It’s been 100 years since President Reagan’s birth, and this is a big deal for some people. Why?
This is the man who presided over the largest upward transfer of wealth in our history. He took credit for the changes in the U.S.S.R. without evidence that he had a thing to do with them. He compared Central American fascists to our Founding Fathers. He ran up a bigger deficit than the cumulative total from Washington to his presidency. He spent at least the last two years of his presidency in a mental fog. He governed by slogan and anecdote. More than twenty years after his presidency we still have not fully recovered from his economic policies. We’re supposed to celebrate this?
I am not a fan of Ronald Reagan, but many Americans loved him because he made them feel good about themselves and their country. Even Obama admires him for that.“At a time when our nation was going through an extremely difficult period, with economic hardship at home and very real threats beyond our borders, it was this positive outlook, this sense of pride, that the American people needed more than anything,” Mr. Obama wrote.
ReplyDeleteThis was a time in my like when I really did not have a great interest in politics. Perhaps the one thing that I liked about Reagan was how he pushed for our Military buildup. As a former Air Force veteran I have always been pro military. I do believe that is a big reason for the changes in Russia and Eastern Europe. It has made a lot of people free of Domination by regimes. Reagan came across as an everyday type of guy. People related to that. He did work across the aisle. I could go on and on. That's enough said.
ReplyDeleteRight now I'm reading "Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future" by Will Bunch. It's amazing what the right chooses to forget about Reagan. If he was President today, the current right wing of the Republican party would disown him. He raised taxes, had face-to-face diplomacy talks with the "enemy," Gorbachev, worked for nuclear disarmament and passed an immigration bill which included amnesty for undocumented residents, among other things. How this idea that Reagan was the father of modern conservatism ever got its foothold I have no idea, but clearly it is history re-written.
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