Sadly, Ronald Reagan has passed away.
His long life was tragically marred by a chronic mental degenerative disorder, which at its worst led him into the delusion that he was president of the United States and made him unable to tell the difference between reality and his own speeches.
The mental degeneration led him to believe that he was standing tall for freedom and democracy at the same time that his army and intelligence services were fighting covert and proxy wars against popular and elected leaders in Chile, and Nicaragua, propped up despots in Guatemala and Honduras, trained death squads and torturers within the US at the School of the Americas and funded Pol Pot in his war against Vietnam. Mr. Reagan himself laid flowers on the graves of Nazis.
He claimed to be maintaining peace and security on the planet but at the same time absent-mindedly brandished nuclear weapons at us.
In one of history’s worst cases of contagious mental disorder, he and many others like him, believed he had brought an end to the Soviet Union. The reality of course was that the leaders of the USSR brought an end to that system. The extravagance of his claims to have reformed the USSR can only lead us to the unhappy inference that he thought he was leader of that country rather than the USA or was unable to distinguish the two. Given the two countries’ disregard for truth and freedom and given that they both began with the letter U, perhaps the error was understandable.
He believed he was a statesman, but to the rest of the world he was a confused old man wandering a golf course looking for a monkey.