I see your point, but admitting that you see nothing wrong with using government power to limit the rights of your political opponents is not the same as claiming the scandals are phony.
Reagan was a conservative, but he like most presidents did many things I do not agree with. But I will take him for president over those who came after him any day. How about you?
I am not a conservative. I am a libertarian and becoming more and more an anarchist every day.
Well, Jefferson was an Anarchist on a limited scale. He also recognized the need for government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_anarchism
As to Reagan's "conservatism", sorry, I want no part of it.
http://consortiumnews.com/2013/03/26/ronald-reagans-hollow-conservatism/
Yet during the last years of his presidency, 1986 to 1988, most conservatives were furious at Reagan for having sold out the movement. Reagan’s image, however, benefited from the presidency of Bill Clinton, ironically a man who was in some respects more conservative than the Gipper. During the Clinton presidency, certain Republican operatives dusted off an idolized Reagan image and began using it to attack Clinton.
Reagan is always associated with his rhetorical advocacy of small government.
However, during his presidency, average annual government spending increased as a percentage of GDP, whereas under Clinton it was reduced. (In fact, Clinton was the only president since Harry Truman to reduce per capita federal spending.)
Moreover, Reagan came in second among post-Truman presidents in average annual increases in the number of federal civilian employees in the executive branch as a portion of the population, exceeded only by the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson period.
Reagan is most famous as a tax cutter; yet Reagan is last among post-World War II Republicans in reducing average annual taxes as a percentage of GDP. Although he did reduce taxes as a portion of GDP slightly, his spending increases as a percentage of GDP rendered his net tax cuts largely fraudulent.
Thus, he ran big federal deficits,
thus tripling the national debt and turning the U.S. from being the largest creditor into being the largest debtor nation. He was number one in post-Truman presidents in increasing average annual debt as a proportion of GDP.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-right-was-reagan/
Reagan gave the fullest explanation of his use of the “shining city on a hill” near the end of his Farewell Address in 1989. Reagan’s city had become a metaphor for a secure America with a bustling economy and open borders. “In my mind,” he explained, “it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity,
and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it and see it still.” One can only wonder what Governor Winthrop would have made of this thoroughly modern transmutation of his meditation on the demands of sacrificial love within the body of Christ.
Paul Kengor defends Reagan’s appropriation of biblical language by noting, correctly, that many presidents, including liberal Democrats, have done the same thing. But pointing out the similarities between Reagan and Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Kennedy, while it may slow down critics on the Left, is hardly likely to reassure conservatives about Reagan’s credentials. America’s identity as a chosen nation has indeed found advocates from across the political spectrum, but that fact merely shows how deeply the habit is embedded in America’s self-understanding. Whether that understanding is healthy is another matter. There is nothing inherently conservative about believing that America is God’s promised land for a new epoch. Because it sounds so patriotic to elevate America among God’s elect, however, many conservatives dig in their heels and resist any challenge to America’s redeemer myth.