Regarding Iran-Contra you noted: "That said, let's keep in mind that this is not the first administration to flaunt the law regarding secret initiatives abroad."

This hardly excuses the crime. It's not just Nicaragua, either. The Reagan administration had a heinous human rights record throughout Latin America -- a record of supporting death squads and subverting democracy that he inherited from Nixon. Reagan strengthened the American presidency by keeping secrets from congress and on the backs and slit throats of thousands of innocents throughout the Americas.

I voted for Reagan in 1980, primarily because of Jimmy Carter's idiotic commando raid into Iran to rescue the hostages, which resulted in the loss of two or three helicopters, and I don't remember how many soldiers. When Reagan won the election, I called my father, a loyal Republican, and told him "I hope he scares the Russians as much as he scares us." Reagan deserves credit for bringing the cold war to a peaceful end, primarily because he was able to gain Gorbashov's trust. Gorbashov wrote a very nice commemorative of Reagan in the New York Times, attributing Reagan's better qualities for bringing the cold war to a peaceful end.

But Reagan did many other things during his Presidency, that did not have such a good result in the long run. The U.S. is today the epicenter of the worst financial crisis since the Depression (truly a Minsky moment), and our present predicament is directly attributable to the misguided economic philosophies launched by Reagan.

Let me explain: Reagan proferred in his inaugural address that "government is the problem". While it is of course true that our government has failed us in many ways, it is, after all, we the people who are ultimately responsible for the political choices we make. Obama, in his commemoration of Abraham Lincoln in Springfield Illinois last week, used Lincoln to refute Reagan. Lincoln believed that government has a fundamental role to do for its citizens what they cannot do for themselves. For example, Lincoln, a railroad lawyer, set in motion the construction of the Transcontinental railroad, which ultimately proved to be perhaps the greatest investment in infrastructure this country has ever known.

Government indeed has a role to play, and the duty of the citizens is to make sure that government plays that role properly and effectively. One of the important roles of government is regulation. The government provides law enforcement, legal justice, incarceration if necessary, national defense, INVESTMENT in infrastructure, education.

Reagan argued against many of these things and sought to narrow the government's role to national defense. He argued against financial regulation, which is one of the primary reasons for our present state of distress. He appointed Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve, a man of unparalleled incompetence, who gained immense popularity, and knighthood, by violating the fundamental precept of the Central banker's duty: to take away the punchbowl when the party gets going. Greenspan refused to take action against asset bubbles, and declined to use any of the Fed's powers to regulate or impede the "Irrational Exuberance", a term he coined himself. When the dot-com bubble popped, Greenspan pushed interest rates down to very low levels and held them there, precipitating the housing bubble, which he also denied.

The health of the banking system depends on the health of the housing market. Why did Greenspan screw around with housing? Sweden experienced a banking crisis in the early 90's precisely due to a housing bubble. Was Greenspan, the most powerful central banker in the world, unaware of what happened in Sweden? And if he was aware, why didn't he learn from it? Either way, his legacy is in a shambles. Greenspan took his philosophy from Ann Rand, Ronald Reagan, and Milton Friedman.

Reagan also argued for cutting taxes, and trickle-down economics. His opponent in the 1980 primary campaign referred to his economic theories as "voodoo economics". Wealth does not trickle down, it trickles up; and the result of 28 years of these policies is that a large segment of Americans has been pauperized -- they have become deeply indebted, in part because of Reagan's dismemberment of the unions. The indebtedness of so many people has undercut the nation's economic foundation.

As Barack Obama put it in his inaugural address: "A nation cannot prosper when it favors only the prosperous."

The present band of Republicans treat Reagan as a god. He is more aptly to be regarded as the pied piper of Hamlin. If I could draw, I would draw a political cartoon: Mitch McConnell, John Kyl, and John Boehner lashed to the mast of the U.S. Reagan, Rush Limbaugh at the helm, and a gigantic wave towering above the broken mast, labeled "Financial Crisis", which is about to descend upon the ship and sink it to the bottom of the ocean.

The country will survive: the present crisis is a political one, not an economic one. We are in the early stages of recovery from Reaganism.

The Soviet economy would have collapsed no matter who was president at the the time. The Soviets proved corporate welfare doesn't work, too bad the republicans didn't learn from them.

Maybe Reagan didn't know what North and Poindexter were up to and maybe he didn't know about trading arms for hostages, but he certainly backed them up with his rhetoric. He certinly knew about the contras and the south American death squads.

Reagan espoused a worldview that has been shown to be completely wrong in almost every way, the sooner the country realizes that the sooner we can become a good citizen of the world and not just a rogue state with nuclear weapons.