Dear Ronald Reagan: Thanks for Wrecking America - Birthday greetings from Charles P. Pierce

President Reagan at a rally for Texas Republican candidates in Irving, Texas, 10/11/82. (photo: Reagan Library)

Dear Ronald Reagan: Thanks for Wrecking America
By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire
08 February 12

Turns out yesterday would have been Ronald Reagan's 101st birthday. In all the excitement over the tsunami of Santorum that engulfed the country, it plumb got right by me. So, let me say, in my own belated way, and because behind-the-times was the basis for Reagan's entire career, happy birthday, ya silly old coot.

How do you like your party now, Ronnie? A Mormon everyone hates, a world-historical balloon animal 10 years past his sell-by date, a survivalist crank from Texas, and a guy who is pretty much a dick. That's the party you and your boys created. That's the end product of the "conservative movement" of which you were the amiable and occasionally coherent figurehead, a prop in your own life. You know how you know that's the case, Ronnie? Look how hard they're trying to memorialize you in concrete and marble. They stuck your name on National Airport, and on the biggest and ugliest building in Washington, D.C., to celebrate your devotion to smaller government. What was it that Bogart said in that detective movie?
The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.

You taught us that "deficits don't matter." (Dick Cheney himself reminded us of that.) You sold missiles to the terrorist-sponsoring mullahs in Iran so you could sponsor our own priest-slaughtering terrorists in Central America, thereby laying the groundwork for all the secret deceptions in foreign policy that led to the Iraq war, which was designed and launched by some of your own old Iran-Contra hands, and thereby also laying the groundwork for the destructive increase in presidential power that continues (alas) to this day, under a Democratic president.

You did more than anyone else to demolish the notion of a political commonwealth, the principle that "government" is a common enterprise that must be undertaken by all citizens, and not some foreign entity to be whipped and controlled. You brought "states' rights" back from the historical ignominy where it richly deserved to have been sunk. You showed how The Other can get you elected, how elections are really simply magic shows of pretty images and soft music. You ruled for an entire second term as a symptomatic Alzheimer's patient and dared anyone to act in a patriotic manner and suggest you step down. Nobody did. You robbed the system of its confidence.

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for all of it, yes there is more:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/ronald-reagan-birthday-greetings-6653286