Speaking of Anti-Americanism .... D'oh! "I'll miss you, Pumpkins, but I just can't share your bleak world view." —Homer Simpson You have a point; perhaps the accelerated economic grift would have broken sooner and healed faster. Of course, there is no guarantee that we wouldn't rush into another, and, to the other, given the ethical depravity of the Reagan economy, there is very nearly a guarantee that we would have climbed back up the cliff just to jump off again. A few more terms of Reagan, and the country would be completely polarized, with no effective middle class. Look, I know the short-term promises of Reaganomics were tempting, but the long-term outlook has always been bad. I simply cannot understand why people would wish such horror on a society. But, hey, I'm just one of those idiots who thinks twenty-four years is just a bit too long for a president; however one wishes to carve up the terms, I don't think an American president should have more than ten years. While there are certainly times that a steady hand on the tiller would be a good thing for the nation, they are nearly irrelevant compared to the damage an administration could do over the course of a quarter-century. True, in some ways I do miss the eighties°. But I just can't share your cruel world view. Oh, and Marxism is always on the table whether or not people want to admit it. They will only move that direction as capitalism strips any alternatives. Our most recent example is Obamacare, which is actually a case in point insofar as once Republicans denounced their own alternative to single-payer health care as socialist, communist, and eventually fascist, someone needs to remind me why, other than the mere fact of the GOP's existence, we ought to be obliged to take that dung-heap of intellectual failures, psychological basket cases, and general testaments to human atrocity seriously. Twenty-four years of Reagan? Man, you must hate Americans. ____________________ Notes: ° in some ways I do miss the eighties — Icehouse; The Hooters; being young enough to fall in love with every fugly teen sensation from Tiffany to Miyam Bialik to Heather Langenkamp; the Slut Code of General Decency; being able to expect the people around you to understand colloquialisms other than their own; the old-world innocence by which Stephen King's girl-scout jackoff scene in Pet Sematary was actually both risqué and literary; Weird Science; the days when Hollywood went to the effort of writing bad sequels instead of simply remaking the original film; cars with less computing power than a moonshot; combustion engines that achieved thirty-five, or in a couple of cases, over fifty miles to the gallon; Republicans you had to choose to not respect according to your own inclination instead of their constant demand; original Coke; the Second Golden Age of Horror; &c. It is fair to say that of the things about that decade I do not miss, criminals like Ronald Reagan would probably make the premier league selection. Remember that the majority of the cultural decay so many lament through recent decades is a direct result of the capitalistic ethos that found its poster-face in Saint Ronald of Bel-Air. Indeed, hearing the conservatives complain about the pestilent results of their own votes would be funny but for the human price. The bad movies, product-packaged pop music, market-researched politics ... all of it comes from the sickness that is the Cult of Saint Ronald. There are, of course, deeper tragedies than the Look Who's Talking films (say what you want about Amy Heckerling, but what other than craven capitalism could result in the director of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Johnny Dangerously, and European Vacation making three LWT films, an accompaniment television series—with Tony Danza as the voice of the baby—and A Night at the Roxbury?) but they all come back to the same idea. What else but capitalism leads to the idea that government should be run like a business so that—and here's the fun part—we might tell teachers, "Go, show us that you can teach children properly without adequate resources, and then we'll write you the check"? So, no, I don't miss the pusillanimous cruelty of the Reagan years any more than I would miss today's Republican Party after the Apocalypse. Sure, the world might have ended, and the starving survivors writhe in boils and tumors, but at least they won't have to put on the pretense of pretending that Ronald Reagan was a respectable person, or suffer the Republican Party. Certes, 'tis not the best outcome, but if you had to live it, there would be far worse fates to fear. Vanni Fucci is alive and well, and living in Hell.
@ Tiassa, I was too young to know the Affects of Reagan as you see it as I was only a teen while he was in power. I recall being impressed by his Star Wars programs and his tough stance against Terrorists, Libya, Iran Hostages (released as soon as Reagan came), and tough stance against Ar Traffic Controllers. The Point I have been trying to make is that sometimes countries NEED unpopular and expensive avenues to be followed. Americas resistance to Kyoto, etc., is a good example; even though the Clinton Administration was key in its development, and has been championed by then Vice President Al Gore. The Kyoto asks too much of The American People with little reward. The long term offset of Global Warming should be treated with dignity, but it cannot be. Here is the American Cycle. New President comes to office... Then there is 4 years of popular changes with behind the scenes preparation for a second term, because the President wants a second term. Then the second term comes and the people are hit with Tax increases and other unpopular changes because there is no third term. This only allows a President to be a real president for half of his time in office. Maybe 4 terms is a horrible idea as then we would see 3 terms of a president kissing the butts of Americans, and only one term when he can actually be motivated by stuff other than opinion poles. I do not know the solution, but I know Voters will not keep anyone in office who makes hard and expensive moves that are unpopular. It is all about popularity; and that is no way to run a country for a long haul.
