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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
sysprog
Published Letters: 2957 Editor's Choice: 2
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/2006/1/2006_1_50.shtml
My Years with Ronald Reagan
. . . He was capable of simplifying ideas to the point of dumbing down the national dialogue by deftly confusing fact and fiction. He made politics, and governing too, into a branch of his old business, entertainment.. . . With conservatives denouncing Reagan for selling out — his friend George Will accused him of losing the Cold War — the President and the General Secretary gambled their political futures (and their countries’ too) on their personal relationship. Conservatives, the ones attacking him in 1987 and 1988, now assert that Reagan won the Cold War all by himself.
. . . He imagined a flag-snapping American future and to an amazing degree made it happen. He did have a strategy. Asked before he was President, when he was attacking “détente” and “containment” as strategies for dealing with communism and the Soviet Union, he was saying, in private, that his real strategy was only four words:
“We win. They lose.”And that’s what happened, though he did not reach that imagined end all by himself, as his champions now claim in printing after printing of hardcover hero-worship. “Nor should Reagan’s admirers claim that without him the collapse of communism would never have happened,” editorialized The Economist on the week of his death in June 2004. “It would have collapsed anyway . . . ”
. . . Amazing things, good and bad, happened in the 1980s because President Reagan wanted them to happen. Reagan’s ignorance of detail and his many blunders did not fundamentally change the way people felt about him as a leader. His personal popularity remained remarkably high in the years after the recession of 1982, even though a majority of Americans disapproved of his driving the country deep into debt, fighting little wars in Central America, secretly selling arms to Iran, and refusing to acknowledge the lethal spread of AIDS.Reagan was the candidate of optimism and national destiny, saying, as he always had, that Americans were God’s chosen, the last best hope. Through good times and bad for eight years, according to Gallup polls, he was the most admired man in America. He had a 63 percent approval rating when he left the White House, higher than any popular Presidents in the last half of the century, including Dwight Eisenhower (59 percent) and John F. Kennedy (58 percent). Among Americans between 18 and 29, Reagan’s approval rate was 87 percent. There were statistical debates about whether he had realigned the country’s political structure in the manner of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but there was no doubt that he had established the Republicans as the country’s governing party. There is also no doubt that many Americans paid a high price for President Reagan’s certainty. None of us can be certain of the “opportunity costs” of Reaganism; the money going to tax breaks and defense may have cost decades of lost opportunities for better education and health care. The rich got richer, and Reagan told them they deserved it. The poor got poorer, and he told them it was their own fault.
For American conservatives he had become what Franklin Roosevelt had been for liberals. FDR, larger than life. Indispensable. Almost all the people I interviewed as I worked on the book said they considered Ronald Reagan a great man. He was a heroic figure, if not always a hero. Many of them had worked for him, of course, but adversaries had stopped laughing at the question. One of those adversaries, Robert Rubin, Secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton, was not smiling when he told me: “Reagan is above the debate for them. It is like reciting Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book. He is like a religious figure. They have to hold him up as an icon to preserve the agenda, to protect the ideology.” And so they do, writing books, renaming airports, and building statues. They keep the faith. Returning to the White House on March 30, 1981, the day President Reagan was shot, Vice President Bush said it all: “We will act as if he were here.”
- - Richard Reeves
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62544-2004Jun22
When George W. Bush's inaugural parade passed the Riggs branch on Pennsylvania Avenue, he spotted Allbritton and said,"Hey Joe, how are you doing?"
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28396-2004May14.html
President Bush's uncle, Jonathan J. Bush, is a top executive at Riggs Bank, which this week agreed to pay a record $25 million in civil fines for violations of law intended to thwart money laundering.
Riggs Bank laundered money for the Saudis, for Pinochet, for African dictators . . .
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
