Whatever his achievements, who can ever forgive the toilet seats? I just burn in rage when I think of all the food and medicine for the Third World that money would have bought and.....sorry, I just can't go on.

Hey, it's Nation. What would you expect them to say about the man who did more than anyone else to bring down the curtain on their Stalinist buddies?

As stated before, most of the things cited are not bad, but the one that fires me is "ketchup is a vegetable", which I still hear occasionally as proof that Republicans are stupid. If I remember correctly, ketchup was first declared a vegetable in the days of Jimmy Carter, and then brought up by some Democrat a few years later to make a point about education spending. (I forget what the point was, but it probably involved bigger spending.) Once the pundits heard this factoid, it became something else to blame Ronald Reagan for, even though his only fault (if he even knew of the rule in the first place) was to leave it on the books.

You probably remember that salsa was declared a vegetable by the Clinton Administration in 1999 or so. I do not recall any great outrage from the expected sources.

The $640 Pentagon toilet seats, actually a toilet assembly for certain military aircraft, were the result of procurement procedures demanded by laws Dingell helped pass

Scroll down to Don't revise Reagan history

Actually, since Corn is on a roll, I might add a single word that clarifies the whole history of The Nation:

Stalin.

Amusingly, even if you believe everything on his list is bad, the sum is less than that one word.

'voodoo economics' consistently makes me laugh.

I hear the "ketchup as a vegetable" line a lot from my Demmycrat friends whenever I try to prove that it's just possible that Reagan isn't the second most evil man who ever lived (behind Dubya, natch). Now that I've heard that others have had to deal with that, my dander is up (and what an impressive dander it is) and I think it's time for a little thorough research.

According to the Web site www.moynihaninstitute.org, the "ketchup is a vegetable idea" was proposed by a Carter appointee, I'm guessing from either the Education or Agriculture department. The proposed rule (which also allowed school lunches to substitute doughnuts for bread) was withdrawn by budget director David Stockman in September 1981, before it was ever enacted. This appears to have been part of a large series of dietary guidelines prepared for school lunches, and it wouldn't surprise me if the ketchup provision was added as a "gotcha" to make Reagan look stupid. Since it takes a long time to get anything written in Washington, I suspect the ketchup stuff may have had its genesis in the Carter years. And since Reagan made a big deal about cutting costs when entering the White House, the proposed guidelines were interpreted as Reagan trying to take vegetables away from children.

I apologize, as this incident is not tied to Carter as closely as I thought. But the following IS true: No, the federal government never classified ketchup as a vegetable. And yes, thanks to a Clinton-signed measure in 1999, salsa is officially a vegetable.

Are David Corn and Katrina Van den Heuval the same person?

Catsup is a vegetable, and one that school children actually eat.
It's a good source of lycopene, as is tomato-based salsa.

Budget deficits are hardly unique to Reagan, or the Republican party, or even to the 20th century.

The MX missile and SDI brought down the USSR, bringing freedom to more people than WWII did, and at far less cost.

I'm surprised Mr. Corn forgot that Mr. Reagan caused AIDS, as well.