Imitation Lice I was seven when he was elected, and there's a story I always tell about what happened to switch on my political conscience. A couple years into his term, Doonesbury checked in with Rick and Joanie Redfern; their son Jeff was perhaps four at the time. In a great testament to hippies surviving through the eighties, the newspaper reporter and lawyer/congressional aide sat together on the sofa, watching betamax video of the Watergate hearings. I forget who, exactly, was testifying, but in the third frame Jeff stops playing with his toys and looks at the television screen. In the fourth, he turns to his parents and says, "That man's lying, isn't he?" Rick does the downward elbow-punch with clenched fist, shouting, "Yes!" Joanie laughs, declaring, "O! fresh eyes!" I actually had a moment like that listening to Ronald Reagan speak; while my father was a Reagan Republican, the man I saw on the television was the antithesis of what we were taught by parents, preachers, and schoolteachers was the behavior of proper citizenship. But, in truth, I suppose I did go over the top a bit. I was originally just trying to exploit the Homer Simpson line, and as my general disagreement with conservatism has grown into a nearly toxic disdain, well, yeah. By the time I got to the eighties footnote I was enjoying myself far too much to stop. My apologies, there. Conservatives right now are charging the line like cannon fodder. There's no sport to hitting ducks in a barrel, or fishing with grenades. But in terms of rhetorical plinking, it's a bummer of a birthmark, Hal; the new party logo seems to be a target. As Bill Maher once put it, no taxes, free beer, and vagina trees. To the other, the solution is difficult to construct and enumerate, though most can perceive it intuitively. Americans are very fixated on marketplace dynamics, which actually serves the point nearly infinitely for the perspiring irony. But it's the same sort of thing as "five hundred channels, and nothing's on". After a while, people come home from work, turn on reality television, watch other people go to work, and call it good television. The underlying idea is that if we stop watching, stop buying tickets, stop merching out, the marketplace will respond by attempting to adjust to demand. At least, that's how it should go in theory. The marketplace has figured out, though, that it can simply weary consumers into dispassionate consumption. It is less expensive for the marketplace to lower the bar than meet its own quality standard. And with consumers, the result is that the cheap and frail become quality because they aren't dirt cheap and worthlessly frail. Applied to politics, obviously it isn't so simple to observe and calculate, but the general outline holds. The people can, indeed, do something about it. Part of the point of a democracy is that it's their responsibility. Doing the right thing over the long run is, for various reasons including the conundrum you consider, not something the consumers want badly enough. In between apathy and open revolution are some pretty obvious fixes, but they require time and effort, and despite being apparent to first glance, difficult to implement. In a collective context, we want these things, but not so badly as to pay market price. I think the only time I would appreciate imitation crab is if they were lice. And some kind of merkin joke goes here, but I haven't devised it yet. I mean, I'm nearly surprised that politicians and rancid fake pubes aren't juxtaposed more frequently in our public discourse.
This reverence to Reagan is almost entirely a WASP construct--which I find fascinating. Also; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–Contra_affair
The Onward March of Future History Looking Back You know, it is bizarre. I mean, Reagan is hardly unique in the symptoms he showed of blueblood passions and interests, but he did sort of become the poster boy. To the other, there are many aspects of old-culture influence that seem to be coming apart; I wonder how history will look on Reagan when another quarter-century has passed.
Honestly, I don't think Reagan fits into the modern diversity of the United States--so I'll safely bet that he fades away, as other Presidents have, before him. I also think that, in the future, there will be a lot more scrutiny held towards past Presidents and the "founding fathers."
I think the Canadian/British system is a little better. It does allow some stronger candidates to be in influence longer. I will likely be crucified for saying this here, but as long as Americans can only do popular things with their tax money then long term needs will be neglected. Maybe Kyoto and Global warming will become an American issue when their crops are all dehydrated in 30 years. This "Iron Lady" ruled Britain for 11 years. Try that Obama... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! She even won a small war.. (no disrespect meant to those who died during it.) C'est la vie.
Which gives us an idea of just how the American voter can be so dumb. How quickly Americans, the majority who don't read and don't listen to those who do, forget the Tea Party that happened even a year or so ago - let alone the generation since the Great Mistake that was the beginning of this Reagan era we're trying desperately to bring to an end. They've forgotten when and where they first heard about K Street, what Star Wars actually was, what the Laffer Curve and the capital gains tax cuts and the S&L fiasco and the SS "deal" turned out to mean for their paychecks and medical bills. We see Republican voters and Republican national pundits complaining about the political influence of fluff-headed actors from Hollywood, with straight faces, in complete and oblivious sincerity. Reagan was a spectacular, gold-plated, televised, sky flaunted, stadium show disaster, a fuckup and an incompetent and an ignorant center of massive corruption, governing in a dream world of stuff he made up. He was the first President (or national politician) to have a published collection of nothing but sincere and serious quotes from him land in the humor section of a bookstore. He appealed to the worst of us, and did them proud. When he was forced to retire he was maybe one term away from accomplishing what his administration - with W as its new titular head - accomplished almost as soon as it next took office: the next Depression, the crippling of American power and authority both moral and economic, on a global scale; the undermining and corruption of everything good about the United States, the burst sewer pipe in the basement of the American Dream. If we had elected Reagan for another term, though, his mental disabilities might have become impossible to continue to hide - which might have brought some folks around to reevaluate what the hell was actually going on under his "oversight". Which would have been a good thing to have happened before Cheney installed a private safe in his official office, right behind the desk across which Spiro Agnew was taking envelopes of cash in that forerunner administration to the glory that was Reagan. How dumb can US voters be? They reelected Reagan.
