Gin and Tacos

A quote has been circulating around the interwebs and underscoring the fact that the Ronald Reagan that modern conservatives worship to a truly unsettling extent bears little resemblance to the one who was president for eight years. We already know that he raised taxes, spent like a drunken sailor, and believed in separating church and state. Now apparently he had some doubts about military-style weapons being protected under the 2nd Amendment for public consumption:

I do not believe in taking away the right of the citizen for sporting, for hunting and so forth, or for home defense. But I do believe that an AK-47, a machine gun, is not a sporting weapon or needed for defense of a home.

Like their continuous pining for the Disneyland Americana version of the 1950s – the idealized America that never was – modern Republicans are much more enthusiastic about the Reagan in their imaginations than the real one. It's almost like there's a pattern wherein what they choose to believe trumps facts and reality.