I'm sure all of you have noticed the lovefest going on the past few days in th ecorporate media for former and late President Ronald W. Reagan.

I've got to get somethings off my chest.

Let me say first off, I respect his passing and everything, and that he(unfortunately) held the office of the Presidency. However, I'm shocked at how much brown nosing the media has been doing over him. From the way everyone is portraying you would think he was some sort of Messianic figure.

But to the contrary looking back at Reagan's career in office(not just the Presidency either), not only did he seem to not leave any lasting achievements, he seemed to leave meaning lasting failures on this nation.

When Reagan took office the United States was one of the foremost creditor nations in the world and by the time he left office we were of the most in debt, a debt continuing to this very day.

Reagan raised defense spending by hundreds of billions of dollars, much of our military money going to fund corrupt regimes like Ferdinand Marcos in the Phillippines, General Suharto in Indonesia, and even worse then these two, the Hussein regime in Iraq. In fact, our current Secretary of Defense was Reagan's Special Envoy to Iraq in 1983 and made some rather lucrative weapons deals with Mr.Hussein.

Weapons and funds acquired in the illegal Iran-Contra scandle were used to support the Contra death squads in Nicaragua, responsible for the deaths of an estimated 78,000 innocent people, including many Catholic Priests and Nuns. And if Reagan's claim that he had no knowledge of the scandle is true, it means the man was merely a figurehead for his corrupt advisors and backers, and if he was lying, it means he was a criminal.

People have tried to attribute Reagan to our 'victory' in the Cold War. Anybody who is a serious historical student of the Cold War could tell you the fall of the U.S.S.R. was much more due to missteps by the Kremlin in the 70's and 80's and internal political strife than any external policies.

Ronald Reagan is no friend of freedom. He is the same man who signed executive orders in the 1980's that set up legal framework for 'national emergency laws' in case of 'strong internal disscent and rebellion against U.S. foreign policy(particularly in reference to Central America and Europe), and he is the same man as Governor of California fought opposition to the Vietnam war with an iron fist. The same man who is responsible for UC Berkely being under National Guard occupation for several weeks in an attempt to kill freedom of speech on campus, with UC students dubbing him the 'Fascist gun of the West'.

Later, Reagan's administration in the 1980's undyingly supported the Apartheid regime in South Africa, and vetoed countless U.N. security council resolutions against it.

I thought these were a few things people ought to be informed of on Reagan, things that seemed to be left glaringly out of the media. I've lost so much faith in American mainstream press, it's gone down hill ever since the first Gulf War.