posted on June 7, 2004 10:16:33 PM new
This is for all the people that didn't like Reagan.
REAGAN'S LEGACY: UNFETTERING AMERICA
Mackubin Thomas Owens, writing in National Review Online:
“In 1980, the United States was in trouble. Malaise was in the air. President Carter could not govern, despite having a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. The U.S. economy was stagnant and beset by a variety of other problems, including soaring inflation and high unemployment, something conventional Keynesian macro-economic policy and the Phillips Curve said was not supposed to happen. Because inflation was well into double digits, interest rates were sky-high as well. Having dishonorably abandoned South Vietnam only five years earlier, U.S. influence abroad was at its nadir while Soviet adventurism was on the rise. The "correlation of forces" certainly seemed to favor the Soviet Union.
“The key to Mr. Reagan's success in ending American malaise and thereby changing the course of the world can be found in a famous 1953 essay by the British philosopher, Sir Isaiah Berlin. In that essay, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," Berlin categorized writers, thinkers, and human beings according to the dictum of the Greek poet Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."
“Ronald Reagan was a hedgehog. The one big thing that Mr. Reagan knew was that the United States was a fundamentally decent regime that constituted the only hope for freedom and prosperity in the modern world. He knew that the "idea" of America was undermined at home by a shift away from individual effort and liberty to a reliance on government and that it was undermined abroad by the ideology of Communism. The focus of his presidency was to unfetter America. The preeminence of the United States today is a tribute to his success.”
posted on June 7, 2004 10:22:17 PM new
I have one more. I am sure the fab 5 or so will have some negative comments to make but it is the american way and whether we like it or not that is the way it will be so be it. We will never see eye to eye with everyone.
REAGAN TRIBUTES
Some notable remembrances....
Andrew Sullivan: "I'll write more tomorrow. He was the greatest president since FDR, a man who did more than restore America's self-confidence and defeat the great lie of Communism. He re-conjured our understanding of the central, animating role of liberty in human affairs. He saw that what was strangling America was the suffocation of big government and high taxation; he paid respect to religion but never turned Republicanism into what it is today - a repository for sectarian scolding; he saw that the use of military force was sometimes necessary to defeat tyranny; and that the greatest weapon against the creeping march of cynicism was self-confidence and optimism. With Margaret Thatcher and Karol Wojtyla, he changed the course of world history for the better. He was the towering figure of my adolescence, a beacon of hope in what was a brutally debilitating time. I'll be lucky if I live to see another political leader of his stature, grace or fortitude. May he rest in the peace he brought to so many others, and in the joy he so richly deserves.
"It takes time to recognize greatness and it sometimes appears in the oddest of forms. A B-actor from Hollywood, a cold fish, a man unknown even to his own children at times, a hack-radio announcer for General Electric, and easily the finest president of the last fifty years. When he dies, this country will go into shock. For Americans know in their hearts that this unlikely man understood the deepest meaning of their country in a way no-one else has done for a generation. He gave them purpose again, and in return they still give him love. For what it's worth, let me now add my own." - from my appreciation of the great man in 2001.
posted on June 7, 2004 10:26:23 PM new
I'm much more interested in who the "Fab 5" are since I haven't heard that expression coined here before. Will you name them for me?
posted on June 7, 2004 10:50:09 PM new
I mean where you said this:
I am sure the fab 5 or so will have some negative comments to make but it is the american way and whether we like it or not that is the way it will be so be it.
So I want to know who the "fab 5" are and if you will name them for me.
posted on June 8, 2004 04:29:58 AM new
Reagan was no more than a cartoon character or sitcom star featured at the Whitw House.
He tried to start the economy by reducing taxes on the wealthy and disenfranchising the poor. Then he spent money and put us in debt like a 17 year old girl in a Mall with daddy's credit card.
Our grand children will be paying the debt that Reagan and now Bush Jr ran up.
posted on June 8, 2004 07:11:30 AM new
No reamond, not unless your version of false history is tought to them.
