The above headline was President Ronald Reagan's famous saying, which became a Republican big business "mantra."

The passage of time permits us to fairly analyze this popular big business slogan to see exactly how it worked in practice.

In 2008 we vividly see how decidedly dangerous and foolish Reagan's slogan really was.

By 2008 the meltdown of the mortgage market demonstrates dramatically what happened when the government "got off" regulating the U.S. banks' mortgage loan departments.

As Sean Hannity and others make clear, the Republicans would like to toss all the real issues away and run against Barack Obama's former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

One point needs to be abundantly clear to Hannity and all the other right wing propagandists exploiting the "Wright issue."  These well paid zealots harp on an extreme compilation of over 30 years of Wright sermons into a 10 to 15 second sound bite.  Even they needed to be taken out of context to deliver the intended resounding message.

It is necessary to take nothing out of context to analyze the McCain spiritual advisers that he continues to retain in his ranks.  John Hagee calls Catholicism "the great whore" and asserts that New Orleans residents had been punished by God for having scheduled a gay pride parade.  He looks forward to what he sees as a God-ordained nuclear war known to the reverend and his followers as "rapture."

Reverend Rod Parsley of Columbus, Ohio is another McCain spiritual adviser who speaks in harsh, raging tones of doctrinal self-righteousness.  Parsley fashions himself as something of an historian as well as he informs listeners blisteringly that "one of the reasons" why America was created was to "destroy Islam."  

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama say they believe in giving Americans universal health care.  I don't believe them.  Anyone who takes the time to understand universal health care should conclude that only a simple single payer system will reform the current outrageous system that benefits the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

That was the shocking headline in USA Today on May 8.

Gregg Zaroya wrote the story from Washington, D.C.  It read:

"More than 43,000 U.S. troops listed as medically unfit for combat in the week before their scheduled deployment to Iraq as Afghanistan since 2003 were sent anyway, Pentagon records show."

Zaroya continued, "The reliance of troops found medically non-deployable is another sign of stress placed on a military that has sent 1.6 million servicemen to the war zones."

With the mainstream media's steady firepower being directed basically in one direction, one would think that the big story of this presidential campaign season revolve around statements made by Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Chicago and how they politically impact on Barack Obama.

How essentially silent this same media has been concerning the statements of Reverend John Hagee of San Antonio.  The only recent definitive study I have seen done on Hagee came from Hagee's fellow Texan Lou Dubose in the excellent political journal he edits and writes for, The Washington Spectator.

Here is how the mainstream media has handled the Hagee matter when it has focused on it at all.  There were two infamous statements that were discussed.  

One dealt with Hagee's explanation that Hurricane Katrina involved an act of vengeance wreaked on the city of New Orleans by an angry God because the city had scheduled a Gay Pride Parade.  Hagee later backed away from the statement when pressured for an answer by media sources.