Fourteen Republicans goofs in Congress want to dump President Ulysses S. Grant from the $50 bill and replace him with Ronald Wilson Reagan. President Grant was the Civil War commanding general of the Union Army. He fought bravely to preserve the union for all Americans. Reagan was a president who didn't do all that well looking out for the interest of a lot of his fellow Americans.

The lead sponsor effort, Rep. Patrick McHenry, a Republican from North Carolina, has the mistaken notion that Reagan was a great American President. Well, didn’t Reagan give us eight years of then record deficits? Didn’t Reagan support the South African apartheid regime?

Wasn’t he on the wrong side of history?


Reagan supported the apartheid regime. He gave aid and comfort to the forces of evil, at a time when most Americans were strongly against the apartheid regime, and supported a boycott of South African goods. Reagan apologists say that Reagan supported the apartheid regime because the other side were communists, and he had an anti-communist policy. To say that he gave aid and comfort to bigots out of his anti-communist  policy won’t fly. Many Americans and others, who were anti-communists, supported the doctrine of one-man-one-vote in apartheid era South Africa.  Reagan did not. He supported  white racist domination of a majority black African population. And though there were communist elements in the  African National Congress (ANC), the main South African opposition force to apartheid, the ANC was never a communist organization. The proof is in  how easily, the ANC supported a market economy the moment the ANC came to power.

And don't forget Reagan's  budget deficits. Reagan apologists  blame the Democrats for the deficits that Reagan's  policies guaranteed.  Reagan was warned by his budget chief David Stockman that the Reagan’s policies would produce record deficits! His Vice President, George HW Bush, when a candidate against Reagan in the !980 primary, warned that Reagan’s economic polices were Voodoo economics! For all of the Reagan bluster, the Reagan years were years of high deficits that weakened the American economy, and thus, the American nation.

Links: (http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheat-sheet/item/will-reagan-land-on-50-bil...), (http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/03/04/368688/mchenrys-initiative-put-re...).