In Christ,
Rick
Genesis 1:1
"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I do not accept His claim to be God." That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic....or else he would be the devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
C.S. Lewis: "Mere Christianity"
posted on June 8, 2004 07:52:57 AM new
false history...heh, that's a good one
___________________________________
When a dog howls at the moon, we call it religion. When he barks at strangers, we call it patriotism. - Edward Abbey
posted on June 8, 2004 08:20:07 AM new
Kiara I miss counted I should have said FAB 7, it was not made in reference to the "GUY" and if you took it that way I am sorry, but I do watch them and they have a class act.
posted on June 8, 2004 04:24:27 PM new
Unwilling to Play for Less Than Total Victory
Posted June 7, 2004
By Rod D. Martin
It was fashionable for a time to consider Ronald Reagan a warmonger and a fool. Perhaps this is the best indicator of his Chuchillian stature; for like Reagan, Churchill was so maligned, and like Churchill, Reagan saved the world.
The left, of course, credited Gorbachev for this, which resembled nothing so much as crediting Hitler's suicide for the end of World War II. Reagan's victory -- and the fact that we are not now speaking Russian or buried ala Khrushchev under a smoldering ruin -- was produced of a vision shared by no president before him, and a fortitude possessed by few.
He refused to accept the left's received wisdom of "moral equivalence" between the Communist East and the democratic West: he called Russia the "evil empire" it was, and revived the moral courage essential for victory. His opponents, lesser men from Michael Dukakis to Michael Foot, hurled their epithets: "dangerous," "destabilizing," "cowboy." But Reagan understood the real danger was in a nuclear superpower bent on world conquest and in the throes of both economic and ethnic collapses its Western apologists refused to see.
He repaired a nuclear "deterrent" so badly eroded as to lack credibility and invite blackmail. Side by side with Margaret Thatcher, he stood down the left's greatest-ever attempted appeasement -- the nuclear freeze movement -- and not only rearmed America but re-established the deterrent in Europe. The Soviets, playing off the terror of the times, threatened to walk out of stalled arms talks if he did so. In a move which stunned everyone, he wished them fond farewell. He would not be bullied; and when they realized it, they returned.
His certainty that people everywhere yearned for freedom and that free markets could always out-produce centrally-planned slavery drove his strategies where realpolitik could never go. He replaced both containment and détante with his "Reagan Doctrine," proclaiming America would actively roll back its foe by helping freedom fighters behind the Iron Curtain. From World War II until Reagan, not one square inch of ground had been recovered once lost to communism. Now all things changed, as Moscow was made to play defense, first in Grenada and Afghanistan, and ultimately from the Berlin Wall to the USSR itself.
Unwilling to play for less than total victory, he went for the Russian jugular. Realizing that over half of all Soviet hard currency came from the export of oil he cut a deal with Saudi Arabia: weapons and other benefits previously unavailable, in exchange for an oil glut which would buoy the West and skewer the common foe. Combining this with an arms race, the keystone of which was the high-tech Strategic Defense Initiative, he pushed Moscow over a cliff his opponents said could not be there. Gorbachev, coming in much too late after a string of dead General Secretaries, was left first to "restructure," then to dismantle his empire, and finally just to "wither away."
This is Reagan's greatest legacy, but it is hardly his only one. His supply-side faith in Laffer's lower marginal tax rates ignited a twenty-year boom in an America used to every-three-year recessions. His vision for tax-deferred retirement accounts transferred the "means of production" to the "proletariat" and destroyed the basis for class warfare: shareholders, a tiny fraction of the population in 1980, today are a large majority. The wealth his ideas created drove a technological boom unlike any the world had ever seen, and convinced billions previously susceptible to socialism that freedom really works.
It is there that Reagan's greatness really lies. To a bleak Orwellian world, he restored hope; and the chance not only that there would be a next century, but that it would be a good one.
This article was originally published in Britain's Freedom Today. Rod D. Martin is founder and chairman of Vanguard PAC. A former policy director to Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and special counsel to PayPal.com founder Peter Thiel, he is a member of the Board of Governors of the Council for National Policy, a vice president of the National Federation of Republican Assemblies, and author of the forthcoming Visions of America. Click here to visit the Vanguard PAC Website.
