geeze, for some reason or another

for the past couple of weeks, i haven't been reading the nyt op-ed page(s). looks like i missed some 'good stuff'
for the record (not that you couldn't guess this or anything), not only didn't i like reagan but i never understood why he achieved god-like status (and still has it)

Columnists War Breaks Out at 'NYT' -- Over Reagan and Racism
By Greg Mitchell
NEW YORK The New York Times Op-Ed page hasn’t been this hot in a long time. Now we are experiencing Columnist Wars, with Bob Herbert today joining in a rapidly escalating battle between Paul Krugman and David Brooks -- largely over an incident involving Ronald Reagan at a local fair over 27 years ago. None has mentioned a colleague by name, while tossing around charges such as "woefully wrongheaded" and "agitprop."Krugman kicked it off with a Sept. 27 column on the Republicans’ continuing problems in attracting minority voters. “Republican politicians ... understand quite well that the G.O.P.’s national success since the 1970s owes everything to the partisan switch of Southern whites,” he declared. “Since the days of Gerald Ford, just about every Republican presidential campaign has included some symbolic gesture of approval for good old-fashioned racism.”......
.........“That won’t wash. Reagan may have been blessed with a Hollywood smile and an avuncular delivery, but he was elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nixon.“Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans — they all knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew. ...“Throughout his career, Reagan was wrong, insensitive and mean-spirited on civil rights and other issues important to black people. There is no way for the scribes of today to clean up that dismal record. ..........