Ron Paul in 1988

Paul has been running for president off and on for a quarter of century, but, according one-time Paulestinian Dave Weigel at Slate.com, this is the first attack ad ever released by a Ron Paul campaign.

The Paul campaign’s attack ad pointed up Perry’s support in 1988 for Al Gore, who ran as a conserva-Dem in the primaries that year. The Perry campaign fired back by releasing the text of Paul’s letter from the same presidential cycle explaining that he was leaving the Republican Party to run for president on the libertarian ticket. Included in his rationale was his disappointment in the policies and performance of Pres. Ronald Reagan:

President Reagan, as governor of California, had a line-item veto and virtually never used it. As President he has failed to exercise his constitutional responsibility to veto spending. Instead, he has encouraged it.

Monetary policy has been disastrous as well. The five Reagan appointees to the Federal Reserve Board have advocated even faster monetary inflation than Chairman Volcker, and this is the fourth straight year of double-digit increases. The chickens have yet to come home to roost, but they will, and America will suffer from a Reaganomics that is nothing but warmed-over Keynesianism.

Candidate Reagan in 1980 correctly opposed draft registration. Yet when he had the chance to abolish it, he reneged, as he did on his pledge to abolish the Departments of Education and Energy, or to work against abortion.

Under the guise of attacking drug use and money laundering, the Republican Administration has systematically attacked personal and financial privacy. The effect has been to victimize innocent Americans who wish to conduct their private lives without government snooping. (Should people really be put on a suspected drug dealer list because they transfer $3,000 at one time?) Reagan’s urine testing of Americans without probable cause is a clear violation of our civil liberties, as are his proposals for extensive “lie detector” tests.

Under Reagan, the IRS has grown bigger, richer, more powerful, and more arrogant. In the words of the founders of our country, our government has “sent hither swarms” of tax gatherers “to harass our people and eat out their substance.” His officers jailed the innocent George Hansen, with the President refusing to pardon a great American whose only crime was to defend the Constitution. Reagan’s new tax “reform” gives even more power to the IRS. Far from making taxes fairer or simpler, it deceitfully raises more revenue for the government to waste.

Knowing this administration’s record, I wasn’t surprised by its Libyan disinformation campaign, Israeli-Iranian arms-for-hostages swap, or illegal funding of the Contras. All this has contributed to my disenchantment with the Republican Party, and helped me make up my mind.

Ron Paul did not mention back than that Reagan also raised taxes at least seven times when he was president or that one of his first acts as governor of California in the 1960s was to raise both spending and taxes, with a $1 billion tax hike that would represent over $6 billion in today’s dollars.

Number less of non-military federal employees under Pres. Obama, compared to Pres. Reagan. Obama, like every Democratic president starting with Jimmy Carter, has cut federal employees, while every Republican, starting with Reagan, has increased them. When Reagan employed 2,875,000 non-military employees in 1980, the American population was 226.5 million. Obama employs 2,840,000 serving a national population of 330 million.

Right: Reagan claiming in 1987 that debt-ceiling default would threaten recipients of Social Security and veterans benefits; left: leading freshman House tea bagger accuses Pres. Obama of lying when he said the same payments were at risk

The House Democratic Caucus found this audio from Pres. Ronald Reagan in 1987:

REAGAN: Congress consistently brings the Government to the edge of default before facing its responsibility. This brinkmanship threatens the holders of government bonds and those who rely on Social Security and veterans benefits. Interest rates would skyrocket, instability would occur in financial markets, and the Federal deficit would soar. The United States has a special responsibility to itself and the world to meet its obligations. It means we have a well-earned reputation for reliability and credibility – two things that set us apart from much of the world.

Reagan’s claim that defaulting on the debt ceiling “threatens the holders of government bonds and those who rely on Social Security and veterans benefits” is noteworthy because after Pres. Obama made a similar assertion, tea party Republicans in Congress accused him of lying.

Rep. Joe Walsh, a hyped-up freshman tea bagger from Illinois, rushed out a amateurishly produced video in which he said, “Pres. Obama, quit lying. You know darn well that if Aug. 2 comes and goes, there is plenty of money to pay off our debt and cover all of our Social Security obligations.”

