In My Lifetime

The more time that passes, the more it becomes manifest to the reality-based community that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were probably the worst stewards of this nation's wealth and safety that we have ever had. In my lifetime, these two men have been in charge for over half of the time. And they have ruined us.

To the non-reality-based community, of course, these men are remembered as heroes, as visionaries, as leaders who made us feel good about ourselves, as men who knew evil when he saw it and did not shirk from confronting it. Staying up all night drinking feels good, too, but the morning always comes.

In reality, however, these men governed through denial and fear. Denial that the rules of economics, or even simple mathematics, applied to the Greatest Nation in the World. Denial that any person or nation that did not bow to our superiority could be anything other than Hitler incarnate. Denial that our nation was anything other than the love child of Jesus and George Washington. And fear. Always fear.

Reagan and Bush were charlatans of the highest order, leaders who serially and unfailingly kicked the can down the road, burdening ourselves and our children with debts that are literally impossible to repay, racking up most of this debt to build and buy weapons that will never be used, all the while convincing many if not most Americans that they were "protecting" us.

Hard as it may be to believe, Reagan and Bush each individually accumulated more debt than every other president combined. Dwell on that for a moment. These two "fiscal conservatives" each spent more than every president from 1789 t0 1981 COMBINED. What is most distressing about this profligate dereliction is that these men are remembered fondly as fiscal conservatives. And Stalin was pro-life.

They each represent something that is quite distressing about our culture. American Exceptionalism is the delusion that the rules of history do not apply to the United States. You can't perpetually spend more than you earn? We're AMERICANS. You can't conquer Afghanistan? We're AMERICANS. You can't expect invaded and occupied nations to welcome the subjugation of their nations? We're AMERICANS.

These two men were profoundly skilled at avoiding responsibilities for their actions, and they both actually believed that saying something made it so. They both truly felt that America is the greatest nation in the world, with the greatest citizens in the world, but that the government comprised by, of, and for those very citizens was a tyrannical and amoral maw of corruption and inefficiency

Accordingly, both men aimed to destroy the government of the nation they so "loved", theoretically with the aim of proving that Americans are so great that, as opposed to every other civilization in human history, we don't even NEED a government.

The after-effects of these policies have crippled, and will continue to cripple, this nation severely. Reagan and Bush, of course, did not cut government spending; THAT would have been ideologically coherent, a vice neither man is often accused of as having possessed.

Instead, Reagan and Bush accomplished something much more insidious. Step one was to ridicule the very idea of government. Step two was to cut taxes so as to starve the government whereby it would inevitably falter, thereby "proving" the theory that it was inherently worthless. Step three was to spend record amounts of money, even while cutting the amount of money collected. Step four was to guarantee that the record spending was funneled nearly entirely to the military.

This is the worst of both worlds. With the kind of debts these two men ran up, you would think they had handed out Ivy Leagues educations to every American teenager. Or supplied clean water and penicillin to every human on earth. Or built great universities and hospitals across the third world. But no. We spent our trillions on weapons we can never use and on some weapons which, when they are used, simply drive us further into debt.

And through this charade, these men are lauded as leaders who "made America strong", who made us "feel good" about ourselves. I for one, don't get a glowing feeling when I consider that my birthright, and that of my grandchildren, was spent on hydrogen bombs and space lasers before I was out of short pants.

And what have these men protected us from? Ronald Reagan is credited with saving the world from Soviet Communism, as if Mikhail Gorbachev and the dozens of peaceful protests movements throughout Easter Europe were inconsequential, as if those were merely footnotes to the real reason for victory, namely that America bankrupted its children and grandchildren for the sake of being able to brag that "we won" the Cold War.

George W. Bush is credited by protecting us by being stoic and unwavering in the "war on terror", as if he were not in charge during the most criminally negligent moment in the history of the security state on 9/11, as if he had not started two wars which have each lasted longer than the Vietnam War and which show no sign of ending, and if he had not reaped near universal contempt and scorn, prancing about in flight suits like some tawdry autocrat.

Both of these men are remembered for greatness, but they have been our greatest failures. Theirs is the greatness one earns by taking the whole country out for drinks, buying round and round, only to skip out on the tab and leave us drunk, disheveled, penniless, and with no ride home.