Michael Kinsley hits the mark in today’s LA Times, at least with respect to the GOP’s love-fest with a mythical Ronald Reagan:

Meanwhile, the Republican primaries have turned into a Ronald Reagan adoration contest.

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Mitt Romney, meanwhile, kept repeating, inanely, “We’re in the house that Reagan built.” Reagan “would say lower taxes”; “Reagan would say lower spending”; Reagan “would say no way” to amnesty for illegal immigrants; Reagan would never “walk out of Iraq.” And, by the way, McCain’s accusation that Romney harbors a secret timetable for withdrawal from Iraq is “the kind of dirty tricks that I think Ronald Reagan would have found to be reprehensible.”

A problem: Reagan actually signed the law that authorized the last amnesty, back in 1986. Romney deals with this small difficulty by declaring: “Reagan saw it. It didn’t work.” He offers no evidence that Reagan had a change of heart about amnesty, and learning from experience was not something Reagan was known for. The proper cliche is McCain’s: “Ronald Reagan came with an unshakable set of principles.” And — pointedly — “he would not approve of someone who changes their positions depending on what the year is.”

All of this is what Democrats these days would refer to as a fairy tale. There is no evidence that Reagan was bothered by the rough and tumble of political campaigns. Mischaracterization of an opponent didn’t even qualify as a “dirty trick” to Reagan, because of his fantastic ability to believe anything helpful.

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Would Reagan “walk out of” Iraq? Far from clear. He scurried out of Lebanon in 1984 after things got hot there. During the Reagan years, the United States was pro-Iraq in its war against Iran, although we also sold weapons to Iran to raise money for a terrorist war we were secretly financing in Nicaragua, while denouncing terrorism. It’s hard to find any “unshakable set of principles” in this mess.

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But the biggest fairy tale about Reagan is the most central one: about taxes and spending. It is one thing to sit in a North Vietnamese prison in the early 1970s, dreaming of a California governor who one day will balance the federal budget. It is another to imagine that it actually happened.

When Reagan took office in 1981, federal receipts (taxes) were $517 billion and outlays (spending) were $591 billion, for a deficit of $74 billion. When he left office in 1989, taxes were $999 billion and spending was $1.14 trillion, for a deficit of $141 billion. As a share of the economy, Reagan did cut taxes, from 19.6% to 18.4%, and he cut spending from 22.2% to 21.2%, increasing the deficit from 2.6% to 2.8%. The deficit went as high as an incredible 5% of GDP during his term. As a result, the national debt soared by almost two-thirds. You can fiddle with these numbers — assuming it takes a year or two for a president’s policies to take effect, or taking defense costs out — and the basic result is the same or worse. Whatever, these numbers hardly constitute a “revolution.”

This is a point I made several months ago, about Republicans fetishizing a mythical version of Reagan, one who possessed Solon-like judgment instead of incipient Alzheimer’s, and who practiced Periclean statesmanship instead of crude cowboy interventionism:

Reagan’s foreign policy with respect to the Middle East was extremely confused and ineffective. He led an ineffective intervention in Lebanon which ended in disaster and withdrawal. His administration brokered illegal arms deals with Iran, though the extent to which Reagan was even compus mentos is brought into doubt by Reagan’s later testimony during which it appeared he was unaware of much that was transpiring due to the early onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s. The Reagan administration also gave money and arms to radical Islamists in Afghanistan, much of it to groups which later formed al Qaeda. His administration fostered cozier ties to Saddam’s Iraqi regime as well.

Reagan was popular, and his presidency was regarded as a successful one in large measure, certainly in comparison to the debacle of George W. Bush’s, but it also had marked scandals, its own misadventures, and serious moral failures. Moreover, as Kinsey again points out, it never embodied the specific virtues attributed to it by the clot of dim, fetishistic current GOP presidential hopefuls.

From the Times post-mortem on the Giuliani campaign: For Giuliani, a Dizzying Free-Fall

A curious new vulnerability also arose. As mayor, Mr. Giuliani took much joy in crawling through the weeds of policy debate, flashing his issue mastery. But as a presidential candidate, he as often seemed ill at ease.

Mr. Giuliani once embraced gun control, gay rights and abortion rights; he knew that all of these issues would be a tough sell to Republicans. While he never shifted positions as sharply as Mr. Romney — who renounced his former support of abortion and gay rights — he as often occupied a muddled middle ground that pleased no one.

This became most evident in the first Republican debate. Asked about repealing Roe v. Wade, he was equivocal. “It would be O.K. to repeal,” he said. “Or it would be O.K. also if a strict constructionist judge viewed it as precedent, and I think a judge has to make that decision.”

Later, he said that the decision on abortion should be left to women — but that he would appoint strict constructionist judges of the type who had favored overturning Roe v. Wade.

A strong, decisive leader who pushed a mobbed-up grifter like Kerik for the head of homeland security; the forceful protector against terrorism who sited his command center in an obvious target zone which was instantly decapitated; “America’s Mayor” — but only as proclaimed by the propagandists at FoxNoise; the champion of a women’s Constitutional right to choose who would appoint a hardline ideologue who would abolish that right at the first opportunity. The front-runner without a lead:

Only weeks ago, Mr. DuHaime spoke in a call about the former mayor’s strong lead in those states. “Some of these leads are momentum-proof at this point,” he said.

Mr. Giuliani now trails or is at best tied in polls in all of those states. And soon after that phone call, reporters received a memorable e-mail rebuttal from Mr. Romney’s spokesman, Kevin Madden.

“Mayor Giuliani’s momentum-proof national polling lead, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny all walk into a bar,” it began. “You’re right. None of them exist.”

Rudy Giuliani, the presidential candidate, didn’t really exist either.

It was always a fake, a cardboard cut-out.