Sorry. I did not mean to turn this into a hate on Reagan Thread. Cheer up. At least Obama is here. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I thought Reagan was a good president with many significant accomplishments. Didn't Reagan help to end the cold war. The Berlin Wall Fell and Eastern Europe was finally free. The position of the US was as the leader of the free and not so free world. The national debt was less than one year of Obama. The IRS was not being used against the citizens. Reagan stimulated the Star Wars technology of missile defense from which modern GPS would emerge. The nation and economy grew for 8 year. Inflation under the democrats was reversed with interest rates falling from 12-18%. The Gays almost wiped themselves out with AIDS, with hundreds of thousands dying, but Reagan saved them by making it a priority in terms of national health. He reduced the size of the government by eliminating waste.
The sale of arms were being use to buy back back hostages. This action actually turned a profit, instead of running up debt, which may seem alien to liberals who expected waste. Some of the profit money was used to support freedom fighters in oppressive communists countries in central America. The Obama Administration gave guns to drug cartels which then were to used to kill Americans. It was not even for hostages nor did it it accomplish anything other than add to the national debt. These are parallel scandals and notice how Reagan does more with less. Both presidents got harassed by the opposing party but neither got anything to stick since they both were well liked.
Annoying Details That it was specifically illegal to do so, of course, has nothing to do with anything, does it? Right-wing tinfoil conspiracy theories are effective for one thing, and that is clouding the important aspects of virtually any issue they address. Gunwalking didn't originate with Obama. Fast and Furious was a phase of Operation Gunrunner, which opened in 2005. Indeed, the problematic straw purchase operations so infamous in F&F originated in Operation Wide Receiver, which ran in 2006-7. We might note, then, that the practice you have so denounced originated under President Bush's ATF. Additionally, since Carl Truscott's departure in 2006, the agency director has required Senate confirmation. Since then, this has occurred exactly zero times. After Truscott, BATF was entrusted to five different acting directors, including B. Todd Jones, the current interim chief, whose day job is United States Attorney for the District of Minnesota. Among the fascistic power grabs denounced about President Obama's gun violence plan is the idea that he would like to nominate and have confirmed a permanent directof of ATF. Indeed, Senate Republicans are so opposed to having a director at ATF that they are blocking Mr. Jones' nomination to the post. The situation has grown so dire that Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) is preparing legislation to "repeal an appropriations rider banning the attorney general from transferring the ATF’s jurisdiction to another agency". This would allow the Attorney General to fold ATF into the FBI, taking the appointment from Senate confirmation and putting it in the hands of the FBI director. Republicans are hamstringing the agency deliberately. And then they're complaining about a Republican program executed without proper directorial oversight—six directors during the Project Gunrunner fiasco—and trying to blame it on Obama while simultaneously working to keep ATF in existence in order to have something to complain about. Just a few details, you know, that get left out of that right-wing tinfoil fantasy. ____________________ Notes: Yager, Jordy. "Sen. Durbin pressures gun lobby with threat to move ATF authority to FBI". The Hill. June 18, 2013. TheHill.com. June 18, 2013. http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/306089-dem-pressures-gun-lobby-with-threat-to-move-atf
I think he will be remembered in history as the man who set the stage for the destruction of the Republican Party.
Are you aware that there is not even a memo with Adolf Hitlers name on it that connects him to the holocaust. According to your reasoning Hitler had nothing to do with the Holocaust. President Obama is a lawyer and knows where to stand to get away with things. Blame Bush is something the liberals use all the time. Does that make President Bush the Puppet master of President Obama, where anything that Obama gets accursed cannot be due to him, because Bush, pulls all his strings? I thought President Obama had choice and could make his own decisions like transparency but the puppet master must have pulled the strings so he could not act?
If you remember in the last election, strategists tried to make President Obama more like Reagan. The thing about Reagan I remember the most was his ability to work on both sides of the isle. Also if he did not get what he needed he would take his argument to the American people with a good presentation and this would motivate citizens to call their Congressmen and Senators and get them on board.
Dumb enough to vote obama in not once but twice. See these comments as to how Americans are starting to wake up.