So, just to connect the dots, Rep. Joe Walsh, R-Ill., has inadvertently also accused Reagan, the patron saint of tea baggery, of lying, too.

Last week, three other prominent House tea baggers — anti-gay presidential candidate Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, Louie Gohmert of Texas and Steve King — held a news conference in Washington in which they also accused the president and his advisers of misleading the public about the consequences of default for Social Security recipients and others:

“[House Speaker John Boehner] is getting bad advice,” Gohmert said at a press conference. “I guess the problem with the speaker and him saying that [the debt limit needs to be raised by Aug. 2] is that he listened to the president. I’ll urge the speaker not to believe the president anymore.”

Gohmert, along with [Bachmann and King], introduced a bill on Wednesday that would require the president to pay off interest on the nation’s debt first, if the debt limit is not increased by Aug. 2. “It’s a misnomer that the president has been trying to pass off on the American people,” Bachmann said at a press conference for the bill.

Credit ratings agencies have warned they will downgrade the government’s credit rating if it begins the process of defaulting on its loans.

But King, calling the president’s statements on the debt ceiling “veiled threats, if not an ultimatum,” said the nation’s credit rating could remain intact even if the debt limit is not increased by Aug. 2, so long as their bill to pay interest on the debt was passed.

“Our credit rating, we’re trying to preserve it with this bill,” King said. “We want to guarantee our credit rating stays.”

It is unclear whether Bachmann’s bill requiring the government to pay the interest on its debt before any of its other obligations would, in fact, make it more likely that payments to recipients of Social Security, veterans and others would not be made.

Reagan also warned about the consequences of defaulting on the debt ceiling in 1983. In a letter to the Senate majority leader, Reagan said, The risks, the costs, the disruptions and the incalculable damage lead me to but one conclusion: the Senate must pass this legislation before the Congress adjourns.”

As president, Reagan also raised taxes at least seven times, including the largest corporate tax hike in history. As governor of California, one of his first acts was to raise taxes and spending in the state. He raised taxes by $1 billion, which in today’s dollars is the equivalent of $6.5 billion.

– Pres. Barack Obama, trying to understand why today’s Republicans allow themselves to be bullied by Ronald Reagan protege Grover Norquist, putting their pledge to him above Ronald Reagan himself.

No doubt these same Republicans will also ignore the fact that, in 1983, Pres. Reagan strongly advocated raising the debt ceiling when the United States was undergoing an economic crisis similar to the one facing the country today. Back then, in a letter [PDF]to Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, R-Tenn., Reagan wrote:

Denigration of the full faith and credit of the United States would have substantial effects on the domestic financial markets and on the value of the dollar in exchange markets. The Nation can ill afford to allow such a result. The risks, the costs, the disruptions and the incalculable damage lead me to but one conclusion: the Senate must pass this legislation before the Congress adjourns.

The reason that Republicans, particularly the tea baggers, ignore Reagan’s actual record is because facts don’t matter, especially if the facts get in the way of their prime objective: doing whatever it takes, including blowing up the world’s financial markets, in order to ensure that Mitt Romney is the next president of the United States.

The text of Reagan’s letter to Baker, urging him to support the vote in Congress is transcribed in full below.

The White House

Washington

November 16, 1983

Dear Howard:

This letter is to ask for your help and support, and that of your colleagues, in the passage of an increase in the limit on the debt ceiling.

As [Treasury] Secretary [Don] Regan has told you the Treasury’s cash balances have reached a dangerously low point. Henceforth, the Treasury Department cannot guarantee that the Federal Government will have the sufficient cash on any one day to meet all of its mandated expenses, and thus the United States could be forced to default on its obligations for the first time in its history.

The country now possesses the strongest credit in the world. The full consequences of a default — or even the serious prospect of a default — by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate. Denigration of the full faith and credit of the United States would have substantial effects on the domestic financial markets and on the value of the dollar in exchange markets. The Nation can ill afford to allow such a result. The risks, the costs, the disruptions and the incalculable damage lead me to but one conclusion: the Senate must pass this legislation before the Congress adjourns.

I want to thank you for your immediate attention to this urgent problem and for your assistance in passing an extension of the debt ceiling.

