President Reagan's Legacy

Rest in peace, Mister President.

http://www.homestead.com/prosites-prs/biasedreagan.html

 

In our family, a part of the legacy is that his twenty years of vigorous and effective campaigning against Medicare (as the anti-Medicare spokesman for the AMA) denied my parents from getting the sort of skilled affordable care from which they would have benefited in their declining years.

 

Indeed!

 

Good stuff Bruce!

You know there are some extremist on both sides of politics that make everything one side verses another. No matter what some of the current wachos are saying about Reagan there is no doubt about what the American people and many people internationally thought about him. If you watched the coverage this week with people lining up for hours to just walk by and pay tribute, or lining up for miles and miles and miles along the highway just to wave or salute the motorcade tells me that he was very well respected and admired by most Americans.

I was just a little too young to vote for Reagan, and got my first chance to vote in 88. The two generations before me were democrats in my family. My grandfather always told me growing up that the democrats were for the little man. He switched and voted for Reagan twice, and then went back to the democratic ticket. Before he died we had many conversations about politics especially during the Clinton years, and he always said that Reagan was his second favorite president behind Kennedy. This from a die hard democrat.

Knowing that even life long democrats liked Reagan makes me see him even more as something special. Though I was young I remember the mood of the country before and after Reagan came into office and it was a big mood swing. I wish his death would cause another mood swing.

 

On the one hand, extremists on the right think that he was the best president ever. On the other hand, extremists on the left think that he was one of the worst presidents. As a centrist, I personally think that he was a good president.

 

Same here with my wife's family. Two SS checks under $2000 a month total barely cover Senior citizens rent + the $700 per month in prescriptions alone and they worked all their lives for 40+ years.

 

Let's hope Bruce doesn't censor this, too.

I wrote the following yesterday... not necessarily intending to post it anywhere. But after reading this thread, I feel I have no choice...



This week has been so distressing for me. Despite my strongly politically-left leanings, I am first and foremost a patriot. So the part of me that respects the office of the Presidency even when it is difficult to respect the man who holds it is genuinely moved by the funeral service that is finishing-up and playing on NPR on the radio on my desk even as I type this. Call me sentimental, but there's just something about the final verse of the Battle Hymn of the Republic that, when done the Marine Corps way, brings a tear.

But the part of me who cannot abide the fundamental mean-spiritedness of the Reagan presidency, and who is old enough to remember well his fundamental lack of compassion so evident to those around him that even his own hand-picked biographer ackowledged it in an interview with CBS television this very week, is irriated beyond my ability to put into words by the revisionist historical public memory, hagiography, and misguided attempts to lionize -- ne, canonize -- this man who, among other things, refused to even utter the word "AIDS," much less fund research into it, for six long years while 23,000 good men and women died before our very eyes.

"Maybe the Lord brought down this plague [because] illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments," Reagan later said of the AIDS crisis in 1989. It was late in 1987 before he finally declared, as if it were his own idea, that he would see to it that AIDS went the way of polio, and he finally stepped-up to the plate and started to do something about it with funds for research and much-needed medical care.

Gone from our memories, it seems, is the fact that Reagan sent American weapons to thugs seeking to overthrow the democratically-elected Sandinista Government in Nicaragua, despite a congressional ban of such weapons transfers. We forget, it seems, the atrocities at El Mozote where some 900 men, women and children whose excavated bones years later bore the skull holes from Contra rifles and the fatal slash marks from Contra machetes. Short is our memory of the US military advisors and CIA agents who organized a fascist government's "death squads" and Contra troops to help overthow the Sandinistas by murdering women, children and even nuns with the help of the very same butchers who were responsible for disappearing over 30,000 leftists in Argentina.

"They are the moral equivalent of America's founding fathers," Reagan said of the Contras in 1985. But, ultimately, some 138 members of his administration were eventually either investigated, indicted and/or convicted of wrongdoing for illegally helping them.

My God.

