Look at how you word everything in this post. Not a lot of objectivity, and a hell of a lot of subjective interpretation of motives.

The short version is you have a feather up your butt about Reagan. You've rewritten him in your mind into something I can't even recognize.

Can't really argue with that kind of viewpoint. God knows you're not the only one, and in fact, for any major politician you can name, I can find someone I know who will foam at the mouth at his or her very mention, and someone else who worships the very ground they walk on.

Kennedy was profoundly anticommunist, back when Democrats were that way. His party in the 80s would have made him sick.

I'm not condemning him at all for his actions. This is how diplomacy is sometimes done, and it involves getting a bit dirty. The prissiness our country developed about the CIA and our military dealing with unscrupulous characters is one reason our current human intelligence is almost nil. Remember whose idea that was?

Despite the frantic rewrite of history that gave Gorbachev a Nobel Peace Prize, if the Democrats had been in the presidency during the 1980s, there's a good chance the Soviet Union would still be there, and probably running a good chunk of the planet. There would have been no support of anticommunist movements in Central and South America. No troops in Grenada. Nothing. And odds are good that negotiations on arms and missiles would have all gone the Soviet way. Missile defense? Missiles in Europe? Bite your tongue.