Reagan! Reagan! Reagan!

This morning while riding the elevator down in the parking garage, I was reading Cheers and Jeers on DailyKos because GOD FORBID I should stand quietly in an elevator for 16 seconds with nothing else to do.  How boring would that be? 

I like and admire DailyKos because they put our hella content and they are also a happily partisan website with a stated goal of getting more and better Democrats elected, which is a goal I can get behind.  But, it's not a perfect website; e..g, if you were to only visit the user-recommended diaries rather than the front page diaries, you might get the impression that the website exists entirely up its own ass.  That said, Bill In Portland Maine, who writes their Cheers and Jeers column, is a super funny guy and a pleasure to read.  I read this on that achingly long elevator trip from the 7th to the 1st floor:

(Do I need to write down that this was a joke?  It was a joke.)

I giggled and then thought, "Damn, those Righties really do love their Reagan."  And then I thought, "Damn, those Righties are really good at writing and then sticking to their hagiographies." We Lefties tend to be some equivocating motherfuckers.  We're all, "Sure that whole Bay of Pigs things was good, but WTF, Kennedy, were you some kind of sexual predator?"  And "Clinton, good job on the economy, but WTF DOMA? Welfare 'reform?' Seriously, dude?  You totally DID have sex with that woman!"  And even if he's known as St. Reagan of the Giant Testicles amongst the RedState readers,  if you got in your TARDIS and carried Reagan up to 2012, he'd totally fail the Tea Party Purity Test.  But they don't care!  They have created a Reagan and the Reagan they've created is the one they're sticking with.

It's a level of delusion that I can't help but admire. 

Look at the way they want to name everything after Reagan.  There are Reagan highways and Reagan byways and the airport in our nation's capitol is named for him.  And they're not done.  They want Reagan on our money. They want him on Mount Rushmore. I think they want to paint his face over the Capitol Dome.  They LOVE Reagan. They want to live in the United States of Reagan.

But Reagan was terrible!  Let's take a look at some of the hits:

• Dog whistled LOUD at the most virulent racists by kicking off his campaign in Philadelphia, MS 
• Put a knife in the family farm
• Made student loans harder to get and harder to pay back
• Introduced the economic abortion known as supply-side (lookit, it hasn't trickled down for 30 years; it ain't trickling)
• Tripled the deficit
• Failed utterly to take any leadership when AIDS was devastating the country
• And, good googly moogly, the man sold arms to IRAN!  Iran, you guys! IRAN!!!!

In the interest of bipartisanship, and in service to our national obsession with elevating our public discourse, I would like to provide a list of things that I think should be named for Ronald Reagan:

• My butt

Sigh. This is what I'm reduced to when I encounter the Church of Reagan.  I say things like "My butt."  Because it seems so shockingly obvious to me that Reagan deserves not a hagiography, but a WTFiography (I'm trademarking that term.  It's mine. You can't have it). But, I'm not ready for the Thunderdome, I do need another hero.  And the only one I can think of?  Is a goddamn Republican, who's been dead for 150 years.