"The Secret Service has announced it is doubling its protection for John Kerry. You can understand why — with two positions on every issue, he has twice as many people mad at him." —Jay Leno
posted on June 8, 2004 04:39:38 PM new
Planet Reagan
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 07 June 2004
Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death
- e.e. cummings, "Buffalo Bill's Defunct"
Ronald Reagan is dead now, and everyone is being nice to him. In every aspect, this is appropriate. He was a husband and a father, a beloved member of a family, and he will be missed by those he was close to. His death was long, slow and agonizing because of the Alzheimer's Disease which ruined him, one drop of lucidity at a time. My grandmother died ten years ago almost to the day because of this disease, and this disease took ten years to do its dirty, filthy, wretched work on her.
The dignity and candor of Reagan's farewell letter to the American people was as magnificent a departure from public life as any that has been seen in our history, but the ugly truth of his illness was that he lived on, and on, and on. His family and friends watched as he faded from the world of the real, as the simple dignity afforded to all life collapsed like loose sand behind his ever more vacant eyes. Only those who have seen Alzheimer's Disease invade a mind can know the truth of this. It is a cursed way to die.
In this mourning space, however, there must be room made for the truth. Writer Edward Abbey once said, "The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak the plain truth. The critics will not understand you; the public will not believe you; your fellow writers will shake their heads."
The truth is straightforward: Virtually every significant problem facing the American people today can be traced back to the policies and people that came from the Reagan administration. It is a laundry list of ills, woes and disasters that has all of us, once again, staring apocalypse in the eye.
How can this be? The television says Ronald Reagan was one of the most beloved Presidents of the 20th century. He won two national elections, the second by a margin so overwhelming that all future landslides will be judged by the high-water mark he achieved against Walter Mondale. How can a man so universally respected have played a hand in the evils which corrupt our days?
The answer lies in the reality of the corrupt society Abbey spoke of. Our corruption is the absolute triumph of image over reality, of flash over substance, of the pervasive need within most Americans to believe in a happy-face version of the nation they call home, and to spurn the reality of our estate as unpatriotic. Ronald Reagan was, and will always be, the undisputed heavyweight champion of salesmen in this regard.
Reagan was able, by virtue of his towering talents in this arena, to sell to the American people a flood of poisonous policies. He made Americans feel good about acting against their own best interests. He sold the American people a lemon, and they drive it to this day as if it was a Cadillac. It isn't the lies that kill us, but the myths, and Ronald Reagan was the greatest myth-maker we are ever likely to see.
Mainstream media journalism today is a shameful joke because of Reagan's deregulation policies. Once upon a time, the Fairness Doctrine ensured that the information we receive - information vital to the ability of the people to govern in the manner intended - came from a wide variety of sources and perspectives. Reagan's policies annihilated the Fairness Doctrine, opening the door for a few mega-corporations to gather journalism unto themselves. Today, Reagan's old bosses at General Electric own three of the most-watched news channels. This company profits from every war we fight, but somehow is trusted to tell the truths of war. Thus, the myths are sold to us.
The deregulation policies of Ronald Reagan did not just deliver journalism to these massive corporations, but handed virtually every facet of our lives into the hands of this privileged few. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat are all tainted because Reagan battered down every environmental regulation he came across so corporations could improve their bottom line. Our leaders are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the corporations that were made all-powerful by Reagan's deregulation craze. The Savings and Loan scandal of Reagan's time, which cost the American people hundreds of billions of dollars, is but one example of Reagan's decision that the foxes would be fine guards in the henhouse.
Ronald Reagan believed in small government, despite the fact that he grew government massively during his time. Social programs which protected the weakest of our citizens were gutted by Reagan's policies, delivering millions into despair. Reagan was able to do this by caricaturing the "welfare queen," who punched out babies by the barnload, who drove the flashy car bought with your tax dollars, who refused to work because she didn't have to. This was a vicious, racist lie, one result of which was the decimation of a generation by crack cocaine. The urban poor were left to rot because Ronald Reagan believed in 'self-sufficiency.'
Because Ronald Reagan could not be bothered to fund research into 'gay cancer,' the AIDS virus was allowed to carve out a comfortable home in America. The aftershocks from this callous disregard for people whose homosexuality was deemed evil by religious conservatives cannot be overstated. Beyond the graves of those who died from a disease which was allowed to burn unchecked, there are generations of Americans today living with the subconscious idea that sex equals death.
