Reagan's Civility Has Become a Liability

Columnist Al Martinez claims that the current GOP nomination for President lacks the civility of dearly departed and overly euologized 40th President Ronald Reagan.

His visionary treatment of the Gipper gyps the reader of the truth. He talked a great talk, even issued the largest tax cut in American History. However, he failed to curtail spending, even raising taxes in the middle of his second term. His overinvestment in military might may have done less to precipitate the fall of the Soviet Union than the frank admission of the USSR's final premier -- Communism does not work, and glasnot became a necessity, no matter who the American President may have been.

Reagan preached a gospel of secular, deified individual optimism, which permitted people to hate government yet still live off of government, laughing away their own hypocrisy. For a man who preached "Man is basically good" to his dying day, even etching it on his elaborate tombstone, Reagan prospered the fantasy that American Exceptionalism does not have to cost anything.

We do not need future Presidents emulating Reagan's lofty rhetoric and softy reality on deficit and spending reduction. Only Congressman Ron Paul has demonstrated the integrity to call out a party that has lost its way, and that Reagan as standard bearer will not help this country back to the beaten path of sound money, limited government, and constitutional rule.

If nothing else, Reagan's amiable civility was a liability, one that declared every American a hero while refusing to hold each one of us accountable for our clay feet in a fallen world where economic scarcity still trumps patriotic desire.