I agree with the 61% of us who voted “yes” in the online CNN poll: the amount of media coverage of Ronald Reagan’s death was “too much”. Insufferably too much.<\/p>
\nOf course, everyone knew this would turn into a campaign contribution by the major television networks to Bush’s re-election, and true to form, the slew of misstatements and exaggerations flowed interminably, 24×7.
\nThey claimed that Reagan was the most popular President in modern times (he wasn’t, Clinton was more popular); that he was fiscally conservative (he wasn’t; Reagan almost tripled the deficit while Clinton reduced it); that he restored the economy to health (inflation was reduced during the Reagan presidency, but that was as a result of then Fed chairman Paul Volker’s iron-fisted control of the money supply; unemployment didn’t decline until the Clinton years) and that he was a mighty warrior (what about the pullout from Lebanon following the terrorist assassination of 241 Marines in Beirut?)
\nRemember all the GOP screaming about the so-called politically partisan memorial service for Senator Paul Wellstone, the Democratic Senator from Minnesota?
\nAgain, the Republicans proved their hypocrisy by excluding ANY prominent Democrat from a speaking role at Reagan’s publicly supported state funeral – an event which, with the awarding of a day off to Federal government employees, cost the taxpayers $66 million for Washington, DC salaries alone (one estimate was as high as $545 million for the whole country, including Post Office employees).
\nNovember 2 can’t come soon enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I agree with the 61% of us who voted “yes” in the online CNN poll: the amount of media coverage of Ronald Reagan’s death was “too much”. Insufferably too much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}