How I remember Ronald Reagan:

• Iran-contra affair = selling illegal arms to the Islamist Iranian government (the same government that is now in the axis of evil) in order to fund US backed rebels subverting one of the only democratically elected governments in Central America (Nicaugra) because it was too 'left-leaning.'[/list}[list:f83abd13cd]Propping up the dictatorial right-wing governments in Guatemala and El Salvador because it was convient. Nevermind that these governments had death squads roaming their countries committing extra-judicial murder on a fairly massive scale against political dissenters

• Reagan's support for the Afghan freedom fighers. Oh wait, no, they were actually just a bunch of warlords and terrorists. Why fund moderates when we can make killing machines that might be useful down the line. Oh wait, they weren't useful

• Decreasing the size of government? Please. He only decreased government where it might have helped people. He dramatically increased spending in all the invasive sectors, where big government starts doing its 1984 thing. Military spending went sky high.

• Collapsing the soviet union by spending them to death. Another myth. The nature of the Soviet Union's amazing growth in the early cold-war period, (mostly the 60s i suppose) was due to heavy capital expenditure. However, investment directed at efficiency improvements was minimal. This meant that the soviet union was not increasing their production function but was simply moving along it toward their k*. All of a sudden, they got their and stopped growing. Increased savings to increase their k*, but then got there again. Had to decrease savings to increase consumption. Read some of Krugman's papers on this topic for a more thorough treatment. The point is, Reagan didn't cause the Soviet Union to collapse, just like the Afghan freedom fighters didn't cause its collapse.

• The guy was basically an idiot. He was an actor. He actually had a rule that if you couldn't sum up a policy position on something like a 3x5 index card, you couldn't get to him. I hate to let the cat out of the bag, but the world is a little more complicated than that. It requires a significant amount of thought and insight in order to work through these problems. Thankfully his vice president H.W. Bush was something of a genius in foreign affairs. Though neither of them had an inkling of modern economic theory

clearly Reagan did some good things. However, I get really annoyed about the myth of him as the greatest president of the Post -WWII era.[/list:u:f83abd13cd][/list]