This weekend, Republicans marked the 100th birthday of Ronald Reagan with speeches celebrating his small government philosophy, anti-tax fervor and hard-line foreign policy. But if Reagan was a GOP candidate today, he would doubtless fall victim to violations of his own 11th Commandment, "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican." Because despite all of the right-wing hagiography, Ronald Reagan ballooned the national debt, repeatedly raised taxes, signed abortion rights legislation and negotiated with terrorists in Iran. For those and so many other perceived offenses, the GOP rank and file - and especially its purity-demanding Tea Partiers - would today brand a reanimated Ronald Reagan a Republican in Name Only.

Meet RINO Reagan:

1. Reagan tripled the national debt
2. Reagan raised taxes 11 times
3. Reagan expanded the size of government
4. Reagan supported the "socialist" Earned Income Tax Credit
5. Reagan negotiated with terrorists in Tehran
6. Reagan sought to eliminate nuclear weapons
7. Reagan gave amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants
8. Reagan approved protectionist trade barriers
9. Reagan signed abortion rights law in California
10. Reagan eventually debunked AIDS myths Republicans continued to perpetuate

1. Reagan Tripled the National Debt. As most analysts predicted, Reagan's massive $749 billion supply-side tax cuts in 1981 quickly produced even more massive annual budget deficits. Combined with his rapid increase in defense spending, Reagan delivered not the balanced budgets he promised, but record-settings deficits. Even his OMB alchemist David Stockman could not obscure the disaster with his famous "rosy scenarios."

Forced to raise taxes twice to avert financial catastrophe, the Gipper nonetheless presided over a tripling of the American national debt to nearly $3 trillion. By the time he left office in 1989, Ronald Reagan more than equaled the entire debt burden produced by the previous 200 years of American history. It's no wonder Stockman lamented last year:

"[The] debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party's embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts."

Sarah Palin's revisionist history Friday notwithstanding, it was Reagan who put the United States on "the road to ruin."

2. Reagan Raised Taxes 11 Times
As ThinkProgress noted, the inedible image of Ronald Reagan the tax cutter is "false mythology." (It is also worth noting that it was President Obama and not Reagan who delivered the largest two year tax cut in American history.) While Governor Reagan doubled California's state spending and signed the biggest tax hike up to that point, as President he raised taxes in seven of his eight years in office. As former GOP Senator Alan Simpson, who called Reagan "a dear friend," told NPR, "Ronald Reagan raised taxes 11 times in his administration -- I was there."

3. Reagan Expanded the Size of Government
On Friday, Sarah Palin told the Reaganauts assembled by the Young Americans for Freedom, "We need to stop spending and cut government back down to size." If that's the case, her role model should be Democrat Bill Clinton and not Republican Ronald Reagan.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (1176)

PLAYS: (4756)

Embed

Well, we knew the National Tea Party Convention this week was going to be a real festival of outrageous wingnuttery, but Tom Tancredo's speech to kick things off will already be hard to top:

Tancredo: Every year, the liberal Dems and the RINO Republicans turned up the temperature ever so slightly. It seemed after awhile that we'd all be boiled to death in a cauldron of the nanny state.

And then something really odd happened -- mostly because we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country.

[Applause]

People who cannot even spell the word "vote," or say it in English -- [applause] -- put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. Name is Barack Hussein Obama.

It's hard to say which was more disturbing: Tancredo's apparent call for reinstituting laws that, as John Byrne at Raw Story points out, were a fundamental component of Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction South, or the massive round of applause he received for saying it. (The New York Daily News has more on the literacy tests.)

Yes, these people really are nuts. Witness, for instance, the applause Tancredo got for saying he was glad McCain lost -- because, after all, McCain was for "amnesty" too:

If McCain had been elected, the neocons would be writing flattering editorials in the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal. Congressman Gutierrez and President McCain would have been posing in the Rose Garden with big smiles as they received accolades from La Raza for having finally passed an amnesty.

Of course, most of the speech was just Tancredo channeling Glenn Beck. (The boiled frog metaphor was the giveaway, along with the "committed socialist ideologue" bit. As well as lines like this:

So the race for America is on, right now. The President and his left-wing allies in Congress are going to look at every opportunity to destroy the Constitution before we have a chance to save it.

But as always with Tancredo -- as with his audience -- the real motivation comes down to defending white culture:

Some things we can deal with in just a political way -- which is, you know, by the votes we cast. Other things will require a commitment to passing on our culture -- and we really do have one, you know, it is based on Judeo-Christian principles whether people like it or they don't!

[Applause]

That's who we are! That is who we are! And if you don't like it, don't come here! And if you're here and you don't like it, go home! Go someplace else!

As the editors at Imagine 2050 observed:

It is obvious that Beck and Tancredo are trying to push the issue of immigration to the forefront of the tea party movement, something that was explicitly clear during Tancredo’s speech. The acts that followed paled in comparison to Tancredo, who definitely stole the first night spotlight of the three day event.

Indeed. If you thought the Tea Partiers went nuts at those town-hall forums on health care, wait till immigration reform is the issue. It's going to be very ugly.

Tom Tancredo, of course, will be leading the way, pitchfork in hand.

People for the American Way :

The National Review asked a few right-wing political figures to try and come up with some things that the Right "can be optimistic about going into 2007." Not surprisingly, the responses are not particularly uplifting.

Aside from taking some glee in the fact that "the American people will now hold [the Democrats] partly responsible for Iraq policy" and getting to watch "the spectacle of liberal congressional Democrats struggling to reconcile what they want to do (impeach George Bush, raise taxes, get out of Iraq, fling wide the gates to all immigrants) with what the public wants them to do," those queried didn't really have anything positive to offer.

Rep. Jeb Henlsarling takes some solace in the fact that the GOP might now get a chance to the things they failed to do for the last six years, such as "embrace the core conservative principles of a balanced budget, limited, accountable government, and traditional values" while Phyllis Schlafly looks forward to re-claiming the party "by outnumbering and outsmarting the false prophets of RINO politics, nation-building utopians, and globalism economics." Read on...

Oh sure, NOW they got a problem with the Republican agenda. Where were they for the last six years?