This morning a story was published in the Houston Chronicle about how two Republican legislators- Dwayne Bohac and Martha Wong- are fighting over the naming rights to the street that circles the state capitol here in Austin. Setting aside the much less pressing work of restoring health care to the 200,000 kids they denied it to in 2003, finding a way to pay for Texas’ failing schools or addressing a child protective services system that has allowed horrific abuse and even murder to occur, they are in a tiff over whether this drive should be named after George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan. The two GOP legislators have decided that naming a road that is closed to the public after one of two right wing Republican presidents should be their top priority and a battle has ensued. We Democrats have been accused of being obstructionists by these types in the past so I felt it would be nice if I offered them a solution.
It is ridiculous that we should be having this discussion at this point as history has yet to judge either man. Presidents who were beloved in their time have since been discredited and presidents who were despised and ridiculed have been vindicated by the work of historians. Reagan has been out of office for 16 years, but this hardly seems long enough to have gained the full measure of judgment regarding his presidency, but the things we have learned in this short time are hardly encouraging for those wishing to name institutions after him. His support for both Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the Islamist state of Iran at different times- Iran as a part of one of the most shameful scandals in American history- and his close ties to various other current enemies of our country marks him as short-sighted. His fiscal policies would have brought disaster were it not for the hard work of President Clinton and Democrats in Congress. And George W. Bush is still president, unfortunately, making it impossible to judge his legacy when only half of his tenure is over. Still, unless the next four years are a complete 180 from his first four we can expect that history will be unkind to him.
If you feel that you must name something after the two of them, there must be some serious limits on where you do it. You certainly would not want to name a drive around the capitol after Reagan, simply because he’s not from Texas. And naming a road after George W. Bush is like naming a staircase after Gerald Ford, Bush’s record of drunk driving should dissuade anyone from naming even a private driveway after the man.
Certainly don’t name a school after George Bush, seeing as he has a serious inability to do simple arithmetic as his unbalanced and irresponsible budgets demonstrate. Absolutely don’t name any bank after Ronald Reagan, seeing as more of them failed under his watch than in the entire Great Depression. Don’t name an accounting firm for either of them because both Reagan and Bush are known for spending more than they bring in. And certainly don’t name a hospital after either of them- Bush for the fact that millions more Americans are going without healthcare today than when he took office nor Reagan for the fact that by the time he finally started paying attention to the AIDS crisis tens of thousands were infected and thousands had already died.
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