We seem to ignore the elephant in the room that was Reagan's massive 1981 tax cuts for the rich which effectively redistributed wealth to them from the poor and middle-class, doubling the national deficit and tripling the national debt -- growing said debt at a rate faster than the GDP for the first time in U.S. history -- and turning the U.S. into a debtor nation... all of it causing increased spending during Reagan's frightening 8-year reign by a whopping 80 percent! We reel to this day from his misguided "trickle down" economic manipulations which widened the gap between rich and poor in this country and effectively eliminated the very middle class which keeps its economic fires burning. His policies were the major force for gentrification and displacement of the poor in urban America during the '80s, providing unprecedented tax incentives for real estate speculation that subsequently contributed, along with Reagan's push for wholesale deregulation, to the collapse of our savings and loan institutions, resulting in an unprecedented multi-billion dollar taxpayer bailout of the S&L industry. We seem to just ignore the fact that arm-in-arm with the foregoing, there were more farm failures, bank failures, and bankruptcies during his term of office than ever before... or since.

In our rush to gush over his memory, we forget that Reagan all but killed-off federal housing funding and aid to mental health programs, paving the way for homelessness to remain a persistent problem in America some two decades later.

"What we have found in this country," Reagan said in 1989, "and maybe we're more aware of it now, is one problem that we've had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice."

My God.

Having driven the economy into chaos with his tax cuts and then later justifying huge budget cuts by citing the lack of available funds caused by said cuts; and to the jaw-dropping astonishment of every person -- Democrat and Republican alike -- who had worked so hard for at least three generations to build an impressive body of strong and respected socio-economic programs with verifiably positive track records of success, Reagan pushed shamelessy and unapologetically for the destruction of long-standing federally-funded legal services, arts and humanities, and volunteer programs that had enriched the lives of those empowered, and empowered the lives of those not. Believing that human need was a sign of weakness (or so said his own biographer in that same earlier-mentioned CBS TV interview), while at the same time hypocritically extoling the virtues of "compassionate conservatism," the social programs which Reagan could not kill, he vastly weakened... and they remain so to this day, to the detriment of us all.

Reagan literally knocked into the previous century decades-worth of important labor reforms, and did more to kill the power of unions to protect workers from oppressive employers than any president before or since by single-handedly breaking the back of the air traffic controllers union who were staging a perfectly lawful strike. It has set a harmful precedent for a marked decrease in good-faith collective bargaining ever since. This is a man, we must remember, who held a press conference eating grapes during the UFW grape boycott, calling the farmworkers "outside agitators."

My God.

And Ronald Reagan was was a liar.

"Hollywood has no blacklist," he said in 1960. But FBI records have since shown that he personally informed to the infamous McCarthy hearings on several actors and others in the Hollywood community -- accusing them of being communists and destroying their careers. Those same FBI records show that every last one of the those on whom Reagon informed were innocent. But they never worked in Hollywood again.

"In England, if a criminal carried a gun," Reagan said in 1982, and to the astonishment of every British citizen on the planet, "even though he didn't use it, he was tried for first-degree murder and hung if he was found guilty."

When informed that the story was just not true, White House spokesman Larry Speakes said: "Well, it's a good story, though. It made the point, didn't it?"

Four years later, on March 21, 1986, during an interview with the New York Times, Reagan repeated the lie.

In November 1983, Reagan told visiting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir that he had served as a photographer in a U.S. Army unit assigned to film Nazi death camps. He repeated the story to Simon Wiesenthal the following February. But it was a lie, plain and simple. Reagan was never within a thousand miles of a concentration camp during World War II (except maybe our own in which hapless Japanese-American citizens were wrongly detained). He spent the whole of the war in Hollywood, making training films with the First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Corps.

The list of lies and intentionally-misleading statements from the president who once said, in 1988, "Facts are stupid things," just goes on and on and on and on... too numerous to list here.

I believe Ronald Reagan, when all is said and done, can clearly be shown to have been responsible for more lies, intentional misrepresentations, destruction of programs, blatant illegality, harmful misinformtion, unmitigaged evil, and arrogant social mean-spiritedness than any American of his time, even Richard Nixon... and that's really saying something.

Still, I know this man was deeply spiritual; that he read the Bible with his mother as a child and took to heart its message; that he prayed for his assailant before himself (or so eye witnesses tell us) in the moments before he went into surgery after the unsuccessful attempt on his life in 1981; and that even his most misguided moments were inspired, he honestly believed, by the lesson and example of the Word. All I can think of to even begin to understand it is Lincoln's observation that both the North and the South were praying for victory to the same God and that they both felt certain He would respond in their favor, but clearly only one would prevail and in so doing, be the only side which appeared truly justified. Indeed, how to choose?

