Reagan the "moderate"

Something that bugs me these days is American liberals using the "Reagan the moderate" talking point.  They think they're being clever when they say that today's Republicans are so extreme that they'd reject Ronald Reagan.  Actually, they're being weak.  I won't deny that the Republican party has been getting disturbingly extreme, yet this extremism is Ronald Reagan's legacy more than any other man's.

Don't get me started on Reagan.  The Iran-Contra scandals showed what crimes a US president can get away with when Congress and the Washington press don't do their job.  Congress made a crucial mistake in 1987 when they spared Reagan impeachment, guaranteeing that his crimes would be repeated.  But it's too convenient to put all the blame on a safe target like Congress.

Back in the spring of 1987 the US news media responded to Iran-Contra by launching a big attack on the Democratic candidates in the 1988 presidential race, labelling them "the Seven Dwarfs" a year before the primaries! (Actually, it was one of the more interesting Democratic races, because one of the dwarfs was Jesse Jackson, but I digress.) The Republican candidates didn't experience the same pile-on, despite not being so much better than their Democratic rivals.  In some cases this one-sidedness resulted from straightforward pro-Republican bias, but more often it reflected a contemptible phenomenon that I call safetargetism.  Your typical Washington reporter clearly calculated that attacking Democrats would put his own position at less risk than attacking Republicans like Reagan.

The continuing conservative praise of Reagan is ignorant, but it's what I expect.  What really bothers me is the cowardly deference that too many liberals still pay to this monster.  It used to be that Washington would have a big White House scandal every fifty years:  the Grant administration in the 1870s, Harding in the 1920s, Nixon in the 1970s.  Now it's happening every ten years:  Nixon and Watergate in the 1970s, Reagan and Iran-Contra in the 1980s, Clinton and Whitewater-Monicagate in the 1990s, Bush Jr.'s war crimes in the 2000s.  This is what happens when presidents are allowed to escape legal accountability for their actions, as in Nixon being pardoned by his successor, Reagan being "pardoned" by Congress, and Obama sparing his predecessor legal action in the name of "looking forward, not back." Such cowardice means that future crimes will be worse.