Letters to the Editor
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@red_gti2000
"No. That means that if Hillary isn't the nominee I'm voting for McCain"
All the government paid cyberwarrior trolls say that. It is in the "Above All" playbook.
Real Hillary Clinton supporters will vote for Cynthia McKinney because she is a woman.
How much are you paid to post crap like that? 80K?
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Apparently no one remembers Jimmy Carter
I sure do. My recollection is that he was quite like most of the Salon crowd - preachy, nagging, hectoring and ultimately doing his best to convince the American people that we deserve less. He (and many of you) seemed profoundly embarassed to be American. Hey, maybe he and his supporters had every right, what do I know? What I do know is that no average citizen wants to be talked down to like that. Like it or not, Reagan inspired us to believe that we are fundamentally a good people and a good country. He LIKED this country, and he never apologized for it. This crowd probably doesn't realize it but most people in this country feel the same way. That's what always kills me about the Salon bunch - they profess that they are the true American patriots while despising 80% of the people who live here. Reminds me of an old "Peanuts" cartoon. Linus says "I love mankind - it's the people I can't stand". That attitude is a sure-fire loser in this country, at least. Just ask Jimmy.
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Mystifying
It really seems as though you're saying that because Reagan was successful at doing vile things, he was OK. Seems a strange point of view.
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Jimmy Carter
That was the last time i felt like I was living in a free country. That was the last time I felt like I was living in America.
He wasn't evil. He wasn't a criminal. He wasn't a traitor. He didn't wipe his bottom with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
No wonder they hate him so.
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Yes, Reagan DID completely, totally, absolutely suck.
I don't give a crap what we are "fundamentally" - I care how we, as a country, act.
And I go much further than liking my country: I love it. I love it enough to be embarrassed by it when we act like less than what we are.
While Reagan was in office, we acted like jerks.
We were the sanctimonious pastors preaching eternal damnation for gays while snorting meth of a male prostitute's ass on weekends.
That's not goodness or hope or positivity or "optimism": that's the kind of hypocrisy that RUINS faith and hope, that creates generations who cynically distrust authority.
I was a punk kid in the 80's, and we were nihilists BECAUSE of Reagan.
Because we saw him smiling on TV, then watched the steel mill close.
Because heard him telling us it would "trickle down" while we died of dehydration.
Because he told us it was morning in America and then closed the blinds on us.
Anything hard or negative or cynical you hear in my world view or idea of America is directly a result of growing up under Ronald Reagan.
So thank him for any angry mid-30's liberals whose knuckles you may rap today.
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The Editors Choice...
...posters said it so very well, especially Ben Sen and AJCalhoun.
Reagan's One Big Thing, ending Communism was something he did NOT do, nor did his friend the Pope, my religion. Communism collapsed of it's own weight and that was due to the fact that the American people taxed themselves to produce a military that the USSR could no longer financially support. So the American people ended Communism. Reagan, the Pope and their brethren Jerry Falwell had nothing to do with it.
Reagan was a skunk for so many reasons, which have been enumerated by other posters.
He gave America what is killing us now, the Neocons and the Theocons. He was nothing but a showman an actor, but he was good at that. The Rethugs want another like St. Reagan but the prez that they would most like to have a beer with is merely another 'front man' and a shill for the Cheney/ Rumsfeld/. Rice/ Powell/ Bolton/ Rove conspiratorial cabal that has done what may yet prove to be irreparable damage.
St. Reagan was no saint and far from it. He was a wolf in sheeps clothing, a Trojan horse, a Trojan whore. He was the beginnig of Fascism in America with his unregulated/deregulated commerce, his passion for predatory business practices of let the business world 'inspect and regulate themselves'. The sleeping prez gave us dead nuns in El Salvador and another nun tortured, raped and filmed by the CIA. and they were missionaries, no threat to anyone. And their Iran-Contra horror sold drugs into the L.A. area; how is that for Pro-Life and Family Values.
No, I'm sorry, I cannot buy or accept Dr. Wilentz's thesis except and only in the most narrow sense that Reagan sold America on what Barry Goldwater started, namely, in the total selfishness of Conservatism.
America has been suffering from what Reagan wrought, and their is no end in sight. These people have their teeth in the throat of America and like the dogs that they are willl notlet go.
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Reagan, the Republican who was a Democrat
Essentially, Reagan "Democratified" the Republican Party. The iconic Democrats of the Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy era were optimistic, big-spender fans of war and imperialism, whereas the Republicans tended towards paranoia, isolationism, tight budgets and hard money. For most of that era, the Bible-beaters and snake-handlers, as well as blatant Southern racists, were on the Democrats' plantation. Nixon began the transformation of the Republican Party, but his personal failings laid him low, and it was up to Reagan to finish the work and triumph. Under Reagan, Republican government learned to be a big daddy who knew how to throw money around, took over and extended the vast imperial project started by Truman and Acheson, and sucked in the backwoods fundamentalists (without giving them anything), leaving the real Democrats nothing but the ever unhappy and resentful Negroes, intellectuals, big-city hipsters and the State of Vermont. (There had to be some kind of outgroups for Reagan's tribalistic working-class followers to define themselves against.)
Of course every victory has within it the seeds of its own destruction. Reagan's and the Republicans' historical nemesis is George W. Bush, who took Reagan's "ideas" -- better call them instincts -- and drove them all over the cliff. But that's another story.
You traditional Democrats -- when you look at Reagan, you should say, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."