Some unpopular thinking

The popularity of President Ronald Reagan hasn't faded in the two decades plus that have passed since he left office, or in the years since he died.
He made Americans feel good about themselves and the country again after the slime of Watergate and the ineffective Carter years.
That popularity has always let President Reagan's mistakes go unnoticed. The Teflon president.
Would any other president in recent history have been completely let off the hook for 200 Marines being slaughtered in Beirut?
Coming into office talking fiscal responsibility, smaller government -- and leaving the country with a massive and growing federal deficit.
Or having set up the conditions that led to the 1987 stock market crash and the savings and loan collapse of the late '80s?
How about bringing "Greed is good" to reality?On that one, maybe the President was just a little naive. Maybe he really did believe that corporations, freed from regulation, would do the right thing with all that extra profit. Oops.
Oh, and Iran-Contra. Sadly, as we learned of his Alzheimer's Disease in the 1990s, it turned out that maybe the President really couldn't recall.
But of late we're learning other things the Reagan Administration got very wrong. And what makes it worse, from Reagan devotees' standpoint anyway, was that his predecessor -- Jimmy Carter -- was getting something right.
Carter is a lesson to be learned in himself, and we'll get to that in a minute.
But the nation was making headway in alternative energy in the late '70s under Carter.
We could have made years of progress since then instead of still being in solar power's infancy.
A number of solar and other programs started by Carter were dumped by Reagan. Even a solar hot water heater was ripped out of the White House.
And the Carter Administration had gotten a small sedan developed -- via a $30 million grant -- that would get 32 miles a gallon and let four people in that car walk away from a 50-mph crash. Based on that project, the Carter Administration was about to issue guidelines to Detroit to produce cars that would let people walk away from a 40-mph crash.Reagan immediately stopped the program, and eventually the prototype cars were ordered to be destroyed.We only know about those cars because it's come to light that two of them had never been delivered to the government but were still at the factory .
They aren't pretty but would have led to better American cars.
How much less gas would we need -- and more important, how many lives could have been saved -- if that program had been carried forward.
And considering how lousy American-made cars were in the 1980s, which led to the imports taking over, better U.S. cars then might have spared us the bailout GM and Chrysler got in 2009.
In both cases, did massive amount of Big Oil and Detroit money funneled into the GOP then lead to problems we face now?
OK, now about Carter.
There's no bigger warning to those who think outsiders are a magical cure to Washington's problems.
Jimmy Carter was the ultimate outsider. Problem he ran into is that Washington hates outsiders.
And it didn't help that Carter's Administration kept sticking "outsiders" in Washington's collective faces.
Congress and the massive bureaucracy took their revenge, making sure that Carter couldn't get much done.
What Harry Truman said of Dwight Eisenhower, his successor, was true for Carter and is still true in Washington: "He'll say do this, and do that, and nothing will happen."
We've created a massive government and it takes care of itself. And for anybody who campaigns saying they'll cut government, don't believe it. They may try, but Washington looks after his own.
That includes Congress. Ron Paul aside, the most conservative Republican will look to have his or her special interests looked after.
Even the best intentions don't last long inside the Beltway. Watch how many Tea Party Republicans change their tune after being caught up in the Washington swirl for a couple of years.
Notice how the one thing the Obama Administration has tried to wean from the public trough and hand over to private business -- the manned space program -- has led to howls just as many Republicans (including self-described Reagan Republicans) as Democrats.
A very sore point in Florida, Texas and Alabama, among other places, where jobs -- and hefty government contracts -- were lost or threatened.
Come on now, isn't that what Ronald Reagan told us to do: cut government and let the private sector take care of it?