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>>> firmly as anyone i have ever known.
>> always remained true to his ideals and principles and our country and the world are better for it.
>> he showed he could get together with political adversaries in an atmosphere of goodwill, mutual respect and the nation was better for that.
>> colleagues and friends and admirers of president reagor at least their fantasy of what he may have been celebrating what would have been his 100th birthday. the admiration hardly universal. the data set doesn’t even seem to be relevant at this point. if you have a fantasy you go with it. mark explains what’s going on in the daily rant.
>> thanks, dylan. we’ve all heard the phrase looking at things through rose tinted glasses. we remember the halcion days of yore, we have embellish this and that until all that’s left is a perfect ideal forever lost. so as time goes by we were pop warner champs, you should have seen the way i clocked him in fifth grade. now it’s 2011. our country is in a sorry state and along comes ronald reagan’s 100th birthday. watching the coverage and reading articles reminds me of that day when i took on le mack. that reagan they were showing us this past week, i have no idea who he was. you think from the coverage reagan should take teddy roosevelt’s spot on mt. rushmore, maybe all the spots. i’m here to jar memories a bit and set the record straight. going back to the ’60s when reagan emerged on the political scene as his hollywood career tanked there was an angry right wing group. the meanest in the golden state. in 1966 when reagan ran for governor of california, guess who was their favorite candidate. if you said reagan, ding ding ding, you win. okay. how about the big issue of that day. civil rights. well, again, reagan was against the civil rights bill. it wasn’t just a ’60s thing either. in 1979 reagan launched his presidential campaign in the same mississippi town where 16 years earlier three civil rights activists were murdered by the kkk. and again, in the ’80s as president, reagan embraced the apartheid regime defending it like it was a helpless princess under siege from evil liberals. for that desmond tutu, a nobel peace prize winner called reagan a racist, unquote. take universal health care, reagan ran around scaring americans into believing it was the first step towards stalinism and gulags. then his biggest pet peeve, affordable education. when he was elected governor in 1966, the university california system was the envy of the nation. imagine if you were accepted into uc berkeley, tuition was free and reagan hated that. he famously said education is not a right, it’s a privilege. as in it’s for the privileged. sow waged a war against california’s higher education system and against the uppity students and against their so-called enablers, the people who ran the best and cheapest university system in the country. four years later reagan won. education was no longer free and it was no longer a right but a privilege. if you weren’t privileged you became one of the millions of graduates who today are saddled with student loan deaths. oh, ronnie, we hardly knew you. there’s this tv show out called “fringe” where there are two parallel universes. maybe reagan should have played the mad scientist walter in that show. the record of reagan’s career and the coverage over the past week of it must have taken place in two separate parallel universes. it’s almost too perfect of a fit. reagan, born on the fringe of right wing politics could have played a starring role in the show of the same name.
>> do you think it’s as simple as euphoric recall?
>> i think it is not that simple. i think it’s actually a concerted pr effort. i think a lot of money and effort has been poured into white washing the reality about reagan so we forget how things got to the point where we’re at today.
>> to what end?
>> basically a war on the middle class. that’s what i tried to get into. he waged a war against unions, even though he started out as a union president, a union boss ahead of the screen actors guild. you know, through tax changes, tax cuts for the wealthy and cuts for all sorts of programs for the middle class.
>> they don’t want that to be his actual message.
>> they want to think everything was great when in fact he divided everybody.
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