Sincerely,

Ronald Reagan

Hat tip to The Dish.

There they go again. The drumbeat on the right for impeaching Pres. Obama is reaching a feverish pitch.

The GOP put impeaching the president on the table last summer, even before it was a cinch they would retake the House in November. Over at the birtherist site, World Nut Daily, they even published a book listing putative impeachable offenses against the president titled, “The Case for Impeachment: Why Barack Hussein Obama Should be Impeached to Save America.” One notable offense in the book: The president, or someone at the White House, reportedly allowed pop stars Beyonce and Jay-Z to have their photographs taken in the White House Situation Room.

Then, as the midterms drew near, Rep. Darrell Issa, the California Republican who would chair the House Oversight Committee, where impeachment investigations usually originate, described the president to Rush Limbaugh as “one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times” and announced that he would increase the size of the committee’s staff. (Issa, who should know from corruption — he’s a suspected arsonist and was charged with grand theft auto in 1980 — later tried to walk back his characterization of the president.)

Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., the history-challenged prospective GOP presidential candidate, also piled on, suggesting that if Republicans gained control of Congress, they should forget governing and do nothing but investigate the president. “Oh, I think that’s all we should do,” she said. “I think that all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another. And expose all the nonsense that is going on. And it’s very important when we come back that we have constitutional conservative leadership because the American people’s patience is about this big.”

Now, in the wake of Pres. Obama’s order last Friday to bomb Libya in preparation for establishing a no-fly zone, right-wing radio talkers and others on GOP propaganda outlets are clamoring once again for impeachment. Critics of the president charge that he violated the War Powers Clause by initiating the bombing without first seeking approval of Congress.

Leaving aside the merits of bombing Libya, the case for impeaching the president on these grounds is precarious. For one thing, there are numerous precedents that did not lead to impeachment, starting in 1950 when Pres. Truman invaded Korea without prior notification to Congress.

But this precedent ought to be of particular interest to the right wing, especially those under the sway of the Cult of St. Ronnie:

In October 1983, President Ronald Reagan announced that he had ordered a pre-dawn invasion of Grenada by nearly 1,900 Marines and armed airborne troops under the code name “Urgent Fury.” The fighting was heavier than expected and by the end of the month, the United States military presence had reached more than 5,600 troops. After a few days of heavy fighting and a number of deaths, the shooting ended.

The invasion and occupation constituted, within the meaning of the War Powers Clause of the U.S. Constitution, a war against the people of Grenada. The president, however, at no time sought the required congressional approval. He justified the invasion by claiming falsely that the lives of U.S. medical students were in danger. The same pretext was given to justify the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965.

(Of course, Reagan cultists have been brainwashed to ignore facts about his record that don’t jive with the mythology they are so invested in. For example, they are blissfully ignorant about the fact that one of his first acts as governor of California was to hike taxes by $1 billion to cover the budget deficit caused, in part, by spending increases he ordered — and that, as president, he raised taxes at least seven times, including the largest corporate tax increase in history.)

Impeaching presidents is as much a political exercise as it is a legal pursuit, as was illustrated by the Republicans’ bogus case against Pres. Clinton in 1998 — an effort led by Newt Gingrich, the most impetuous and ideological speaker in recent history.

In 1983, however, calls for impeaching Reagan in the Democratically controlled House went nowhere, at least in part because Speaker Tip O’Neill refused to pursue them. On a practical level, he knew the matter would likely fail in the Senate, where Republicans were in the majority. Politically, he surmised impeaching Reagan, whose Gallup approval rating was 49 percent, would not sit well with the public.

After Speaker O’Neill took impeachment off the table, a group of civil libertarians brought a lawsuit against the government for violating the War Powers clause on behalf of Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich. In fact, during Reagan’s two terms in office, Democratic members of Congress sued him four times for War Powers Clause violations, including the Conyers action, as well suits related to his sending military advisers to El Salvador and his activities in Nicaragua and the Middle East. All four cases were dismissed.

