Chris Lawrence, who isn’t a conservative but is often mistaken for one because he also isn’t an asshat, invites his more conservatively-inclined readers to “enjoy tearing a new one in this hapless Ole Miss undergraduate,” who both he and are sure thinks he’s far more clever than he actually is. Allow me.

The anti-Christ is dead. That was my initial reaction Saturday afternoon at a Cincinnati hotel bar to the news of former President Ronald Reagan’s death. I know it’s an insensitive sort of statement to the news of a death of someone grandly touted as one of America’s “greatest presidents.” Frankly, though, he is one of the worst presidents we’ve had.

I do not intend to dishonor the man,

Nah, when I compared him to the “anti-Christ,” I meant that in a good way!

… but I’m tired of the rose-colored glasses worn by many when examining Reagan and his presidency.

Especially, no doubt, when they come from people old enough to have any meaningful recollection of life during the Reagan years.

From his “loveable” gaffs (once saying that 80 percent of air pollution comes from natural vegetation)

Which, for all the derision it generated over the years, may not be that far off the mark.

to his more sinister efforts to undermine Social Security and other programs, Reagan screwed over the American people.

Time to let you in on a little secret, Mr. Niemeyer: when your parents took your allowance away, they were just being cheap bastards. It had nothing to do with Reagan undermining Social Security; they just told you that so you would leave them alone.

For many other Americans, myself included, Reagan’s presidency represents a dark period of American history.

The paper doesn’t say what class Mr. Niemeyer is in, so I’m going to be generous and assume he is a graduating senior. Assuming he hasn’t skipped any grades or been held back, that puts his age at 21, meaning he was born in 1983, about halfway through Reagan’s first term. In late 1984, a one and half year old Niemeyer was doubtlessly crushed to see Walter Mondale fail in efforts to end this dark period of Mr. Niemeyer’s life. That period got even blacker late in 1985, a period known among Reagan critics as the Terrible Twos. The situation became progressively bleak when, in 1988, Mr. Niemeyer was ordered by his authoritarian parents to attend kindergarden, for no stated reason other than “because we said so.” By early 1989, at the ripe old age of six, Mr. Niemeyer was a broken man.

Savings and loan scandals, national debt skyrocketing and slashing economic safety nets all taint the Reagan years.

Never mind that there were no cuts in the safety, and that saving and loans tanked because of a poor deregulation model that goes back to the Carter era. The national debt did go up, though, so you just lost your perfect record.

All this on top of his wife’s recommendations via Joan Quigley, a psychic who would go so far as giving schedule recommendations. Yes, they consulted a psychic about national policy.

Only for scheduling meetings and the like, not for determining any of the substantive policies. Sorry if they weren’t able to pencil you in.

Reagan and members of his administration broke the law by selling weapons to Iran to fund the contras, who had been waging a brutal guerrilla war against the popularly elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

Apparently, Mr. Niemeyer is confusing a democracy with a republic. The Sandinista government may have been “elected” by the U.S. Congress (hence the need for the Iran-Contra games), but it wasn’t “elected” by anything else. Or perhaps figured that any government that will eventually yield to pressure from the freedom fighters who had been waging a brutal guerilla war against them, and then hold a popular election in which they will finally get trounced, is just as good as a “popular elected” government.

Despite reports of death squads by right-wing militia and the Boland amendments forbidding the actions, Reagan (via Oliver North, John Poindexter and Robert McFarlane) sold the weapons to Iran.

Leading, ultimately, to the free and fair elections in 1990, when the Sandis stopped pretending to represent the Nicaraguan people, and finally allowed a real democracy to take root, just in time for Mr. Niemeyer’s seventh birthday. Meanwhile, courtesy of Mr. Christ (can I call him “Anti?”), two rogue states in the Middle East were too busy fighting each other to do any real harm to us. Bummer.

Reagan’s economic policies nearly destroyed the security of the American economic system.

OK, that one I’ll grant you. Prior to Reagan’s term, and even well into his first term, most economists were quite secure in their belief that it was impossible to reduce unemployment significantly without causing inflation to increase, or vice-versa. By reducing both precipitously, Reagan’s policies destroyed that “security.”

Reagan, during his years as president, refused to pass new minimum wage laws to counter the decreasing value of worker’s take-home pay, falling 27 percent in its value during his tenure.

In other words, Reagan, unlike most people, understood that minimum wage laws don’t work. Economists, including the ones whose security blankets he yanked away in the 1980s, are practically unanimous on this point. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen here, any elected official who pays attention to them risks being called an anti-Christ, and that’s from the people who don’t intend to dishonor them.

