Letters to the Editor
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HUH?
Anyone claiming to be a liberal historian needs to hang up their credibility if they think Reagan did anything but suck...I remember eight years of living hell under this man. It was RAY GUN who thought up the assinine Star Wars idea, who had idiots working for him galore (sound familiar?), who created mass genocide in several Central American countries (Iran Contra, anyone?), who did NOTHING to stop the spread of AIDS, who built an economy of McJobs and a growth in bloated military spending and the blighting of minorities in cities succumbing to crack...no, the delusional notion that Reagan was this sunny figure as painted by nuts like Peggy Noonan means Reagan does suck, always has and always will.
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Right, Pancho!
The Gipper
Ronald Reagan was a lot of things. He was above all a fraud. He was a coward, a war criminal, a hypocrite, a bigot, a crook, a rapist, a dim wit, a turncoat, a scab, a war monger, a liar and a traitor. He was all of these things.
There was not one God damn good thing about him.
-- pancho
You hit the nail on the head...my Mother, God bless her soul, despised the man...railed at him every time his wizended old puss came on TV. I love Bette Davis' wonderful assessment of him on Johnny Carson, emphasizing his name as "LITTLE Ronnie Reagan..." Bette was like that, could reduce you to nothing with one inflection, and RAYGUN certainly was a nothing.
OH BTW: Thanks to RAY GUN we have airline service that stinks and awful right wing talk radio and no equal time on TV anymore. This ass hat ruined airline and broadcast media...
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Europe is dead?!
Excuse me, but did I read this right? A letter writer, Ghingis Can, compares the U.S. to Europe and concludes of the latter:
'For the first time in 400 years nothing new, either technological or cultural, has come out of there. They have a declining birth rate and are quickly living off of the last of the capital they had built up for centuries. It is a good place for freeloading hippies to loaf around but they are doomed.'
My response, even if I wasn't an American living over here in this thriving environment in which to raise children, is this: have you, at the very least, noticed the exchange rate of the plummeting dollar to the robust Euro lately? Get your facts straight before you make such preposterous claims!
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I remember those days, too
As other commenters have said, Reagan didn't end the Cold War, he just took credit for it. (Like Clinton taking credit for ending the Bosnia war, which he didn't do either.) West German television which familiarized people on the other side of the Iron Curtain with the Western style of life, did more than US policy ever did.
Reagan's foreign policy was downright scary, he went from one extreme to the other, one day nuclearizing Europe (against which I was an activist at the time), the other day promising total disarmament on the basis of hard-to-verify Russian promises... but in those days the US Senate didn't just roll over for the president, and capable people like Sam Nunn and Al Gore managed to keep the lid on the pressure cooker.
Reagan's main claim to the history books could have been his turn-about of Carter's unpublicized but successful Latin America policy. Under Reagan, the US which had started to look friendly once again became a bogeyman, but a worse one than ever. However Carterism won out in the end and Latin America, for all the Bushies' meddling, is largely democratic today. Another claim to history might have been bankrupting the US government, but that was ultimately preempted by the information revolution and Clinton/Gore fiscal discipline. So what remains is the cultural counter-revolution of which he was no more than a symbol.
All that being said, there were times I almost liked the guy. Like when he reacted to rightwing whining about campaign hits by saying, "If you don't like boxing get out of the ring." Or when he defended Jesse Jackson, who had just returned from Lebanon where he had negotiated a hostage's release, against the shilly criticism of the right, with the words "You don't argue with success." Yes, I remember the exact words. Unlike Bush, Reagan had an independent streak and, at those rare moments when he took the trouble to be informed, something like a heart.
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Lest we forget
This is the man who routinely fell asleep at his own staff meetings and was so shallow that his own biographer couldn't get a handle on him. He was divorced, knocked up his girlfiend whom he later married, and was estranged from his children, despite running on a family values platform. The man had the biggest deficits in our history to build a Star Wars system that still doesn't work.
No one ended communism. It ended itself; Reagan was merely sleeping in the White House when it happened.
The right has built him up as a paragon, rewriting history in the process. I'm waiting for the book that shows Reagan as he really was.
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"When did Reagan stop sucking?"
Never; and forever will, him and his kind will be remembered as the ones that set America on it's self-destructive mode. does any one even remember the Hostages? and how he negotiated the prolongation of their captivity, the man was a traitor.
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Let me get this straight
According to the article:
Ronald Reagan didn't completely suck because he altered America's culture in such a way as to allow the current administration to come to power and drive America into a depression while fighting two wars and turning the media into its personal propaganda whore.
So in effect: Because Reagan managed to suck long past when he died, he doesn't entirely suck?
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Drug smuggling operations - bush clinton bush reagan.
Iran Contra - drugs for weapons - brought in to homestead airforce base - christic institute and pbs frontline.
after that shipment point was blown the operation was moved to mena arkansas, which brightstar is aware of, although i am pretty sure he knows nothing about oliver north running the operation out of the white house basesment. bush was glad to see his business partner elected because he knew he wouldn't be impeached or prosecuted and then clinton got a raw deal but it was over sex and not the ddrug smuggling operation. naturally the presidency had to be handed over to another bush to keep the racket safe and secure.
What are they flying into the Mena Arkansas Airport?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=mena+drug+smuggling&spell=1
The government is organized crime.
TSA painted airplane registered to the same address as the CIA flight school that trained the "terrorists" was busted by the Mexican Army with 5.5 tons of cocaine in black suitcases labeled private and just a couple of years earlier, John McCain used the same plane for his Presidential bid. The mainstream media didn't touch that story. The pilot, aka Jack Bauer, got away because the Mexican Army doesn't arrest CIA agents. The copilot and crew were less fortunate.
Of course, Brightstar cannot see any criminality among his republican idols. I guess he doesn't know that the Clintons are republicans. Most democrats are.
The only reason we invaded Afghanistan was to get the opium growing again.
Everytime one of our Dips flies over and comes back there is more cheap heroin on the streets.
Situation perfectly normal.