by James Glaser
June 9, 2004

Almost every day now on some news program former politicians are interviewed about what the current government is doing. Former Senators are called Senator. Former Presidents are called Mr. President and the same goes for Vice-president, Cabinet Members, Ambassadors, and Representatives.

I hate to be picky here, but the Constitution, which all of these people swore to uphold, states in Section 9 #8 "No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States."

Think about how politicians are treated compared to you and me. For sure they have the world's best health care as does their family. Where ever they go they are treated like nobility and their thoughts on any subject is sought after like they know more than the rest of us.

If you really think about it, you will remember that on a percentage basis, even with all of their power, as many politicians get caught committing crimes as do the rest of us. These men and women are no better than anyone else, but for the rest of their lives we give them a title that sets them apart and makes them into another class of Americans. Then of course on top of everything else, we give them a stipend, far greater than most American's retirement. Many who have served in our Congress get voted out or retire to a larger salary in their retirement check, than they made working for us.

There is one more benefit this Nobel Class of Americans gets from us and that is that we only remember the good things they did while in our employ.

Today my daughter sent me a column written by William Rivers Pitt, about Ronald Reagan. News program after news program have made a real effort to canonize Mr. Reagan. However Mr. Pitt takes a different look at the man and his time in office. It seems that most of the American media wants to forget this part of Reagan's time in office. It tends to take some of the saintliness out of our memory of him.

"Ronald Reagan actively supported the regimes of the worst people ever to walk the earth. Names like Marcos, Duarte, Rios Mont and Duvalier reek of blood and corruption, yet were embraced by the Reagan administration with passionate intensity. The ground of many nations is salted with the bones of those murdered by brutal rulers who called Reagan a friend. Who can forget his support of those in South Africa who believed apartheid was the proper way to run a civilized society?

One dictator in particular looms large across our landscape. Saddam Hussein was a creation of Ronald Reagan. The Reagan administration supported the Hussein regime despite his incredible record of atrocity. The Reagan administration gave Hussein intelligence information which helped the Iraqi military use their chemical weapons on the battlefield against Iran to great effect. The deadly bacterial agents sent to Iraq during the Reagan administration are a laundry list of horrors.

The Reagan administration sent an emissary named Donald Rumsfeld to Iraq to shake Saddam Hussein's hand and assure him that, despite public American condemnation of the use of those chemical weapons, the Reagan administration still considered him a welcome friend and ally. This happened while the Reagan administration was selling weapons to Iran, a nation notorious for its support of international terrorism, in secret and in violation of scores of laws.

Another name on Ronald Reagan's roll call is that of Osama bin Laden. The Reagan administration believed it a bully idea to organize an army of Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. bin Laden became the spiritual leader of this action. Throughout the entirety of Reagan's term, bin Laden and his people were armed, funded and trained by the United States. Reagan helped teach Osama bin Laden the lesson he lives by today, that it is possible to bring a superpower to its knees. bin Laden believes this because he has done it once before, thanks to the dedicated help of Ronald Reagan.

In 1998, two American embassies in Africa were blasted into rubble by Osama bin Laden, who used the Semtex sent to Afghanistan by the Reagan administration to do the job. In 2001, Osama bin Laden thrust a dagger into the heart of the United States, using men who became skilled at the art of terrorism with the help of Ronald Reagan. Today, there are 827 American soldiers and over 10,000 civilians who have died in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a war that came to be because Reagan helped manufacture both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

How much of this can be truthfully laid at the feet of Ronald Reagan? It depends on who you ask. Those who worship Reagan see him as the man in charge, the man who defeated Soviet communism, the man whose vision and charisma made Americans feel good about themselves after Vietnam and the malaise of the 1970s. Those who despise Reagan see him as nothing more than a pitch-man for corporate raiders, the man who allowed greed to become a virtue, the man who smiled vapidly while allowing his officials to run the government for him.

In the final analysis, however, the legacy of Ronald Reagan—whether he had an active hand in its formulation, or was merely along for the ride—is beyond dispute. His famous question, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" is easy to answer. We are not better off than we were four years ago, or eight years ago, or twelve, or twenty. We are a badly damaged state, ruled today by a man who subsists off Reagan's most corrosive final gift to us all: It is the image that matters, and be damned to the truth.