An Internet hub with domestic and international news, analysis, original reporting, and popular features from the left, center, indies, centrists, moderates, and right
Remembering Ronald Reagan’s 99th Birthday
9 Responses to “Remembering Ronald Reagan’s 99th Birthday”
I never really considered Reagan much of a President, nor much of an actor for that matter.
American's are ticked about unemployment, not rallying around Hayek. Punditry these days is 90% fantasy and 10% reality.
He is dead, and if it is a life after this one he will spend eternity being tortured by the South American left-wingers whom he unleashed oppression and fascism on. End of story.
“American's are ticked about unemployment, not rallying around Hayek”
Well, doy. Perhaps you weren't around in 1980 – we were “ticked” about the same thing. In my hometown in 1980, unemployment was well into double digits (the '80's were terrible times in farm country).
“he will spend eternity being tortured by the South American left-wingers whom he unleashed oppression and fascism on”
Actually, his approach did more than anything to bring a functional democracy to El Salvador.
“End of story”.
That's not really as effective a debate tactic as you might think.
Thanks for the link, Joe!
“The kindest thing you can say about Reagan is that he may not have known what the policies of his administration were, but I’ll pretend he did. The Reagan years were a period of devastation and disaster in El Salvador. Maybe seventy thousand people were slaughtered. The decade began with the assassination of the archbishop. It ended, rather symbolically, with the murder of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, by an elite battalion, trained, armed and run by the United States, which had a long, bloody trail of murders and massacres behind it.”
Like all people who do not hate Reagan, you know nothing outside what the MSM told you during his administration. You will not speak of South American-US relations and history again until you are more learned on the matter.
Everyone probably knows my opinion of Reagan by now. He was a self-confessed traitor to the United States, who delayed the release of American hostages so he could sell weapons to our sworn enemy Iran. In violation of a law he himself signed into law, he diverted the ill-gotten gains of his treason into the “Contra” fiasco, a terrorist faction we paid, trained and armed, to terrorize a neighboring country and overthrow its democratically elected government.
On the home front, he tripled the national debt. TRIPLED IT. He ushered in the “borrow and spend” era and the end, to this day, of fiscal conservatism by so-called “conservatives.”
His lofty rhetoric convinced people of the need to spend lavishly on the military to beat “the evil empire” but never bothered to suggest we actually PAY for what we think is so vital and urgent. No, instead, he falsely sold absurd concepts like reducing taxes would increase government revenue and other elements of what GHW Bush called “voodoo economics.”
I don't like to speak ill of the dead because it offends those who loved him, but I abhor revisionist history like the crappy article on Hot Air.
Hi there Axel
Please read the commenter's rules at the top of the home page. TMV commenting rules support debating, discussing, teaching the facts 'on the topic' of the article with as much passion as one cares to. But, TMV wont support attacking other commenters, putting them down, ad hominem attacks, or telling them they ought not comment in a civil manner until or unless they agree with someone else.
Just generally to all commenters: This is a place to debate to your heart's content, but with civility.
Thanks.
dr.e
deputy managing editor, TMV
GreenDreams, I agree. Axel, it is hard to be civil when discussing Reagan; I sympathize.
This article is baloney. He was a terrible president, putting us in debt for unnecessary military spending while the USSR was already self-destructing. Then there is the shameful pandering over the hostage situation. Just because he was popular, he was a great man? What does that make Michael Jackson?
I think RR's conflicting actions and speech, and the double-think people had to employ to praise his presidency, drove me away from the Republican party (and gave me my pessimistic side of politics) more than anything else.