Ronald Reagan's Greatest Hits

Today the nation marks the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Ronald Reagan, an undertalented, slick movie actor who played the President of the United States from 1981 to 1989. Of course, a lot of people have sound reasons for not wanting to mark the birth anniversary of a man whose policies they saw as inhumane, selfish, intellectually bankrupt, and politically dishonest. Well, I already touched on the specifics of that on this blog in June 2004 (a link to that post is here), less than two weeks after his death. (I came to bury Reagan, not praise him.) Today, I call attention not to his deeds, but his words. Because when Reagan spoke, he proved to be a very gifted comedian, even though he was unintentionally funny. Here, on the day Reagan would have referred to as the sixty-first anniversary of his thirty-ninth birthday, are some laughable lines from the man conservatives have declared the greatest President of our lifetimes:

At the start of his 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan charged the Environmental Protection Agency of suppressing information with this bombshell: "The American Petroleum Institute filed suit against the EPA [and] charged that the agency was suppressing a scientific study for fear it might be misinterpreted . . .. The suppressed study reveals that 80 percent of air pollution comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes, but from plants and trees." (No scientific data supports this assertion.)

As President, Ronald Reagan declared in 1981, "Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do."

Both of these quotes were the result of Reagan's confusion of nitrogen oxide, a harmful carbon, with nitrous oxide, a natural by-product of trees. And it probably led him to say this in October 1980: "Growing and decaying vegetation in this land are responsible for 93 percent of the oxides of nitrogen." In fact, according to Dr. Michael Oppenheimer of the Environmental Defense Fund, industrial sources are responsible for anywhere between 65 and 90 percent of the oxides of nitrogen in the U.S.

In a 1983 speech delivered in Oregon, "There is today in the United States as much forest as there was when Washington was at Valley Forge." Actually, only 30 percent of the forest that existed in the present-day United States in 1778 was still preserved in 1983.

And passenger rail advocates will love this May 1980 argument against subsidizing Amtrak and other forms of passenger rail transit: "Trains are not any more energy-efficient than the average automobile, with both getting about 48 passenger miles to the gallon." However, the U.S. Department of Transportation calculated that a train of fourteen passenger cars traveling at 80 miles per hour gets 400 passenger miles to the gallon. A 1980-model automobile carrying an average of 2.2 people got 42.6 passenger miles to the gallon.

But wait! There's more! How about some of these doozies?

Asked what he learned on a state trip to South America in 1982, President Reagan replied, "You'd be surprised. They're all individual countries." A White House aide had to go to the press to insist that Reagan didn't mean to suggest that he was surprised by this.

During his 1976 presidential campaign, Reagan declared, "Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal."

In 1985, President Reagan called the mercenaries in Nicaragua trying to overthrow the Marxist Sandinista government there "the moral equal of our Founding Fathers."

"I've been told," President Reagan said that same year, "that in the Russian language there isn't even a word for freedom." The Russian word for freedom is svoboda.

President Reagan once quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. as saying, "Keep the government poor and remain free." The late Supreme Court justice never said that, though he did once say that taxation was necessary for a civilized society.

President Reagan defended his support for the apartheid government in South Africa in 1981 by saying, "Can we abandon this country that has stood beside us in every war we've ever fought?" Although South Africa, which became an independent country in 1910, fought in both World Wars on the side of the U.S. and Great Britain, the National Party, which developed the apartheid system after coming to power in 1948, had opposed South African participation in both wars. Many National Party members harbored pro-Nazi sympathies in the 1930s.

In 1983, President Reagan spoke to reporters about how "the ten commandments of Nikolai Lenin [are] the guiding principles of communism," among them "that promises are like pie crust, made to be broken." Although scholars pointed out that Lenin's first name was Vladimir, Lenin is sometimes identified as "Nikolai" Lenin, so Reagan can't be faulted for that. However, those same scholars declared that the ten commandments of Lenin that Reagan spoke of do not exist.

In 1985, President Reagan declared that few living Germans remembered World War II, "and certainly none who were adults and participating in any way." A few weeks later, he laid a wreath at Bitburg, a German military cemetery containing the graves of Nazi and American soldiers. Oops! Wait a minute! No Americans are buried there.

And how about this?

Upon declaring his candidacy for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination in 1979, the 68-year-old Reagan told Tom Brokaw that he was "younger than any head of state I would have to deal with except Margaret Thatcher." Not only were several world leaders of the time younger than Reagan, but as prime minister of Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher was the British head of government. (Queen Elizabeth II is the British head of state.)

President Reagan once insisted he had firsthand knowledge of the "bad things" that happened in World War II because, as he explained it, "I was in uniform for four years myself." That was true, but what the former actor didn't mention was that he was in a non-combat unit based in Los Angeles that produced training films.

On the possibility that 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis had seen a psychiatrist for depression: "Look, I'm not going to pick on an invalid."

Defending his lapsed church attendance (an issue because of his alliances with the Christian right) in a presidential debate with Walter Mondale in October 1984, he talked about how he had started going to church as "here in Washington" as President before logistics forced him to stop. The debate was in Louisville. And if Reagan couldn't attend church due to security concerns, he could have held private services in the White House, as previous Presidents had done. He did not.

In that same debate, President Reagan referred to military uniforms as "wardrobe," as if they were costumes.

President Reagan insisted in a "60 Minutes" interview broadcast on January 15, 1989, just before he left office (and on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday) that black civil rights leaders had done very well for themselves "keeping alive" the idea that blacks were "still the victims of racial prejudice." Jesse Jackson was not amused.

And how about this?

During a White House meeting with Arab leaders in October 1982, President Reagan turned to the Lebanese foreign minister. "You know," he said, "your nose looks just like Danny Thomas's." The Arabs were not re-assured.

And advocates for the homeless were hardly re-assured by this Reagan statement from January 1984: "You can't help those who simply will not be helped. One problem that we've had, even in the best of times, is people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice."

I could go on. In fact, I could be here for a whole week.

But while you ponder these pearls of record, ponder also that this man was this vast, diverse, powerful country's leader for eight freakin' years.

Ladies and gentlemen, the fortieth President of the United States!

(Speaking at a White House News Photographers Association dinner in May 1983, President Reagan suddenly stuck his thumbs in his ears and wiggled his fingers. Explained the President, "I've been waiting years to do this." :-O )