Repubs remember Reagan

After Michael Jackson died, his approval rating skyrocketed, and there was an explosion of new fans.

When Ronald Reagan died, he became nearly as holy as Jesus to Republicans.

Because a star has died, people tend to gloss over all those glaring, previously unforgivable acts he or she committed. We tend to just focus on the good things they did. I mean, they’re dead now, and you wouldn’t disrespect the dead, would you?

Ronald Reagan is widely considered to have been the greatest president of all time, or at least that’s what Sarah Palin tells me.

Here are some reasons:

Ronnie said if he won the 1980 presidential election he would get our hostages back from terrorists in Iran. Yeah, he was fighting terrorism before it was cool. No big deal.

That Reagan fellow was crazy like a fox — there was no telling what he was capable of.

I heard he kept an ICBM in his front yard like a totem pole. Less than 20 minutes after he was inaugurated, the Iranians let the hostages go.

Boom, what’s next?

Oh yeah, someone tried to assassinate Ronald in March of that same year. Emphasis on the word tried, because a month later Ronnie was back in business, cutting taxes and popping bottles of Alizé with Tupac.

What else did he do?

He single-handedly won the Cold War by pretending he was going to institute the Strategic Defense Initiative.

About 30 years ago, Ronnie declared he had scientists working on a project the media nicknamed “Star Wars.”

This was to be a highly sensitive system of satellites that could accurately shoot the arming trigger of a commie nuke with light sabers, or something, effectively turning warheads into harmless aluminum tubes of nuclear waste.

Meanwhile, back in Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev was standing in a bread line being briefed by a bear. He nearly dropped his ration in surprise, asking, “Hold on a moment...Is that even remotely feasible?”

The bear shrugged, “I dunno.”

In response, Gorbachev spent billions of dollars trying to create his own version of “Star Wars.”

By 1990, the USSR was bankrupt and the Cold War was over. You’re welcome, world.

As you can see, Republicans are right. Evoking Ronald Reagan’s name should be just as powerful as evoking God. The man didn’t have an evil bone in his body. He never did anything wrong at all, ever.

Unless you count the Savings and Loan Crisis, when hundreds of lending institutions failed after Reagan manipulated borrowing regulations, resulting in America’s first large-scale bank bail-out of $160 billion.

And then there was the Iran-Contra Affair, when Reagan sold $30 million in arms to Iran to fund a secret revolution in Nicaragua.

And even after several U.S. officials were indicted on conspiracy grounds, none of them went to prison because they were subsequently pardoned.

But other than that, he could walk on water.
 

E-mail: nicjacob@indiana.edu