What was it about Reagan that made him be considered a bad president?

No I was looking this shit up yesterday. Something about Bush Sr.'s approval ratings being wildly unstable I think.

He had the good fortune to get elected right when the economy was entering a positive cycle which makes boomers thing he was some kind of economic miracle worker.

You could also count the 1789, 1792 and 1820 elections for the electoral vote percentage, but there was only one candidate in each of those.

It all leads back to Perfidious Albion.

Everything that has happened since 1945 is connected to their stupidity in dealing with former Ottoman territories and their own former colonies.

Would have a Communist Afghanistan really made a difference?

Communist Afghanistan would have relentlessly murdered Islamists, meaning that far fewer of them would have survived to create the current situation we're in.

So... yeah. Maybe we should have let the Soviets have that one.

Wouldn't have done anything about Saudi Arabia, you know, the home of Salafism.

It's hard to remove yourself from the bias of present day. Nobody could have predicted that these guys would be causing such problems. But the KGB armed the Vietcong throughout the Vietnam War so the CIA felt this was an opportunity to finally get back at them. And by that metric, it worked out very well.

Might have done something about Osama bin Laden though. I'm not saying it would fix the problem, but it may have mitigated it, having a nominally atheist regime with no regard for human rights to kill the people who needed killing.

Whatever people say about him, he was necessary in getting the United States out of the mindset of the 1970's.

Worked out so well we're permanently embroiled in conflict in the Middle East and have damaged our reputation beyond repair.

>Massive tax cuts without reducing spending leading to a record breaking deficit
>Iran Contra
>War on Drugs
>Failure to acknowledge AIDS
>Massively bloated military spending
>Literally tried to end the department of education altogether
>"Trees cause more pollution than automobiles"

He was hilariously bad but charismatic as hell.

>inb4 m-muh stagflation

You can thank Volcker for that

Bush didn't have to invade Iraq. That was his fault, not Reagan's. Yeah, I actually agree with you on letting the commies have Afghanistan, but you can't apply 2016 hindsight to 1984.

Iraq ignoring ten years worth of orders from the UN to disarm and allow inspections led to Iraq getting invaded.

The political climate in the US helped, but Iraq violated the terms of its surrender after Gulf War '91 and that directly led to the '03 invasion. If Iraq had complied with the inspections then the rest of the world would have had definitive existence or lack thereof of WMDs. If we had proof there were no weapons there would have been no invasion.

>Actually defending the Iraq War

Spending a bazillion dollars on a wild goose chase isn't a win no matter how you slice it.

Everyone involved with Gulf War part deux regrets it.

On 29 September 1998, the United States Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act supporting the efforts of Iraqi opposition groups to remove Saddam Hussein from office. The Act was signed by President Clinton on 31 October 1998. On the same day, Iraq announced it would no longer cooperate with United Nations weapons inspectors.

At any rate, the gist of the chemicals that were found in Iraq was that they were all either hidden or forgotten stockpiles from the 1980s program, and not a new program that Saddam had secretly set up after the disarmament.

>Hidden stockpiles of chemicals

That's.... that's exactly the shit that we were there to get.

Hidden and the Iraqis didn't know where they were because they forgot about them, I should say.

"Documents since captured inside Iraq by coalition forces are reported to reveal Saddam's frustration with weapon inspections. Meeting transcripts record him saying to senior aides: 'We don't have anything hidden!' In another, he remarks: 'When is this going to end?' And another: 'Don't think for a minute that we still have WMD. We have nothing.'"

Don't let me say more about how incompetent Saddam was, because I could go on and on

>What was it about Reagan that made him be considered a bad president?

He started appointing corporate lobbyists to regulate industries they used to work for. Fox guarding the hen house.

Call me an old stick in the mud, but I've always felt that one of the minimum requirements for the Leader of the Free World SHOULD be that they have all their faculties. Every viable candidate should be forced to have tests, then fill out a questionnaire, and if we afterwards find out that that they've been lying: the people should be able to go at them with pool cues. For example, let's say that a certain bottle-black sixty-nine year old has Alzheimers...

Early in his presidency, Reagan surrounded himself with some of the most appalling Jerry Falwell-types, who espoused a particular strain of apocalyptic theology that seemed to tie Nuclear Holocaust into the mix. Godless Communism was considered to be the literal great Satan, and, if the official History is to be believed, it took a bloody tv movie to snap him out of his idiocy.

> Exacerbate the highly damaging drug policies of Richard Nixon
> The CIA are involved in crack cocaine trafficking for their Contra friends, arguably leading to epidemic amongst your urban youth

wew lad

There is a myth perpetuated by Reaganites that he was an historically significant President, in some positive sense. If you are old enough to have voted in 1980, you probably know differently. If you were born after 1980 you have been raised on this myth. He sold Americans a fable about a Hollywood movie-like exceptional past and destiny, and led ordinary people around with portrayals of that mirage while his reactionary robber-baron friends set about dismantling 50 years of progressive advancements for working men and women, on their way to returning themselves to the position of unfettered economic domination they held between the Civil War and the Great Depression. He was a union buster. He gave us Scalia – need I say more? He tried to give us Robert Bork (does anyone under 30 even know who he is?). He lied about Iran/Contra. He avoided dealing with AIDS. He sealed the political sham-show between right wing capitalist kings and the evangelical thought-control snake-oil salesmen. Americans don’t want to hear that they are ordinary citizens of the world, and they don’t want to hear that the aren’t anointed by some deity to lead the world to salvation. They lapped it up, and they continue to do so.

>Reaganomics
>Iran-Contra
>CIA drug dealing
>giving guns to the Taliban
>AWB
>almost died to a fucking .22
did he actually do anything right?

>Greatest achievement of 20th century economy
>the best political decision ever
>tips tinfoil hat
>tinfoil v2
>What' the problem with it?
>and that's why he should've ban all dangerous assault weapons.

(You)

This would be indirect responsibility