throwing him out of power forever. Reagan remained disengaged: nothing he did caused the coup, and nothing he did made the Soviet military support Boris Yeltsin over their superiors.

We're all fortunate things happened as they did -- but once again, Reagan did nothing to make this fluke more likely.

All this is vintage Reagan. Reagan took credit for others' hard word and hard choices, and blamed them for his failures. Reagan even blamed Jimmy Carter for Reagan's foolish, fatal, and reckless decision to leave 243 Marines stationed in Beirut, helpless and unguarded.

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.

Reagan was an actor playing the part of the president. He was style over substance; lucky, not good.

And once the myths are stripped from the "legacy", the truth becomes obvious: Reagan was by far the most overrated man in American history.

Castro is not the Left's hero. Fiorello LaGuardia is (for New York lefties)

The CDC under Reagan did yeoman work on AIDS research, and also under Reagan people with AIDS were afforded protection so that they could remain in school, etc. Are you people so saturated by the media mentality that you judge what someone says as more important than what they do or don't do? Castro - the left's hero - locked up Cuba's AIDS patients in forced isolation, even after it became apparent that communicability was limited. Can you imagine the howling today if Reagan had decided to quarantine AIDS patients, given all the whining about how he didn't talk about them in public? Haha.

In addition, if you follow the link where the AIDS spending figures are derived from in the National Review article, the amount that's available to Health and Human Services for discretionary funding (used to fund CDC, NIH, etc. and actually get things done, public health-wise) is actually not nearly as dramatic a jump as the author would have you believe, considering that it was a massive and massively underestimated public health crisis.

Actually, the National Review article says:

President Reagan's February 6, 1986 State of the Union address included this specific passage where he says the word "AIDS" five times: "We will continue, as a high priority, the fight against Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). An unprecedented research effort is underway to deal with this major epidemic public health threat. The number of AIDS cases is expected to increase. While there are hopes for drugs and vaccines against AIDS, none is immediately at hand. Consequently, efforts should focus on prevention, to inform and to lower risks of further transmission of the AIDS virus. To this end, I am asking the Surgeon General to prepare a report to the American people on AIDS."

Don't know where they got that from or if it was willful misattribution but the difference between a nationally televised State of the Union is very different from a Budget Message to Congress (so many people tune in for that!).

I admit my error--it wasn't the State of the Union. It was the Budget Message to Congress the following day. This was clear in the National Review article, and I misread it. Here is the original text: http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/resource/speeches/1986/20586b.htm

If this happens, I'll be writing "Iran-Contra" on every $10 I get.