Trolling does not mean a thing. Try this on for size but then you can troll some more. Loser boy.
The lies modern-day Republicans tell about Ronald Reagan are legion. To today’s GOP, Reagan was beloved and his presidency resided over a “shining city on a hill," as his campaign commercials portrayed America. The truth was more shaded, to say the least. Welfare cuts pushed half a million people, mostly children, into poverty; tax cuts helped the rich but not the rest of us; and unemployment during his first term hit a post-war high. Terrorists killed 220 marines in Beirut on Reagan’s watch, which Reagan responded to, not with resolve, but by cutting and running. Despite claims to the contrary, JFK, Eisenhower and even LBJ were more popular overall than Reagan (although his ratings at the very end of his second term were higher).
Reagan’s administration was filled with little lies, claims about trees being major air polluters and apartheid-era South Africa eliminating segregation. Never mind the larger distractions, like the eight senior members of his administration who were indicted. But his biggest lie came to be known as the Iran-Contra affair. Reagan came to office in 1980 in large part due to the failure of the Carter administration to successfully free hostages in Iran who had been held for over a year. The hostages were finally released the day of Reagan’s inauguration—thanks to Carter’s persistent diplomacy.
In 1985, during Reagan’s second term, Iran, which had taken additional hostages in the intervening years, offered to free the hostages in exchange for missiles. A plan was hatched in which Israel would ship missiles to Iran, the U.S. would resupply Israel with the missiles, and the U.S. would receive the cash that had been paid for the missiles. That cash would then go to Nicaragua, to fund the
contras, the rebels Reagan portrayed as, "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers," who were fighting to take down the elected Sandinista government.
When details of the exchange leaked in 1986, Reagan was forced to explain why America was selling missiles to a sworn enemy, while intervening in Nicaragua, which Congress had forbade. Reagan’s response was to deny that arms had been traded for hostages. "We did not, I repeat, did not trade weapons or anything else [to Iran] for hostages, nor will we." A few months later he admitted, "A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not." A disingenuous way of saying, “I lied.”
A bit of real history instead of the blown up version.
First to go is the myth that Reagan was the most popular president since FDR. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting reminds us, "During the first two years of Reagan's presidency, the public was giving President Reagan the lowest level of approval of all modern elected presidents. Reagan's average first-year approval rating was 58 percent-lower than Dwight Eisenhower's 69 percent, Jack Kennedy's 75 percent, Richard Nixon's 61 percent and Jimmy Carter's 62 percent." At the end of his second year, (remember the Reagan recession?) Reagan's approval rating was 41 percent; after the Iran-Contra scandal was revealed, Reagan's approval rating stood at 46 percent. His approval rating for his entire presidency was lower than Kennedy's, Eisenhower's and even Johnson's, and at times he was one of the most unpopular presidents in recent history.
Also forgotten is Reagan's own embarrassing propensity to just make things up. Reagan was a dunce and a fabricator. One of his most famous assertions was, "Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do," and he maintained, wrongly, that sulfur dioxide emitted from Mount St. Helens was greater than that emitted by cars over a 10-year period. (In one day, cars emit 40 times what Mount St. Helens released in a day even at its peak activity.) In 1985, Reagan praised the P.W. Botha's apartheid regime of South Africa for eliminating segregation, a blunder then-Press Secretary Larry Speakes had to correct a few days later.
Other examples abound: During a 1983 Congressional Medal of Honor ceremony Reagan told a story about military heroism that New York Daily News columnist Lars-Erik Nelson wrote never happened. Nelson had checked the citations on all 434 Congressional Medals of Honor awarded during WWII. The scene Reagan described did appear, however, in the 1944 film A Wing and a Prayer. Larry Speakes' response? "If you tell the same story five times, it's true."
Sounds even like someone today!!! "the peemeister"
And let's not forget the wages of "trickle down" economics and "Reaganomics," from which we have still not recovered. In 1982, the Congressional Budget Office found that taxpayers earning under $10,000 lost an average of $240 from Reagan's 1981 tax cuts, while those earning more than $80,000 gained an average of $15,130. By that fall, the jobless rate hit 10.1 percent-the worst in 42 years, and a year later 11.9 million were out of work. In 1983, the country's poverty rate rose to 15 percent, the highest level since the mid-'60s. In 1984, a congressional study reported that cuts in welfare had pushed more than 500,000 people-the majority of them children-into poverty. Then-Attorney General Ed Meese's response? "I don't know of any authoritative figures that there are hungry children people go to soup kitchens because the food is free and that's easier than paying for it."
And Yes it is long. Liars usually have a long history of lying.
Why do people love Reagan?
He was a big spender and gave amnesty without fixing the illegal Mexican problem.
20,000,000 jobs created.
Brought down the Soviet Empire.
Restored our military after Carter neglected it to a point of ineffectiveness.
His only mistake was trusting Democrats.
You lost any credibility you might have had when you used F.A.I.R. as your source, loser.