Quoting Ashcroft doesn’t even make much sense wrt Reagan. Ashcroft was just a State Attorney General in 1980, and wasn’t a national politician (Senator) until 1995.
During the Reagan years Reagan’s advisers ran the country. We did not have a president. We had a presidential committee. Reagan was not even in charge of the committee. He was an amiable front man who needed to be told what to say and where to put his feet.
In his book The Triumph of Politics: How the Reagan Revolution Failed David Stockman, who was Reagan’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget from 1981 to 1985 wrote on page 76 “It was evident that [Edmund] Meese was the acting President.”
So what? Our GDP is huge compared to any other single country. We also emphasize having a capable military, something the EU obviously doesn’t (and, frankly, leaves mainly to us to carry the water). China’s GDP is not even half of ours, and they have further to go to get their military up to snuff (and, IIRC, spend a higher percentage of their GDP on the military than we do, even if that is a lot less in absolute terms because their GDP is so much less than ours).
Probably not, in the long term. Sort of like the social program spending of many European countries, IMHO. In the end they will have to cut back (already are in some cases) and so will we. What we really need is to define a realistic mission for our military so we can optimize our spending on what we need. IMHO of course.
-XT
Maybe not, but he was responsible for being a candyass while our guys where held captive. Had he taken a harder line and been willing to go to war, either our guys would have been home sooner or maybe Iran would not be the rogue nation it is today. That was a great opportunity to send an unmistakable message–one does not fuck with Americans. Instead, the message sent was more like–America is a paper tiger.
It didn’t need optics or lasers he said this:
There were non-optical technologies (like Daniel O. Graham’s “High Frontier” proposals, which he’d already published in popular book form by this time) that qualified as “new technologies”, but , since there was nothing significantly “new” about it, his speech hints that this was some non-ballistic technology – particle beams, lasers (which were much in the news – Reagan’s speech wasn’t the “starting gun” for anti-ABM laser weapons) and other, more exotic technologies (like plasma systems)
So you are wrong =-- in thinking that Reagon explicitly mentioned laser weapons. We now know that, in fact, Edward Teller’s “Excalibur” program of nuclear-pumped laser weapons was one of the catalysts for this speech. At the time, we didn’t know exactly what he had in mind (and I suspect he didn’t either), but lasers were clearly in the running.
Reagan doesn’t get enough credit for bringing the religious right into the center of the Republican tent.
Without Reagan, Huckabee and Palin would be political nobodies, not frontrunners in the 2012 GOP presidential race.
Edmund Morris? I’d really like to read a Reagan bio written by Edmund Wilson, though.
Darn, I’m having Iraq Invasion flashbacks here. Worked like a charm that thing.
By the way, how does the Iran-Contra affair stand in that curious world view?
+1
Particularly the part about restoring hope after Carter. The mood of the country changed dramatically over night. It was really pretty amazing.
He wasn’t a “candyass”. He authorized Operation Eagle Claw to get them ouit It’s certainly not his fault that the helicopters ran into a sandstorm.
The enduring legacy of Ronald Reagan was to leave most Republicans with the delusion that they can have the government they want without paying for it.
During the campaign of 1980 Reagan said he could cut taxes, raise defense spending, and balance the budget by 1983 “if not sooner” without cutting middle class entitlements. It was not true, but most Republicans thought it was, and still do. That delusion has lead to the increase to the national debt which makes it difficult for President Obama to deal with the Great Recession.
It was his fault for sending them in when they weren’t up to snuff training or equipment wise, and the general lower preparedness of our military at that time was certainly something he had a non-zero amount of complicity with.
Regardless, he got the rap. He was in charge. Had it been a huge success he certainly would have gotten the credit, no? And he would have deserved the credit about as much as he deserved the blame.
-XT
If Carter had invaded Iran the hostages would have been killed. The occupation of Iran would have been at least as expensive and frustrating as the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Look, I won’t say anybody else was to blame for Ronald Reagan’s final drug-tailspin, but I still have respect for him. Considering his age, he really was the hottest – certainly the most charismatic – male porn star of the 1970s. And equally memorable in gay and straight performances.
Yes, I know, go away. This is the timeline I prefer to live in, thank you very much.
At least. Iran is five times as big as Iraq.
Well, he was great for wealthy white guys. If you were a minority (welfare queen!), middle class, poor, black South African, or Central American, you may view his legacy differently.
You can use a person’s nostalgic esteem for Ronald Reagan as a reverse barometer for intelligence. Reagan was a reasonably competent cermonial head of State. He could give some nice line readings if a space shuttle blew up. When it came to actually running the country, he was an unmitigated disaster. His policies led to a decimation of the middle class which has never recovered, an adminsitration of record breaking corruption (with more than 100 indictments, arrests and investigations), the fostering of terrorist regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan (something Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda all have in common - they were all supported by Ronald Reagan), and was the only POTUS to commit treason while in office by trading arms to a sworn enemy of the United States (after that enemy had supplied the weapons to kill more than 200 US Marines in Beirut) in order to illegally fund a secret terrorist insurgency in South America, then lied through his teeth about it on national television.
Trickle down economics was a sham and a fraud that stopped the rise of the American middle class and began the economic class regression that we’re still dealing with now.
He had no major accomplishments, but I give him credit for raisng taxes (the biggest tax hike in US history - good on him), for giving amnesty to illegal aliens and for putting pro-choice nominees on the Supreme Court. Other than that, he sucked and his image as a great President is so much revisionist moonshine.
I voted for the bastard, by the way.
Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy, by Will Bunch, is worth a look.
Just for the record, Reagan had absolutely nothing to do with the collapse of the Soviet Bloc.
Absolutely nothing? He had zero effect? Seriously, or are you being hyperbolic?
-XT