Just in case ya'll didn't know

[The Jays]

Ronald Reagan is dead.

[Black Lazerus]

Just in case ya'll didn't know.... The Jays is an idiot.

[Arpikarhu]

good riddance to that moron

[Galt]

edgy

[The Jays]

i dont understand why we need 24/7 coverage of this. I don't recall this much being done when Nixon died.

Why is this shit such a surprise? he's dead, he started dying 10 years ago.

I suppose we need a whole week of Reagan tributes; that way, everyone can bash him without looking insensitive

[Black Lazerus]

I think Bush killed him to get some sympathy votes.

[diceisgod]

He skipped out on a helleva bar tab. In the trillions.

[GonzoStyle]

Now we can hear a million times over on how great a president he was by people who were hysterically happy when he got shot and were pissed when he survived, hated him for all he stood for and couldnt wait for him to get out off office.

ofcourse now hes dead so he's a legend and a "beloved figure"

[TheGMANN]

The same will happen when you die too

[GonzoStyle]

Yeah but it would be all true in my case... right!?!?!?!?

[Black Lazerus]

.......

[Goatweed]

.......

^^^what he said^^^

[Sir O]

He was a great president...at least, compared to our current leader.

Somehow, in little more than 200 years we've risen from colonial states to the leading, and temporarily only, superpower. Yet out of our 43 leaders, only a handful have approached anything close to greatness, and Reagan certainly isn't one of them.

I'm certainly glad I don't watch TV news anymore. The deification of a man who sold arms to terrorists would be enough to make me puke.

[GonzoStyle]

He was a great president...at least, compared to our current leader.

Compared to Bush well duh, Warren G Harding was a great leader and inspirational american if you compare him with Bush.

Funny you mention the whole iran-contra deal, when CNN first started reporting on his death about 30 mins in they did a whole bio on him that lasted about 15 mins.

They spent more time talking about the fuckin knute rockne film than they did on iran-contra, they kinda skip past iran contra like basically saying "whoops oh well shit happens and move on".

[Galt]

How can you debate the fact that when Reagan entered office the country's economy was in shambles, the Soviet Union was a superpower, and the rest of the world laughed at us.

Then Reagan came, the economy boomed for 20 years, America became true supreme lord and master of the planet, and was a personality that people truly loved.

Now, there are many who hated him, as well at the time, but by and large, he was an incredibly popular president at the time, was a great speaker, had the witty soundbites that people liked.

The deficts grew, no question. Some blame him, some blame Congress. The rest of the world might not hold us in high regard now, but during the 80s our opinion in the international community skyrocketed, and the economic and technological growth during the 80s and that which grew off the base from the 80s was unprecidented.

To say that he was not a great president is just irrational and not based in any fact.

If you don't measure the greatness of a president by his ability to be loved by the populace, allow the economy to prosper, and have amazing success in foreign policy, then by what measure do you use?

By that argument, many could say that Clinton was a great president, and those three things are exactly what people cling to when saying that Clinton is a great president. It's a realistic statement. I don't know if Clinton was a great president (lying to congress and being in the rite place at the right time mitigate it a bit) but I would never be so foolish and blinded by politics to say he was a horrible president.

There is no rational argument that can be made that he was anything but a great president.

I'm glad he's dead. I get Friday off.

[Sir O]

I'll repeat: Reagan was not a great president. He sold weapons to terrorists.

At one point Reagan tried to cut federal funding for school lunches for the poor. He tried to have ketchup reclassified as a vegetable to save money. Senator Heinz gave a speech against this move. He said that ketchup is a condiment, not a vegetable, and that he should know.

Reagan took a "blame the victim" approach to the AIDS crisis. His inability to come to terms with the horrible human tragedy here, or with the emerging science on it, made his health policies ineffective and even destructive.

Among his achievements in office was to break the air traffic controllers' union. It was not important in and of itself, but it was a symbol of his determination that the powerless would not be allowed to organize to get a better deal. He ruined a lot of lives. I doubt he made us safer in the air.

In foreign policy, Reagan abandoned containment of the Soviet Union as a goal and adopted a policy of active roll-back. Since the Soviet Union was already on its last legs and was not a system that could have survived long, Reagan's global aggressiveness was simply unnecessary. The argument that Reagan's increases in military funding bankrupted the Soviets by forcing them to try to keep up is simply wrong. Soviet defense spending was flat in the 1980s. I won't argue that Reagan may have hastened the demise of the Soviet Union, but in doing so he left us with defecits that we'll be paying interest on for decades.

Reagan also had a hand in creating al-Qaeda. Yes, it's true! By the mid 80s, Reagan was giving them half a billion dollars a year. His officials strong-armed the Saudis into matching the US contribution, so that Saudi Intelligence chief Faisal al-Turki turned to Osama bin Laden to funnel the money to the Afghans. Even the Pakistanis thought that Reagan was nuts, and balked at giving AQ ever more powerful weapons. Reagan sent Orrin Hatch to Beijing to try to talk the Chinese into pressuring the Pakistanis to allow them to receive stingers and other sophisticated ordnance. The Pakistanis ultimately relented, even though they knew there was a severe danger that al-Qaeda would eventually become a security threat in their own right.

Now, let's go a little more in-depth on the whole "selling weapons to terrorists" issue. Reagan's officials hated the Sandinista populists in Nicaragua. Congress cut off money for the right wing death squads fighting the Sandinistas. Reagan's people therefore needed funds to continue to run the insurgency. They came up with a complicated plan of stealing Pentagon equipment, shipping it to Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, illegally taking payment from Iran for the weaponry, and then giving the money to the guerrillas in Central America. At the same time, they pressured Khomeini to get US hostages in Lebanon, taken by radical Shiites there, released. It was a criminal cartel inside the US government, and Reagan allowed it.

At the same time they were supplying Iran with weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, they also turned a blind eye to Saddam's use of chemical weapons. Reagan's secretary of state, George Schultz, sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad twice, the second time with an explicit secret message that the US did not really mind if Saddam gassed the Iranian troops, whatever it said publicly.

Reagan's policies have directly resulted in the problems we face today - namely, Islamic terrorism and proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. There are also indications that he was beginning to suffer the effects of Alzheimer's disease long before he left office. In 1987, testifying before the Tower Commission, he was asked why his more recent testimony seemed to contradict earlier statements he made. Reagan consulted his notes, looked up and said with a straight face, "If the question comes up at the Tower Board meeting, you might want to say that you were surprised."

Ironically, Alzheimer's could be cured potentially by stem cell research. In the United States, where superstition reigns over reason, the religious Right that Reagan cultivated has put severe limits on such research. His best legacy may be Nancy Reagan's argument that those limitations should be removed in his memory.



Edited By Sir O on 1086625913

[Keyser Soze]

sir o for president!

[Sir O]

Too many skeletons. I'd be Karl Rove's wet dream come true!

[Keyser Soze]

karl rove is a genius. too bad the mainstream ignores what he writes and laps up whatever USA Today spits out to them.

[Sir O]

A genius? I suppose. He's mastered the art of dirty campaigning; his ability to use even the positive qualities of his opponents against them is almost unprecedented. During the 2000 Presidential primaries, he discovered that John McCain had adopted a Bangladeshi orphan. Rove used this as a basis for one of his famous "push-polls" where potential voters were asked the question, "If John McCain fathered a black daughter out of wedlock, would you be more likely to vote for Bush?"

Crafty sonofabitch. Nothing illegal about it, nothing that could technically be called a lie, but fuck if it isn't dirty as hell.