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“Reagan was a dunce and a fabricator. One of his most famous assertions was, ‘Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do,’ and he maintained, wrongly, that sulfur dioxide emitted from Mount St. Helens was greater than that emitted by cars over a 10-year period. (In one day, cars emit 40 times what Mount St. Helens released in a day even at its peak activity.) In 1985, Reagan praised the P.W. Botha’s apartheid regime of South Africa for eliminating segregation, a blunder then-Press Secretary Larry Speakes had to correct a few days later.
There’s more, including his administration’s willingness to trade arms for hostages, something Jimmy Carter didn’t do. But Douglas can’t acknowledge the fact that Reagan was the John F. Kennedy of the 80s generation: a shining symbol of something that didn’t really exist, a glamorous deceiver albeit in a different cause. Kennedy did only what he had to do for civil rights; Reagan did as little as he could get away with for the worshippers of the unborn.