Using the theory of what is now coined “Reaganomics,” he cut taxes - mostly for large businesses and the upper class - in the hopes of increasing economic growth.

Translated: I like a 70% marginal tax rate. I want that back! After all, most tax savings is limited to those who pay taxes.

Through this growth, the American people would see the benefits, and federal revenue would also increase to cover the tax cuts and increased spending.

Actually, the increased spending wasn’t part of the plan, though it was when Kennedy did the same thing 20 years earlier. This time, it was all about the American people seeing the benefit. That federal revenues also increased as a result of the policy was a nice side effect, of course. Too bad the increase wasn’t fast enough to keep up with the spending increases.

Unfortunately, this has yet to work out for us. After 20 years, most Americans are worse off than before Reagan.

That statement practically fisks itself, so I’m going to leave it alone.

Reagan also attempted to undermine the Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade in 1981 by endorsing a Human Life Amendment. The amendment, which failed, would not only have banned abortion but also gone so far as to ban some forms of birth control.

A President opposed abortion? Stop the presses! Only the Anti-Christ would oppose abortion, especially if it ends up banning abortion as a form of birth control! [Never mind the fact that undoing Roe would not, by itself, have "banned" anything. Details.]

Reagan also opposed Title IX, a law that fought against sexual discrimination in schools receiving federal funding.

Oh yes, I remember those ads during the 1980 campaign, as I’m sure Mr. Niemeyer (at the tender age of -3) does, as well. “I oppose Title IX and support sexual discrimination.” Too bad old Dutch had such a lousy memory. I mean, he may have run on a pro-sexual discrimination platform, but it was less than six months into his first term that he not only forgot he was anti-woman, he up and appointed one to the Supreme Court! I know, I know, he only did it to help George W. Bush steal a Presidential election 19 years later, but still.

In Grove City College v. Bell (1984), the Supreme Court ruled that Title IX was only applicable to the specific program receiving the funding. Four years later, Congress fully restored the bill.

Translation: In Grove City College v. Bell,465 U.S. 555 (1984) eight men and one woman (the same one Reagan had accidentally appointed) ruled that Title IX only meant what it said, not what the feminist plaintiffs hoped it would mean. Four years later, the feminists got their way, and as a rseult, over Mr. Christ’s dead veto, we still got the version of Title IX that shuts down men’s sports programs around the country, while doing next to nothing to promote women’s.

The Gipper waged campaigns deeply rooted in racist rhetoric - “black welfare queens” - to attract white voters to his campaign.

Ah, I see today’s journalism students learn the L.A. Times’s famous “air quotes” policy, in which quotation marks are used around phrases attributed to some person, not because the person actually said them, but simply, well, because. This case even better at misleading, however, as the part of the phrase (”welfare queen”) was an expression Reagan had used while another part (”black”) describes an irrelevant attribute about that individual which Reagan himself did not mention, allude to, or in all likelihood, care about.

By using “state’s rights” in his 1980 campaign speech in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were brutally murdered 16 years before, Reagan was deliberately using racially charged shibboleth to connect to his audience.

Funny how this racially charged shibboleth, which has nothing to do with race or charging, made it into the Bill of Rights, where it remains to this day.

While such a phrase today is relatively ambiguous, 24 years ago, people knew its implication regarding race, especially in Mississippi.

Actually, it’s not ambiguous at all. States’ rights means states’ rights. Sometimes it means a state’s right to run its own schools as it sees fit. Other times, it means the right of the State of Oregon to allow physician-assisted suicide, California’s right to allow medical marijuana, etc. In no context does it mean “some individual’s right to go out and murder three people 16 years ago.”

Reagan also attempted to secure a tax exemption for Bob Jones University in South Carolina. The university was not granted exemption status because of its segregationist policies.

Translated: Reagan wanted all universities to enjoy tax exempt status, rather than give the IRS the power to pick and choose. Bob Jones wasn’t really the issue; he just didn’t want to set a precedent that might threaten the tax-exempt status of Anti-Christ University later on.

Bonzo’s bedtime buddy also claimed the 1965 Voting Rights Act was “humiliating to the South.” Funny how a law that allowed black people in the South to have a political voice was “humiliating,” while keeping them from voting was good.

It’s good to know that some urban legends never, ever die.

Women, blue-collar workers and minorities suffered during the Reagan years and the neo-conservative movement that followed.

Except, of course, those women, minorities and ex-blue-collar workers who got jobs, earned a living and actualy get to keep some of it. And that’s just on this continent. Maybe you should travel behind the Iron Curtain and ask those women, minorities and blue collar workers how much they have suffered as a result of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy. Oh wait, I almost forgot - there is no Iron Curtain anymore. Nevermind!