I’m old enough to remember Ronald Reagan proclaiming
to us on national television these words: “We did not —
repeat — did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages — nor will we.”
Later President Reagan admitted that he was —
repeat — WAS lying when he made this claim. (Reagan did not do the repeat thing
when he admitted to lying; that’s me being snarky.)
But this was not actually Reagan’s biggest lie in
my opinion. When he said, in his 1981 inaugural address, that “Government is
not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” that was his
biggest lie. It’s a lie whose consequences we have been living with for 35
years as his efforts to shift the tax burden onto the middle class, cut funding
for education, and hold down the federally mandated minimum wage by breaking
the power of unions, have paid off for the “one percent.”
In addition to this there is the web of lies
surrounding President Reagan’s support for the Contras, the conservative
terrorist organization that was trying to overthrow Nicaragua’s left-wing
government. I remember this aspect of Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal vividly
because I went on a fact-finding trip to Nicaragua in 1984 and, during a visit to
a rural area, was told that the Contras had killed a Swiss ambulance driver
with a roadside bomb on the very road we were then cruising along. About a year
and a half later I was in Switzerland visiting friends in the Canton of
Fribourg and was upset to see newspaper clippings they had saved that described
the killing, by the Contras, of the ambulance driver, their countryman.
Our tax dollars at work.
President Reagan managed to survive the Iran-Contra
scandal, though, for a time, it looked like he might face impeachment. As
details of Iran-Contra surfaced, the public gradually concluded that the
President had been dishonest about the whole affair. According to one poll, only
12 percent of Americans believed him when he claimed he had no prior knowledge
of U.S. government funding of the Contras.
So why isn’t Ronald Reagan known as a “congenital
liar,” to use the words once employed by conservative columnist William Safire
with reference to Hillary Clinton? And how can RNC Chair Reince Priebus get away with
saying of her that she is “incapable of telling the truth?” Even more to the
point, how can Priebus make this obviously dishonest claim (i.e., lie) about
Hillary Clinton with a straight face while at the same time supporting someone
like Donald Trump? I, for one, would pay good money to see Mr. Priebus attempt
to defend the honesty of Mr. Trump’s various ridiculous claims, starting with
his insistence that no, he was not responsible for those Trump-promoting phone
calls by “John Miller” back in the 1990s.
But back to Ronald Reagan: his lies were much more
blatant and significant than any slick talking or sneaky email usage that
Hillary is guilty of, so why should she be perceived as not trustworthy in a way
that Reagan never was?
The short answer, as I’ve said elsewhere, is that
she has been relentlessly hammered by a Republican Party obsessed with
portraying her and her husband as dishonest. These endless attacks have had a
payoff, even though they almost invariably turn up no evidence of deceit or
wrongdoing on her part. What they do turn up – the emails again – is trivial
compared to the deceit and wrongdoing of which Ronald Reagan was guilty. The
point is, if the Democratic Party had made up its mind to portray President
Reagan as a habitual liar, “incapable of telling the truth,” his reputation
would certainly have suffered. I’m glad the Democrats never engaged in such a
campaign, however, since I think this kind of character assassination is bad
for the country as a whole.
I’m not picking on this particular late president because
I believe him to be unusually dishonest. Actually, I think he is about average
or maybe only slightly below average in honesty, but no worse or barely worse than
most. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is above average. I say this because,
first of all, a PolitiFact study of deceit by politicians found her to be above
average in her degree of honesty and, secondly, because, despite the mind-numbingly
incessant attacks leveled against her since 1992, nothing she has been shown to
have done matches in dishonesty Reagan’s Iran-Contra actions. Nor, for that
matter, Vice President G. H. W. Bush’s dishonest claim to have been “out of the
loop” during the Iran-Contra scandal. Nor George W. Bush’s claims about Saddam
Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” and connections to 9-11. In light of
the dishonesty represented by these various scandals, Hillary is clearly better
than most of her predecessors where honesty is concerned.
I say “predecessors” because I believe that she is
likely to be our next president. Certainly a win is not in the bag, but the
odds are very much in her favor. And when I vote on November 8, part of me is
going to be motivated by my hostility toward the character assassinating
tactics that the GOP has tried to use against her. I look forward to being able
to say, “Congratulations, Madam President. You have prevailed despite the morally
repulsive actions of these unscrupulous and small-minded men who have tried to
bring you down.”