On this day that the patriot in me acknowledges should be for honoring a fallen president worthy of the moment by virtue, if nothing else, of the office; and in light of my certain knowledge that we are all -- even Ronald Reagan -- saved by grace alone; and though I know the power of the Lord's forgiveness is greater than our ability to understand it, I nevertheless find myself so uncontrollably filled with hatred for the man, bitterness over his legacy that has left my beloved country so damaged, and deep and abiding anger toward those this week who extol his virtues in wholesale disregard for the facts... those "stupid things."

And I am ashamed.

Indeed, it's been a very rough week. I pray the Lord forgives Ronald Reagan and I trust he has been welcomed into Heaven with trumpets sounding...

...and I pray the Lord forgives me for wishing it weren't so.

 

What Garbage!

 

Is that your best intellectual rebuttal?

 

No, not garbage, not by a long shot. I disagree with most of what was in that post, but it was thoughtful and DesElms courteously waited until the obsequies were finished to post it.

One point where this poster--who is so conservative he tended to think Reagan was, if anything, too far left--agrees with DesElms is on Reagan's callous attitude toward mental health care. So much for "Christian values" toward "the least of these My brethren". A vivid and totally commendable contrast on that issue, by the way, has been steadfastly shown by Newt Gingrich. So it's not a left-right thing at all.

As I say, I disagree with most of the earlier post, but I admire DesElms' unsparing self-examination.

May Reagan rest in peace. Peace to you, too, DesElms.

 

On the other hand, your post on the other thread scolding Bruce and blaming Reagan for AIDS was about as silly as crediting Reagan for "ending" communism. You took the moral high ground and used it to pee on people. If you don't like the atmosphere here, go over to

Why am I posting this on the "wrong" thread? I was emotionally manipulated by your previous post, something that doesn't happen often but which angers me when it does, and I would not care to have my commendation of your above post generalized by you or anybody else into an approval of tearjerking bitchy hysteria, because it isn't.

 

Blame Reagan for AIDS? Is that what you got from that posting? How well did you do on standardized reading comprehension tests back whenever (if ever) you took them?

Reagan was not responsible for AIDS. Rather, it began with man's clear-cutting of African rain forests and driving humans and monkeys and/or chimps into closer proximity with one another so that not only the statistical probability of, but also the marginal propensity for, a virus then living in monkeys and/or chimps being able to mutate so it could also begin to live in humans would be higher. The President had nothing to do with that.

Reagan was also not responsible for AIDS coming to the U.S. Rather, it was brought to the U.S. (or so it is believed) by a French airline steward -- "Patient Zero," as scientists and researchers eventually came to call him -- who was not only HIV positive (having picked-up the virus, it is believed, from either his having had sex with someone HIV-positive during trips to the African continent, or his having had sex with someone HIV-positive from the African continent who traveled to Morocco or France), but was full-blown AIDS symptomatic -- frequented the old San Francisco bath houses, had sex with what some scientists believe were dozens and dozens of gay men there over time, and planted the seeds of the deadly infection with a vengeance. The President had nothing to do with that.

And Reagan was not responsible for AIDS spreading throughout the gay community in the U.S. Rather, it spread at first innocently, between gay men before the virus even had a name and no one knew they were passing anything around back and forth between each other. Even after researchers made the connection between the virus and gay sex, and even after that connection began to become know in the gay community, many gay men were in denial and refused to give up the sexually free lifestyles for which many of them had moved to San Francisco in the first place. Also, the operators of the highly-profitable bath houses were unwilling to acknowledge that their establishments were centers of HIV virus concentration and infection and they were unwilling to close them to help slow down the rate of new infections. The President had nothing to do with that -- in fact, he and countless other conservatives made very clear their categorical disdain for such a lifestyle.

And then there were the blood banks, most of the directors of which simply refused to believe that the AIDS virus could be carried in the blood supply and didn't take adequate measures to see to it that HIV-infected blood stayed out of it. That's how it began to spread to the heterosexual community. Reagan had nothing to do with that, either.

And then there were the IV drug users, who spread the virus to one another by needle sharing -- the primary way that it began spreading to women. Reagan most certainly had nothing to do with that. His admonition regarding IV (or any other kind of) illegal drug use were clear and unambiguous: Don't do it!

