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<\/p>\nRonald Reagan – by far the greatest president of my lifetime – would be 103 today.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I’ll be doing my usual Reagan’s Birthday celebration; special dinner, talking with the kids (and, soon, granddaughter Watermelon, who will be old enough to learn the basics before too terribly long), jelly beans at the office.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Of course, Reagan’s Birthday is more than just a fun <\/em>holiday, commemorating one of the great men of Western Civilization, a man whose brief ascendancy may have bought the United States a few more decades of prosperity – indeed, existence in its current form – than it had any right to expect 35 years ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n No – there are a lot of people out there trying to steal Reagan’s legacy, to pervert it into something it wasn’t, to lie and deceive for craven and low purposes.\u00a0<\/p>\n And I’m here to steal Reagan’s legacy back. The lies are all over the place; the answers, the scathing debunquements, are harder to find.\u00a0<\/p>\n But not on this blog.\u00a0<\/p>\n “Reagan spent a lot of money!”<\/strong>:\u00a0 Read your Constitution.\u00a0 Presidents don’t spend money.\u00a0 The House of Representatives does.\u00a0 Tip O’Neil spent money like a meth hooker with a stolen Gold Card.\u00a0 Yes, Reagan’s primary priority – the downfall of Communism – cost money, and a lot of it.\u00a0 That spending was supposed <\/em>to be met with cuts to entitlements.\u00a0 Congress – which, for the first 3\/4 of Reagan’s time in DC was entirely controlled by spendthrift Democrats – insisted on keeping the entitlement gravy train flowing.\u00a0 Presidents aren’t dictators (although Barack Obama seems to have expressed his intention to test that thesis in his last State of the Union); compromises were made.\u00a0<\/p>\n But economist James Lindeman of the Heritage Foundation estimated that Reagan’s defense spending paid for itself, with interest, in the nineties; freed of a Soviet Union, America’s economy de-militarized, freeing up immense capital and capacity for civilian production.\u00a0 The technology that went into making the sonar on the Los Angeles <\/em>class submarines a top-secret wonder of the world in 1982 was turned into making cell phones smaller, lighter, more capable and downright cheap by 1997.\u00a0 Bill Clinton’s boom economy was entirely the result of Republican policy; Reagan made the “peace dividend” possible, and Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Congress prevented Bill Clinton from spending it all on Hillarycare.\u00a0<\/p>\n “Reagan was teh dum!”<\/strong>:\u00a0 This notion has been shredded by waves of scholars.\u00a0<\/p>\n Of course, the source of that slander was something more toxic than the slander itself.\u00a0 Reagan was a regular, middle-class American with a degree from a humble, obscure midwestern college, who’d worked his way up through several fields – radio, acting, public relations and then politics – without any of the academic fripperies that the elite has come to regard as the price of entry to respectable success – degrees, and more degrees, from institutions whose main claim to fame is their claim to fame.\u00a0<\/p>\n Reagan had none of that.\u00a0 He had vision, talent, and hard work – the same things the vast majority of Americans bring to the table.\u00a0<\/p>\n And that – today, when our academy has turned into a self-sustaining parasite class (not to knock any particular members of the academy who may be friends and occasional radio co-hosts of mine), that’s an example all Americans need.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.blogcdn.com\/www.politicsdaily.com\/media\/2011\/02\/ronald-reagan-427yp1-020411.jpg\")
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