cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/ … index.html
Never loved the man’s politics, but he certainly had a winning personality, was steadfast in his support of Taiwan, and his policies deserve some credit for winning the Cold War
June is turning out to be a sad month. Tiananmen anniversary, Reagan dies, D-Day anniversary. . . .
RR seemed to be a swell guy, but I hated his politics. I hope Nancy has a peaceful old age. She deserves it - living with Alzheimers sufferers is a stressfull, discouraging, sad experience.
Sorry to hear Reagan died but America deserved a much better leader than that man. Reagan made it fashionable to look down upon the poor, and according to most historians I have read, he really didn’t own an original thought in his head. As a matter of fact, he was simply a masterful “talking head.”
Well, I gotta’ give the man some credit for “looking” like a great leader. Who would have ever thought that the same man who did such a “wonderful” acting job in many lousy movies could have done such an Academy Award level performance when he got into the White House?
grandfather dies, father dies, son dies. such is the preferred sequence. may we all be so fortunate to live as long as he did.
You might want to read some more on the subject.
Reagan, in His Own Hand will show that the 40th president knew far more than some people have given him credit for. It collects Reagan’s recently discovered writings from the late 1970s, when he delivered more than a thousand radio addresses. He wrote about two-thirds of these himself, in longhand on yellow legal paper. “In writing these daily essays on almost every national policy issue during the 1970s, Reagan was acting as a one-man think tank,” suggest the editors. This edition reproduces everything faithfully, right down to the spelling mistakes and crossed-out words. And it offers a compelling look at the ideas and principles that animated one of the most important Americans of the 20th century. In one address, Reagan describes his contribution to a time capsule: I wrote of the problems we face here in 1976–The choice we face between continuing the policies of the last 40 yrs. that have led to bigger & bigger govt, less & less liberty, redistribution of earnings through confiscatory taxation or trying to get back on the original course set for us by the Founding Fathers…
The last time I voted in a US presidential election was in 1984 for Reagan, and I was not a republican.
(He was simply the right man for the job.)
Why are so many Americans under the assumption that Ronald Reagan was responsible for the Soviet collapse?
[quote]"For decades, we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children’s future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals.
You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we are not bound by that same limitation?" Inaugural address, Jan. 20, 1981 [/quote]
Ahem.
“American” does not automatically equal “Republican”.
Republican-Americans believe this. Other Americans do not hold this belief.
Personally I think that while his pressuring may have hastened Gorbachev’s urgency to reform, the U.S.S.R. would have collapsed no matter whom was Prez. R.R. was just in the right place at the right time.
Because of his relationship with Gorbie.
Ronald Reagan was a standup guy of the old school. They don’t make them like that anymore.
RIP
The collapse of Soviet Communism and Maoism had nothing to do with Reagan’s cold warrior steadfastness though. It was simply a consequence of the succession of power from a generation of Bolshevik zealots who guarded their power and privilege with paranoid intensity to a generation of younger leaders who had no intention of perpetuating the pointless austerity of totalitarianism.
Nothing more complicated than that.
the people of eastern europe generally credit reagan for an intrumental role in the collapse of the soviet union. and they would know more about this topic than you or i.
We credit him or the collapse of the Soviet Union because he took this as his main goal, he laid out a plan to do it, went ahead with his plan, and the USSR collapsed. True, it might have been a coincidence.
I also agree that it would have eventually collapsed anyway, sooner or later. Reagan hastened its demise.
Why did communism also collapse in China? Why does it survive in North Korea and ninety miles off the coast of the U.S. in Cuba?
When Castro dies, what are the odds that his Soviet-style Marxism will survive intact in Cuba?
Reagan was not in an arms race with China at the time. He was not trying to cause the collapse of the country of China. He was trying to use the economic power of the States to force the USSR to spend itself to exhaustion, and collapse. Hey, it seems to have worked. Cuba, China and North Korea were not superpowers engaged in a cold war with the USA; the USSR was.
Yet communism also collapsed in China at precisely the same time the old guard of Maoists yielded power to the next generation of leaders.
I would celebrate no-one’s death, but neither will I mourn for Reagan’s passing. His comment of “They that live in sin shall die in sin” for those with Aids can never be forgiven.
And then there are the south american murders he helped back, etc etc etc. Just another president puppet figurehead run by Wall Street, oil, chemical/pharmaceutical, military interests and so on.
Well, in that case, you should blame the assholes at CBS for faking the quote. Reagan never said it; it was something the screenwriters made up.
Here, you can even read about it from a source you’ll love, dipshit:
glaad.org/media/newspops_detail.php?id=3518
did reagan take russia down, hollywood style? of course not. did he exacerbate their problems, making the course they were following physically and mentally more untenable? of course. who is to say what would have been the result of a more accomodating, “moderate, sensible” policy? hit him with all the tired cheap insults if you will but you have to give him his credit.