The veneer of honor and respect painted across the legacy of Ronald Reagan is itself a myth of biblical proportions. The coverage proffered today of the Reagan legacy seldom mentions impropriety until the Iran/Contra scandal appears on the administration timeline. This sin of omission is vast. By the end of his term in office, some 138 Reagan administration officials had been convicted, indicted or investigated for misconduct and/or criminal activities.
Some of the names on this disgraceful roll-call: Oliver North, John Poindexter, Richard Secord, Casper Weinberger, Elliott Abrams, Robert C. McFarlane, Michael Deaver, E. Bob Wallach, James Watt, Alan D. Fiers, Clair George, Duane R. Clarridge, Anne Gorscuh Burford, Rita Lavelle, Richard Allen, Richard Beggs, Guy Flake, Louis Glutfrida, Edwin Gray, Max Hugel, Carlos Campbell, John Fedders, Arthur Hayes, J. Lynn Helms, Marjory Mecklenburg, Robert Nimmo, J. William Petro, Thomas C. Reed, Emanuel Savas, Charles Wick. Many of these names are lost to history, but more than a few of them are still with us today, 'rehabilitated' by the administration of George W. Bush.
Ronald Reagan actively supported the regimes of the worst people ever to walk the earth. Names like Marcos, Duarte, Rios Mont and Duvalier reek of blood and corruption, yet were embraced by the Reagan administration with passionate intensity. The ground of many nations is salted with the bones of those murdered by brutal rulers who called Reagan a friend. Who can forget his support of those in South Africa who believed apartheid was the proper way to run a civilized society?
One dictator in particular looms large across our landscape. Saddam Hussein was a creation of Ronald Reagan. The Reagan administration supported the Hussein regime despite his incredible record of atrocity. The Reagan administration gave Hussein intelligence information which helped the Iraqi military use their chemical weapons on the battlefield against Iran to great effect. The deadly bacterial agents sent to Iraq during the Reagan administration are a laundry list of horrors.
The Reagan administration sent an emissary named Donald Rumsfeld to Iraq to shake Saddam Hussein's hand and assure him that, despite public American condemnation of the use of those chemical weapons, the Reagan administration still considered him a welcome friend and ally. This happened while the Reagan administration was selling weapons to Iran, a nation notorious for its support of international terrorism, in secret and in violation of scores of laws.
Another name on Ronald Reagan's roll call is that of Osama bin Laden. The Reagan administration believed it a bully idea to organize an army of Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. bin Laden became the spiritual leader of this action. Throughout the entirety of Reagan's term, bin Laden and his people were armed, funded and trained by the United States. Reagan helped teach Osama bin Laden the lesson he lives by today, that it is possible to bring a superpower to its knees. bin Laden believes this because he has done it once before, thanks to the dedicated help of Ronald Reagan.
In 1998, two American embassies in Africa were blasted into rubble by Osama bin Laden, who used the Semtex sent to Afghanistan by the Reagan administration to do the job. In 2001, Osama bin Laden thrust a dagger into the heart of the United States, using men who became skilled at the art of terrorism with the help of Ronald Reagan. Today, there are 827 American soldiers and over 10,000 civilians who have died in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a war that came to be because Reagan helped manufacture both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
How much of this can be truthfully laid at the feet of Ronald Reagan? It depends on who you ask. Those who worship Reagan see him as the man in charge, the man who defeated Soviet communism, the man whose vision and charisma made Americans feel good about themselves after Vietnam and the malaise of the 1970s. Those who despise Reagan see him as nothing more than a pitch-man for corporate raiders, the man who allowed greed to become a virtue, the man who smiled vapidly while allowing his officials to run the government for him.
In the final analysis, however, the legacy of Ronald Reagan - whether he had an active hand in its formulation, or was merely along for the ride - is beyond dispute. His famous question, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" is easy to answer. We are not better off than we were four years ago, or eight years ago, or twelve, or twenty. We are a badly damaged state, ruled today by a man who subsists off Reagan's most corrosive final gift to us all: It is the image that matters, and be damned to the truth.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/060704A.shtml
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
William Rivers Pitt is the senior editor and lead writer for t r u t h o u t. He is a New York Times and international bestselling author of two books - 'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and 'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.'
posted on June 8, 2004 05:47:34 PM new
Thanks Helen..I really enjoy reading WR Pitt, and often forget to go look at his page. I've always liked listening to Reagan's speeches, the man really knew how to do it. Pat Buchanan is much the same. A great speaker in my opinion, whether you agree with him or not. Needless to say, I rarely do.