In the 1990s, Pres. George H.W. Bush was sued by Rep. Ron Dellums, D-Calif., for not consulting Congress before sending troops overseas to prepare for the Gulf War. A few years later, 26 members of Congress, led by GOP Rep. Tom Campbell of California, sued Pres. Clinton for not consulting Congress before he invaded Yugoslavia. These cases were dismissed, too.

In general, courts dismissed these lawsuits on the grounds that the Constitution established impeachment as the preferred method for adjudicating criminal charges against the Executive Branch by Congress.

While some liberals view congressional notification as a constitutional, rather than a partisan issue — just this week Rep. Dennis Kucinich, an Ohio Democrat, called for impeachment hearings on Pres. Obama’s actions in Libya — Republicans don’t give a damn about violations of the War Powers Clause when GOP presidents do it.

For the current crop of Republicans, the issues are unimportant — they are shopping around for a pretext for impeaching Obama, just as their predecessors under Speaker Gingrich spent six years in the 1990s searching for something, anything, over which to impeach Pres. Clinton. After Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, the Vince Foster suicide and even the their investigation into Socks the cat failed to produce impeachable offenses, they resorted to trapping Pres. Clinton in a perjury about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

In 1983, Speaker O’Neill refused to pursue Reagan over his illegal invasion of Grenada because it was a political non-starter. Not only did the president’s party control the Senate, where impeachment trials are decided, Reagan’s popularity was just under 50 percent.

Today, Speaker Boehner faces a similar political landscape. The president’s party controls the Senate, and the president’s approval rating is 48 percent, according to Gallup.

But John Boehner is no Tip O’Neill. He is neither particularly smart nor politically savvy — but the starkest contrast between them is that Speaker Boehner is the leader of his party in name only. The Tea Party Caucus, led by the half-witted Rep. Bachmann, has him and his team on a very short leash.

And that is the political wild card here. Like Gingrich-era Republicans whose loathing of the Clintons drove them to recklessness, Bachmann, Issa and the rest are blinded by an irrational, partisan hatred of Barack Obama. If they demand impeachment hearings now, Speaker Boehner would be powerless to stop them.

At the time, Reagan’s tax increase was the largest ever levied by a state — and it hit Californians right in the middle class:

Reagan campaigned in 1966 on cutting government, but his first budget exceeded [his predecessor Democratic Gov.] Pat Brown’s by half a billion dollars. “Taxes should hurt,” Reagan said, and they certainly did – especially for the middle class. The billion dollar tax increase to pay for that big increase in government spending was sweeping: the sales tax jumped from three cents to five; bank, corporation and inheritance taxes went up half a percentage point to six percent; liquor taxes rose from $1.50 a gallon to $2; cigarette taxes leaped from three cents a pack to 10; and the maximum income tax rose from seven to 10 percent.

In 1968, Democrats were able to stop another Reagan tax increase — this one on food, utility bills and services like haircuts. In 1971, he raised taxes on banks and corporations.

Despite the current mythology about Reagan, he was even more tax happy as president, raising taxes at least seven times during his eight years in office, including the largest corporate tax hike then to date.

Today, of course, the mythological Reagan has become the patron saint of the GOP corporatists’ ideological aversion to taxes. Their anti-tax propaganda has been phenomenally successful, so much so that now, as the nation stumbles through its recovery from the worst recession in 80 years — a calamity caused by Republican malfeasance and ineptitude — raising taxes, even on the wealthiest Americans, has been taken off the table.

America is broke, Republicans say, and, since raising taxes is verboten, the only way to balance the budget and spur the economy is to cut spending, by which they mean defunding programs they don’t like — by which they mean government services that benefit the poor and the middle class.

But as Michael Moore correctly said this week in a speech to pro-middle class protesters in Madison, Wisc., they are lying. America is not broke. Not hardly.

Citing a 2009 article Forbes, the right-wing business magazine, Moore pointed to a huge structural disparity in the country’s finances.

As of 2009, the top 400 wealthiest families in the United States, Moore said, control $1.27 trillion ($3.175 billion per family). That same year, conversely, the least wealthy 60 percent of American families — 100 million of us — had a combined net wealth of just $1.22 trillion, or $12,200 per family. (Politifact checked and Moore was right about the 2009 numbers — they even looked at the 2010 figures and came up with roughly the same results.)

