Who doesn’t like Reagan?

While some long-time critics of President Ronald Reagan stifled their inclination to criticize the dead, others launched the kind of venomous attacks that marked his long career in politics.

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi said yesterday he regretted Reagan died without ever standing trial for 1986 air strikes he ordered that killed the Libyan president’s adopted daughter and 36 other people.

Ronald Reagan ordered the April 15, 1986, air raid in response to a discotheque bombing in Berlin allegedly ordered by Khadafy that killed two U.S. soldiers and a Turkish woman and injured 229 people.

“I express my deep regret because Reagan died before facing justice for his ugly crime that he committed in 1986 against the Libyan children,” Libya’s official Jana news agency quoted Gadhafi as saying.

Stateside, the verbal attacks were just as vicious.

Ed Weathers, a writer for the Memphis Flyer, had this to say: “Forgive me, but I am about to speak ill of the dead.

“In the coming months, the Republican propaganda machine will shift into high gear. Their goal: to turn Ronald Reagan into a saint. Just watch. First will come the coffin in the Capitol rotunda. Then there will be a proposal to put Reagan’s face on the dollar coin. Next will come a demand that his statue appear on the Washington Mall. And at the Republican Convention in September – oh, just wait. The highlight of that week will be a long, elegiac video of Saint Ronald, with moving music, snippets of favorite speeches, and the voiceover of, say, Charlton Heston. When the video ends, there will be heard the rapturous cheers of the faithful.

“Then George W. Bush will try to ride Ronald Reagan’s coffin back into the White House.

“For that reason, it is necessary now to speak ill of the dead.

“As president, Ronald Reagan was a mediocrity. He has left no legacy. He did not change the world in any significantly good way. His greatest achievement was to win a war with Grenada. He ran for president blaming Jimmy Carter for high gas prices and for letting Americans be taken hostage in Iran – both situations that no American president could have prevented.”

Trevor Royle of the Sunday Herald in Scotland offered this assessment: “Reagan remained an actor, not a doer.

“Perhaps because he saw himself as a patriot, a Forrest Gump before his time, he allied himself with the McCarthy faction and joined those Hollywood bigots who lined themselves up against anything that smacked of communism and the perils of the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War in the early 1950s,” wrote Royle. “It was unworthy of him and unworthy of the country at the time, but it marked him and had he not entered politics he could have ended up a bad actor who chose bad politics.”

David Swanson, media coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, wrote this for AlterNet.org: “Reagan is also the source of many of the relationships in Iran and Iraq that have troubled the United States since. Kevin Phillips’ recent book ‘American Dynasty’ does a good job of summarizing the strong evidence that Bill Casey and George H.W. Bush made a deal with the Iranians not to release the hostages until after the 1980 U.S. presidential election. This would mean that Reagan’s election was illegal, that the trading during the Iran-Contra scandal had a precedent, that Reagan and G.H.W. Bush’s buildup of Saddam Hussein’s military was motivated in part by a desire to counter weaponry and money that the United States had given Iran in exchange for Reagan’s election, that our media has completely fallen down on the job, and that we’re all a bunch of suckers.”

AlterNet.org also republished a short piece by David Corn of the Nation titled “66 Unflattering Things About Ronald Reagan.”

Counterpunch.org published a piece by Phil Gasper called “Ronald Reagan, 1911-2004: Goodbye and Good Riddance.”

“Ronald Reagan has finally died at age 93,” Gasper wrote. “Predictably, politicians from both major parties have issued gushing tributes to this venal and vicious man, who was happy to slash workers’ wages, see families thrown onto the street, support sadistic death squads and bomb other countries, if this was in the interests of the American ruling class.”

Blogger Steve Gilliard, in a piece reprinted by the European Bellaciao.org, had this to say: “The hagiography started as soon as they announced Reagan’s death. How he ended the Cold War, how he was a decisive leader, all this nonsense about Reagan which is just ridiculous.

“The British have a tradition: When someone dies, their newspaper obituary tells the truth. Americans like to say something kind about the dead, no matter how scummy they were,” wrote Gilliard. “Even Nixon got a halo in death, where only Hunter Thompson reminded people of who exactly he was and how the honors given him were, well, wrong. This deification of Reagan began as soon as Clinton took office. There has been pressure to name everything but rest stop toilets after the man.”

DemocraticUnderground.com seemed to regret not having enough time to come up with a suitable obituary for Reagan.

“If you’re looking for stories about Ronald Reagan in this week’s edition, he ‘ended communication’ a little too close to our deadline. Tune in next week for coverage of the fallout of St. Ronald’s passing.”

Axisoflogic.com published a commentary by Greg Palast, who wrote: “You’re not going to like this. You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. But in this case, someone’s got to. Ronald Reagan was a conman. Reagan was a coward. Reagan was a killer.”

And Joe Davidson, a columnist for BET.com, the website of Black Entertainment Television, wrote: “It’s customary to say good things about the dead. Ronald Reagan appointed the first woman to the Supreme Court. He signed legislation for a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King. He thawed relations with the Soviet Union and signed a nuclear weapons treaty. He was warm and amiable and had a good sense of humor. He liked horses.

“Now let’s talk about what he did to black people.”

Davidson went on to claim that “after taking office in 1981, Reagan began a sustained attack on the government’s civil rights apparatus, opened an assault on affirmative action and social welfare programs, embraced the white racist leaders of then-apartheid South Africa and waged war on a tiny, Black Caribbean nation. So thorough was Reagan’s attack on programs of importance to African Americans, that the Citizens Commission on Civil Rights, an organization formed in the wake of Reagan’s attempt to neuter the official U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, said he caused ‘an across-the-board breakdown in the machinery constructed by six previous administrations to protect civil rights.’

“During his two terms in office, Reagan captured, solidified and came to personify America’s move to the political right,” he wrote. “His greatest legacy is as leader of that swing in the American political spectrum. That shift made ‘liberal’ a dirty word and Democrats cower. What had been conservative became moderate. What was moderate was pushed to the left wing. The shift was so pronounced and profound that black America giddily embraced Bill Clinton despite his promotion of programs, criminal justice and welfare policies in particular, that would have been called racist and reactionary under Reagan.”