You cried a tear, I wiped it dry / I put you up upon a pedestal so high

This guy decided he’d have an easy post that would appeal (he thought) to the totebaggers who read the HuffPo:

I beg to differ. Reagan would fucking clap, a standing ovation. The guy who hired Lee Atwater, who kicked off his campaign with a “state’s rights” speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the same county where three CORE workers were killed in 1964, would fucking love the idea that someone was finally kicking blacks and women out of high-level government jobs. The “Southern Strategy” candidate who helped complete the South’s turn from segregationist Democrats to wish-we-could-segregate Republicans would be happy to see that his dreams, the wishes that his heart made, finally came true.

I don’t mean to be too critical of Mr Date, who probably just wanted an easy hook for his story. But Reagan’s legacy needs no burnishing from anyone who is to the left of, say, Mike Lee or the ghost of Jesse Helms. Reagan’s presidency was eight years of retrograde motion. It started the long trip to where we are today, beginning the inexorable motion backwards from the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act to, well, the notion that anyone who thinks that US history was anything but a cakewalk for blacks and women is “woke”.

One of the key talents of right wing propagandists is revisionist history. Making Reagan a secular saint is a hardly even a reach for those revisionists, who are busy trying to convince us that the Civil War was fought over economic issues. But we don’t need to participate — in fact, we need to push back. Reagan, Bush I, Bush II and Trump represent a steady slide into racism, sexism, stupidity and hate. Treating Trump like some kind of aberration, rather than the logical consequence of 45 years of Republican policy, ignores the plain facts in front of our faces.

(The title is a deep cut but it’s CanCon.)