Despite the GOP’s skillful disinformation campaign on taxes, their pretexts fall apart under even casual analysis. The primary rationale — that the uber-wealthy create jobs — is disproved by recent history. It is an indisputable fact that during the first 10 years that the infamous Bush tax cuts for the super-rich were in place, the super-rich created next to no new jobs. By contrast, Pres. Clinton’s tax on the wealthy in the previous decade did nothing to impede the economic boom.

Middle class Americans — including many of the swing voters who just three months earlier elected tea party extremists into Congress and state houses across the country — appear to be waking up to the fact that with their draconian cuts, union busting and other tactics, Republicans have unleashed a full-scale war on the American middle class.

So far, only one member of Congress has had the courage to stand against the GOP’s fantastical anti-tax propaganda. Yesterday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, proposed a tax on millionaires:

Sen. Bernie Sanders … on Thursday afternoon introduced a bill (PDF) that would establish a surtax on millionaires and strip tax deductions for oil companies — a proposal he claims would cut the deficit by about $50 billion.

The Emergency Deficit Reduction Act would accomplish this by raising taxes by 5.4 percent on annual income over $1 million.

If this proposal is allowed to advance, expect the right wing noise machine to go into overdrive. But Sanders has the people on his side. In the most recent Wall St. Journal/NBC Poll, a whopping 81 percent of voters — in other words, everyone but the 20 percent in the GOP base — chose raising taxes on the wealthy as the best way to cut the deficit.

Put another way, an overwhelming majority of Americans agree with both Sen. Sander’s proposal now and Ronald Reagan’s anti-deficit strategy back in the day that raising taxes, not cutting spending, is the best way to reduce the deficit.

– California Gov. Ronald Reagan, in 1967, advocating raising $1 billion in taxes to balance the state budget. Despite tea party mythology, Reagan had few qualms about raising taxes. He did it at least seven times as president, including the largest corporate tax hike ever.

Via George Skelton, Los Angeles Times

As someone who was already around when he was in office, I have a different view of the golden age conservatives now see as the greatest in our country’s history, except of course, for the halcyon days of 3/5ths personhood and what-not at our country’s founding. Reagan gave us:

• Voodoo economics, aka trickle-down economics, aka supply-side economics, aka tax breaks for the rich
• Tripling the national debt within two years (see “voodoo economics”)
• Just Say No
• Creating a new demographic of Americans: The Homeless
• A 4,370-piece set of dishes (19 pieces per setting), costing $209,508
• Bombing Libya and killing 60 people, including Leader Muammar al-Gaddafi’s 15-month-old daughter
• Ketchup as a vegetable in public school lunches
• Lt. Col. Oliver North
• Selling arms to Iran and using the money to overthrow the government of Nicaragua
• Using astrology to plan presidential trips, functions, speeches, etc.
• Invading the tiny doctor-mill Caribbean island of Grenada, which the United Nations called a “flagrant violation of international law”
• Firing the country’s air traffic controllers
• A peak unemployment rate of 10.8%
• The savings and loan crisis, which ended that industry
• “Black Monday,” the stock market crash of Oct. 19, 1987, the largest one-day percentage decline in stock market history
• The uncompleted “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative, upon which the United States has spent $100 billion to date

One final memory of the Reagan years continues to this day: the concept of the “Teflon politician.” That Reagan’s legacy, which should be one of shame and ignominy, is instead held up by conservatives as aspirational, boggles the minds of those of us who don’t suffer from diseases that rob the memory.

So complete is Reagan’s rehabilitation and sanctification among conservatives that Sen. John McCain, during his last failed presidential campaign, vowed to cut the deficit like Reagan did. Former partial-term Gov. Sarah Palin recently claimed that Americans who are “out of step” with Reagan’s values — presumably, trickle-down economics that creates cruel income disparities, violating world sanctions to sell arms to our enemies, and wild, credit card financed personal spending — are wrong.

Let the tea partiers have their illusions but don’t expect those of us with intact faculties to go along with them.

- Sarah Palin, comparing herself to Ronald Reagan four days after she told Entertainment Tonight reporter Mary Hart that she might run for president.