Reamond, I guess I missed the parts about Reagan in the bible
___________________________________
When a dog howls at the moon, we call it religion. When he barks at strangers, we call it patriotism. - Edward Abbey
[ edited by profe51 on Jun 8, 2004 05:50 PM ]
posted on June 8, 2004 08:09:03 PM new
Not Even a Hedgehog
The stupidity of Ronald Reagan.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, June 7, 2004, at 10:03 AM PT
Neither a fox nor a hedgehog
Not long ago, I was invited to be the specter at the feast during "Ronald Reagan Appreciation Week" at Wabash College in Indiana. One of my opponents was Dinesh D'Souza: He wasn't the only one who maintained that Reagan had been historically vindicated by the wreckage of the Soviet Union. Some of us on the left had also been very glad indeed to see the end of the Russian empire and the Cold War. But nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.
Ronald Reagan claimed that the Russian language had no word for "freedom." (The word is "svoboda"; it's quite well attested in Russian literature.) Ronald Reagan said that intercontinental ballistic missiles (not that there are any non-ballistic missiles—a corruption of language that isn't his fault) could be recalled once launched. Ronald Reagan said that he sought a "Star Wars" defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R. Ronald Reagan professed to be annoyed when people called it "Star Wars," even though he had ended his speech on the subject with the lame quip, "May the force be with you." Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars. Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the "End Times" foreshadowed in the Bible. In the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan told Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal, on two separate occasions, that he himself had assisted personally at the liberation of the Nazi death camps.
There was more to Ronald Reagan than that. Reagan announced that apartheid South Africa had "stood beside us in every war we've ever fought," when the South African leadership had been on the other side in the most recent world war. Reagan allowed Alexander Haig to greenlight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, fired him when that went too far and led to mayhem in Beirut, then ran away from Lebanon altogether when the Marine barracks were bombed, and then unbelievably accused Tip O'Neill and the Democrats of "scuttling." Reagan sold heavy weapons to the Iranian mullahs and lied about it, saying that all the weapons he hadn't sold them (and hadn't traded for hostages in any case) would, all the same, have fit on a small truck. Reagan then diverted the profits of this criminal trade to an illegal war in Nicaragua and lied unceasingly about that, too. Reagan then modestly let his underlings maintain that he was too dense to understand the connection between the two impeachable crimes. He then switched without any apparent strain to a policy of backing Saddam Hussein against Iran. (If Margaret Thatcher's intelligence services had not bugged Oliver North in London and become infuriated because all European nations were boycotting Iran at Reagan's request, we might still not know about this.)
One could go on. I only saw him once up close, which happened to be when he got a question he didn't like. Was it true that his staff in the 1980 debates had stolen President Carter's briefing book? (They had.) The famously genial grin turned into a rictus of senile fury: I was looking at a cruel and stupid lizard. His reply was that maybe his staff had, and maybe they hadn't, but what about the leak of the Pentagon Papers? Thus, a secret theft of presidential documents was equated with the public disclosure of needful information. This was a man never short of a cheap jibe or the sort of falsehood that would, however laughable, buy him some time.
The fox, as has been pointed out by more than one philosopher, knows many small things, whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn't like him all that much. He met his second wife—the one that you remember—because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see. Year in and year out in Washington, I could not believe that such a man had even been a poor governor of California in a bad year, let alone that such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His latest book, Blood, Class and Empire, is out in paperback.
posted on June 9, 2004 06:40:13 AM new
Nice graph... however if you noticed where they upward trend started... Carter, and where the downward trend started Reagan and so on and so on... same with Ford, however he was not elected
I wished you would of carried it out further so we could of seen the upward trend at Clinton's end of office...
Yes Democrats are great at taking credit for something they did not start... but when they ruin a good thing... it is the Republicans fault... gee...