But what Reagan did do -- and, though you seem to have missed it, I thought I made this abundantly clear in both postings -- was refuse to even utter the word "AIDS" publicly for six long years. Instead, he considered it (and told others that it was) God's revenge for the despicable gay lifestyle, and he actively stifled all funding for research and medical care. He set the tone. He erected the road blocks. People started dying. By the time he relented and finally declared his war on AIDS, more than 23,000 people were either dead or soon would be. Reagan had everything to do with that. The clear connection between those unnecessary deaths and Reagan's intransigence was made long ago by people a helluva lot smarter than me.

And, yes, I did scold Bruce in that posting... and deservedly so. Or do you think censorship is ever okay? I invite you to go back and re-read that posting and get your mind wrapped around its message independent of anything else I've written anywhere else. That posting stands on its own and its theme is decidedly censorship, which is always wrong, anywhere and any time it happens... and it's difficult to imagine anyone of conscience -- which you clearly appear to be -- arguing, categorically, with the notion of that. The Reagan mention in that posting was supporting documentation to the central censorship theme. To connect that posting with this one by saying that I took the moral high ground here (which you seem to have liked) and then peed (to use your word) on people there (which you clearly didn't) says more about you than me, doesn't it?

And the invitation for me to go elsewhere if I don't like the atmosphere here is eerily reminiscent of the old '70s conservative battle cry (and bumper sticker adage), "America! Love it or leave it!" Debate's okay, I guess, as long as it doesn't rub the wrong way whomever is making that un-American invitation. It was stupid then, in that context, and it's stupid now in this one. And shame on you for saying it. Debate, by its very nature, must have the power to in incense or it's not really debate, is it? Inviting one's debating opponent to leave isn't debate either, Sparky.

Emotionally manipulated? What was it about this posting that made you wish me peace, but about the other posting that made you come back here and call me a manipulator? What, you only respect views with which you don't agree when they're accompanied by just the right amount of introspection, self-deprecation and contrition? I don't agree with the guy, but at least he knew he was wrong and asked God's forgiveness for it so I can extend the olive branch in this case... is that about right? Here you liked me (not because you agreed with my message, mind you, but apparently because I was willing to question myself for expressing it), and over there you didn't agree with my message but it was a dislike that appears to have been exacerbated by your allowing yourself to like me a little after reading the post in this thread. Don't you see the fallacy of connecting them in the first place?

"...bitchy hysteria?" I'm not gay, uncle janko...

...and your homophobic Freudian slip is showing.

 

Gregg....you can't seem to grasp the concept that this is a private message board. Any two-bit lawyer will tell you that the First Amendment does not apply here.

Nothing you've written here has been "censored". Even if it was, there's nothing that you could do about it, other than write another 17-paragraph response.

 

And your accusation of homophobia is a violation of the TOS. Not to mention alleging that I do not know how to read (then I assume you reject my extorted praise of your earlier post) and that my views are unamerican. And as for going elsewhere--do, do go to ............... where spewing about this board is the chief pastime. Know what, you just might find over there that homophobia you're looking for to justify your own, yes, bitchy hysteria and superciliousness toward folks here.

Oh, you're not a good text critic. In your shrill hue and cry over censorship, you--not Bruce the so-called censor--altered my post with your own (though not labeled as such) comment that words had been deleted by someone. I prefer not to advertise the other forum I had in mind, and so omitted its name. Nobody deleted anything.

As for your aspersions on my ability to read and comprehend:
reading knowledge of foreign languages: 10
preaching competence in foreign languages: 3
foreign languages taught by me in RA university: 3
SAT scores: Verbal 800, Maths 650
Cognitive impairment from clubbing assault by neo-Nazis: none
Physical impairment from same: substantial.
Tolerance for defamation in the name of diversity: none.

Take your business to Kinsels. This soda fountain's closed.

 

Source please?

 

The "source" is probably that crappy alleged biography starring James Brolin.

 

AIDS Lie

As Deroy Murdock proved in an excellent National Review piece, President Reagan mentioned AIDS publicly in 1987, and he said the word five times in his 1986 State of the Union Address.

And a Congressional study found that the government spent almost six billion dollars on AIDS during President Reagan's tenure.

 

http://bush-zombiereagan.com/faq/

 

John,
Up until now I thought you were a person of class...guess that presumption is out the window.

 

DIRTY LIE!

From a DIRTY LIAR!

7.8 BILLION DOLLARS FOR AIDS RESEARCH, to be exact during Reagan's presidency.

Reagan haters HAVE TO RESORT TO SLANDER TO "MAKE THIER POINT."