Ever since President Ronald Reagan rode west into the sunset, whenever a Democrat has inhabited the White House, Republicans – particularly the right wing – have lamented the Reagan could not be restored to life and sit once again in the Oval Office.

However, the political right, especially the Tea Party members, have no grasp of history. What they know of it they have learned from Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and other extreme right-wing ideologues who themselves don’t know it or distort it. No matter how outrageous the statements made by these right-wing radio and TV entertainers, it is accepted as inerrant as the Bible.

Ronald Reagan the campaigner differed as much from Reagan the president as does President Obama from the man who ran for office. The Reagan worshipers forget that he was the most effective Republican president since Teddy Roosevelt.

He was so effective because, while he had ideals, he was not an ideologue. He was a president who was flexible, striving to build a conservative America, but ready to compromise when it was necessary. Reagan was a man who, as he said, wanted “to get things done.”

Reagan ran for president promising to cut federal taxes. In his first year in office he did just that. The biggest reduction was in the highest bracket, from 78 percent down to 38 percent. All in all, they were the biggest tax cut in U.S. history.

That’s at the heart of the myth, which is why right-wing extremists genuflect before statues of the Great Communicator. They assume he would have continued slashing taxes, presumably until there weren’t any. However, where the myth ends, history continues. Ronald Reagan was not a president who was willing to reduce revenue to less than necessary to run the government.

In 1982 President Reagan restored a third of the cuts, making it the biggest increase in taxes in the nation’s history. In 1983 he increased the gasoline tax by 5 cents, instituted a payroll tax to help cover Medicare and Social Security, and despite “the sky is falling” screams of big business, he plugged tax loopholes generating a billion dollars of revenue each year.

President Reagan, hailed by right-wingers as the scourge of big government, increased the federal payroll by 60,000 new employees. If any literate Tea Party members ever cracked a history book on U.S. presidents and examined Reagan’s actions in office, they would realize that with U.S. income taxes the lowest in 60 years and our government desperately in need of more revenue, it is not likely that a President Reagan would call for more cuts.

A few other facts that would be discovered are that while governor of California, he signed a bill legalizing several million abortions. He was the first president to entertain an openly gay couple in the White House. It was President Reagan who in 1987 signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act; while it increased the size of the Border Patrol by 50 percent and stiffened requirements on U.S. employers to assure their workers were not illegal aliens, the act he signed granted amnesty to millions of them already here.

He was pressured by interventionists around him to send troops to Nicaragua to install a regime favorable to the United States and flatly refused. That’s when referring to them he is quoted as saying, “Those sons of bitches won’t be happy until we have 25,000 troops in Managua, and I’m not going to do it!”

The actuality of Reagan in office vs. the graven image created by right-wing Republicans does nothing to reduce his stature as one of our great presidents. When he entered the White House, he faced an overwhelming Democratic House led by its speaker, the legendary Tip O’Neill. President Reagan accomplished so much because he was not inflexible on any issue. Politically they were separated by the Grand Canyon, but if the two stood toe to toe shouting at one another, Reagan knew America would be the loser. Instead, as a contemporary said, “They slugged it out, but didn’t try for a knockout, they wanted a decision.”

Virginia Rep. Frank Wolf, who was one of 54 Republicans swept into office with Reagan in 1980. has said, “A lot of it was done after hours. They got together, they broke bread, they told stories, and they did things that I think helped us make some accomplishments.”

Ronald Reagan himself said it best when he hugged O’Neill.

“Our friendship is testimony to the political system that we’re part of and the country we live in, a country which permits two not-so-shy and not-so-retiring Irishmen to have it out on the issues rather than on our countrymen,” Reagan said.

Could it happen today? Not a chance. With control of the House, O’Neill could have prevented any bill submitted to Congress by the president to pass, making him appear so ineffective the odds would have been against him serving a second term. Although O’Neill was urged by some Democrats to do so, he refused.

“For me to use Congress as a political weapon to defeat the president was not what the institution was created for. I may be a stubborn Irishman, but, damn it, that would be un-American,” he said.

Tea Party members and other Republicans believe it would be un-American to not do so. In the years since Ronald Reagan demonstrated his greatness in getting things done across the ideological political divide, politics in America has spiraled downward to an atmosphere of meanness, of hatred, of seeking revenge, of a willingness to unhesitatingly destroy the American government in the name of saving it. And most discouraging, insulting the legacy of Presid