It has not been shown to be false, it was simply unable to be proven. There are still witnesses like Barabara Honneger and the former President of Iran who say it did happen.
I’m happy to file this one under the “unproven” category and drop it.
Now, what do you have to say about Reagan selling arms to the enemy?
No, America wanted someone like that, someone to tell it that there was no need to worry, that America was still great, and that it could go on doing what it always did because God was on its side. What it needed was someone with some integrity and a firm grasp of reality. Didn’t get it.
And Curtis - we’ve already gone around once about Clinton and the Cole, and I’ve pointed out to you that the involvement of Al Qaeda was not confirmed until after Clinton left office. I realize that you are insisting that he should have somehow known it was them anyway, but even if the “bomb first, ask questions later” approach hadn’t already bitten him on the ass in Sudan it made all sorts of sense to let the new administration take this forward with solid intelligence rather than order pre-emptive military strikes a week before leaving office, which is poor judgment by any standards. (The new administration, of course, did nothing.)
No, we didn’t. The Republican party wanted someone who could bring them back from the Nixon debacle. They got him, but at the cost of ushering the religious nutjobs into the heart of the party.
America wanted a competent, honest leader. They didn’t get one. Instead they got Ed Meese and James Watt and Anne Gorsuch Burford and Ollie North and etc. etc. etc.
I wasn’t there? I beg to differ.
I think you must be replying to someone else’s post. I didn’t express any particular opinion of Saint Ronnie at all, except, as I did just there, to mock persons for whom nothing negative can be said about his presidency.
You’re a guy who’s very qucik on the trigger to call out people who apparently can’t see the flaws in our current President. Are you perhaps applying a double standard here?
And why, pray, after all these years, why haven’t the Reagan papers been released to historians, and then to us? Decades after the date they were due to be de-classified, we still can’t look at them?
I’m betting Shodan would love to see them released, so he can rub our lefty noses in all the wonderful, wonderful things therein. Me, suspicious lefty that I am, I suspect somebody is hiding something.
Differ with what? Nobody said you weren’t there. I was there.
No, I was replying to yours.
Here’s what you claimed -
Nobody based what they did on the fact that Reagan said everything was fine. They based their opinions of him and their actions on how the US was doing.
I don’t think so. Has Obama triggered the longest sustained peace time expansion of the US economy in history? Has the poverty rate dropped? Has he created a net job increase of 16 million? Has the unemployment rate dropped faster under Obama than it did under Bush? Has real economic growth under Obama been faster than it was under Bush?
Of course it is not fair to compare Reagan to Obama just yet. Only after Obama is out of office will it be possible to compare the two.
OTOH, there are some things, like the deficit, on which we can draw some preliminary comparisons -
Of course, the Reagan deficit peaked at $236 billion. Obama proposes a deficit of $1.58 trillion, or 11.2% of GDP. (Cite). The Obama deficit, in other words, is about six times higher than Reagan’s worst. (Cite.)
Regards,
Shodan
Commander Susan Ivanova. And it failed.
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I’m happy to file this under the “unproven” category and drop it.
Regards,
Shodan
He admitted it, dude. That one is proven.
We need to be scrupulous about our data and methods here. Your comparison isn’t very fair - using nominal dollars without correcting for inflation or GDP/population growth.
Reagan’s highest deficit ran to about 6% of GDP, and the average during his presidency was 4.3% of GDP.
Obama’s deficits are running over 10% of GDP, so it’s fair to say that Obama is running deficits about twice as large as Reagans - not six times as large.
Of course, you could argue that in Reagan’s time the deficits were more justifiable (there was a cold war, and the entitlement collapse was decades in the future, and the absolute debt level was much lower). But the fact is, Reagan ran large deficits - larger than any other President’s up until Obama.
However, I also remember how the left vilified him for it - how he was bankrupting the country, and leaving a ‘legacy of debt’ for our grandchildren, and all the rest. So if Reagan was flawed for creating that much debt, then Obama should be doubly flawed.
Furthermore, you can’t even justify Obama’s deficits in terms of Keynesian stimulus, because he plans to run them long after the economy has recovered (according to his own analysis). Furthermore, the debt is being jacked up to pay for a lot of things that are actually anti-stimulative (i.e. a 35% increase this year to the EPA, which is just nuts).
It’s inane to try to blame the current deficit on Obama when he inherited a near-depression. There was absolutely no way he could have avoided it (thanks in no small part to the enormously expensive, illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq).
This was done for the good of the party, rather than the good of the country. Had Reagan been an honorable and competent president, the Republicans wouldn’t have felt the need to spit in the face of justice like this.
No question he inherited a deficit. A big one. What you can blame him for is whether he’s dealt with that problem responsibly.
If he had inherited a 1.2 trillion deficit, and his budget left behind a 1.1 trillion dollar deficit, I’d be inclined to agree with you. But he’s taken a situation where he’s inherited a dangerously high deficit, and he’s acting like it doesn’t matter at all and he’s piling on to it. That’s irresponsible.
For example, he’s already said that he will renew the Bush tax cuts that impact the middle class - which would be the bulk of them. And in a time when deficits are unsustainable, he’s announced numerous NEW multi-billion dollar spending programs. He’s giving various government agencies double-digit budget increases. He’s increasing discretionary funding by a huge amount. THAT he gets the blame for.
For example, these are some of the discretionary increases in the 2010 budget:
Dept. of State: 40.9%
Dept. of Housing and Urban Development: 18.5%
Dept. of Education: 12.8%
Dept. of Agriculture: 8.8%
Dept of Commerce: 48.4%
Dept. of Labor: 4.7%
Dept. of the Interior: 6.2%
Environmental Protection Agency: 34.6%
Social Security Administration: 10.2%
Corp for National and Community Service: 22.2%
He’s creating a new ‘National Infrastructure Bank’ with a starting budget of $5 billion dollars. He’s also increasing Medicaid by 12%.
THAT he can be blamed for. In an era of unsustainable deficits, he’s dramatically increasing discretionary spending. Not only that, but a lot of his budget increases are going to departments that will actually inhibit growth, because he’s using the money to pay for new regulatory programs to constrain business.
In addition, these are not temporary stimulus expenditures. The way Washington budgeting works, these increases become next year’s baseline. They are permanent budget increases. If they all together amount to 100 billion dollars, that translates to an additional trillion dollars of debt, plus compounded interest, over the next ten-year forecast cycle.
Seems to me he’s acting like getting the economy back on it’s feet after 8 years of Republican misteps is a higher priority for him than paying down the debt immediately. It’s called a long term strategery. Assuming Sarah Palin or her like don’t take over in 2012, it might even work. Historically, the economy responds well to such democrat schemes.
Obama had absolutely no choice but to do what he he did. It would have been irresponsible not to. The next thing he really needs to do is tax the ever loving Christ out of corporations and the super rich. They’ve been getting a free ride for too long, and they caused all these problems in the first place.
Reagan quadrupled the National Debt under his pregnancy.
Funny how whenever we have a Republican President, conservatives always say the National Debt doesn’t mean anything – just a bookkeeping chore. Then when a Democrat gets elected, it’s, “ZOMG, The DEBT!!”
Where was this concern when Bush was in the Whitehouse?
Even under a Democratic president, the GOP’ll vote against actually paying for stuff:
Senate passes pay-go rule on party-line vote
Well had he launched a pre-emptive military strike we might have killed a whole bunch of Al-Qaeda people.
And possibly many more innocent civilians.