A bridge (name) too far

There is some noise being made about renaming the famed Coronado Bridge in San Diego to the “Ronald Reagan Bridge.” I live about 60 miles east of San Diego and am still within San Diego County. I really can’t believe that The Powers That Be would even consider such a thing.

Over at Firedoglake, David Glenn Cox rants about the new Time magazine cover which has a photoshopped picture of Ronald Reagan and President Obama arm in arm. He is quite amazed by the fact that a Democratic President would allow such a thing to happen without a hint of squawk. His very nice overview of Reagan is very apropos of why I feel Reagan should not have his name replace the Coronado Bridge.

Forget that the Reagan administration was corrupt up to its eyeballs. Let’s forget that the Reagan administration generated wars that killed thousands of innocent civilians in Central America. Let’s forget that the Reagan administration sold the chemical weapons to Saddam that were used to gas the Kurds. Let’s forget that the Reagan administration traded arms for hostages and sent birthday cakes to the ayatollah.

After we’ve forgotten all of that, we are left with the administration that shifted the tax burden from America’s wealthy to America’s working class. An administration which declared ketchup a vegetable to skirt Federal law on providing school lunches. An administration that bought plastic Air Force bombers for three quarters of a billion dollars a copy. Plastic dreadnoughts, too expensive to risk and too expensive to throw away.

I have said in the past that as far as I'm concerned, both the Democratic and Republican parties are essentially made of the same cloth. So it's really not surprising to me that the Time cover would demonstrate that notion. Or as Bill Hicks once said:

I'll show you politics in America. Here it is, right here. 'I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs.' 'I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking.' 'Hey, wait a minute, there's one guy holding out both puppets!'

All in all, I can’t understand why Ronald Reagan is so revered in this country. Now that his 100th birthday is this Sunday, I'm sure we're going to get tons of accolades about him, perhaps all the frakkin' year. Yeesh!