They’re full of shit. Who do they think they’re kidding? Everyone in the US knew long before he left office.
Reagan used to tell an anecdote to illustrate the importance of telling the truth. It was about an incident that had occurred at his high school when he was young where an athlete had inadvertently commited a foul which had not been seen by the official. But the athlete realized the value of honesty so he reported his foul to the ref and as a result their team lost the game.
Reagan told this story many times and some people noticed that the details changed. So they checked back and found out that the event had never actually happened - Reagan had just made up the story to make a point. A point about the importance of being scrupulously honest. And he fabricated the story.
That was the day irony died.
That was Reagan. He didn’t understand the difference between appearance and substance. It wasn’t that he thought appearance was more important than substance - he thought appearance was substance. If you said something and it sounded convincing then it was true. He put Tinkerbell politics into the mainstream and convinced people they no longer had to accept unpleasant realities.
Just out of curiosity, how the hell could you go out looking for evidence of leftist vitriol towards Reagan during the 1980’s and come back with a photograph of wacko fringe right-wing extremists protesting at Reagan’s funeral in 2004?
Did you find it on a website that explicitly misidentified it, or did you just google “Reagan protesters” and grab whatever came up without looking closely at it?
Sure, as I’ve noted, there were a lot of people who thought he was a fairly stupid, very ignorant, insincere, jingoistic, anti-intellectual, misguided, duped and dangerous amiable old guy. But that’s not the same thing as being viciously hated and demonized, the way that many folks on the right viciously hate Clinton and Obama or many folks on the left viciously hate Nixon and Cheney.
Your efforts so far to support your contention that there were a lot of American leftists during Reagan’s presidency who viewed him as “evil personified” have been fairly feeble, to say the least.
That’s exactly what I did. I googled “Reagan Protests”, clicked on Google Images, and it was on the first page. I should have looked closer.
I was there. I was very active in politics at the time. I remember the protests, the nuclear freeze marches, the ‘evil Reagan’ puppets, the “Ronnie Raygun” taunts. I was in college when Reagan was shot, and heard plenty of “I hope they killed the old bastard” comments. Granted, those particular comments were mainly from Canadians on campus, but there was plenty of similar sentiment on the left in the U.S.
Reagan was hated by many on the left before he even took office, because he busted up student protests at Berkeley as Governor of California.
Frankly, I think Liberals in general have been backing away from how much they hated Reagan ever since he died, because they know that this is not the opinion shared by the vast majority of Americans, and becaue history has shown Reagan to have been a pretty good President. So there’s some revisionism going on here.
In my memory, Reagan was hated with a passion by the left. George Bush I, not so much. He was considered to be kinder, gentler and smarter than Reagan - and got extra props for having attacked Reagan pretty hard when they were both running for the presidential primary. The key criticism against Bush I was eventually that he was old, rich, and out of touch with the people, and a relic of the cold war. People wanted change and elected Clinton, but there were really no hard feelings for Bush. So if you had said that the left didn’t really hate Bush I, I’d agree. But man, a lot of them really, really hated Reagan. Probably more than they hated Bush II.
By the way, have you been reading the Reagan thread? It seems that a lot of that hatred is still around.
And what evidence have you presented for your contention? My opinion comes from the fact that I lived through the era and remember it well. I was very active politically, had subscriptions to a lot of popular and obscure political journals, and followed the debates as closely as possible. And, I was on campus. I saw the protests, I remember the anti-Reagan handbills, and all the rest.
Unfortunately, this was before the internet era, so it’s not as widely documented as events since have been. But I know what I saw.
Your memory does not match mine. I was actually in the United States for most of Reagan’s Presidency. Were you? There was disagreement, yes, anger, yes, a few tepid protests, yes, but the kind of viciousness we see in modern politics just wasn’t there then. Nobody’s backing away from anything, and history isn’t vindicating the guy. The only revisionism has come from the right.
Most of the anti-Reagan sentiment was expressed satirically, but his visibly declining mental faculties tempered the anger because it was generally asumed that he just wasn’t in the loop for most of the rampant crime going on in his administration.
The fact that your memory includes his ‘visibly declining mental faculties’ makes it suspect. I’ve already posted links to many doctors who have examined hours upon hours of his later speeches, interviews, writings and press conferences, and found absolutely zero evidence of Alzheimers.
Reagan’s speech to the RNC in 1992 - four years after leaving office - shows him still mentally sound. He was actively riding horses and working his ranch after he left the White House, and suffered a brain injury in a fall off a horse in 1989, yet still seemed to have all his faculties at the 1992 convention. He wrote his own memoirs after leaving the White House. He wasn’t diagnosed with Alzheimers until 1994 - six years after he left office. You claim that signs of Alzheimer’s were visible in his 1984 debate, ten years earlier. Your claims are not credible.
Here’s a transcript of Reagan being interviewed by Jim Lehrer in 1989, after he left office: Reagan Interview. Does that sound like someone who is into his 7th year of Alzheimers?
I do recall one of the memes of the left being that Reagan was stupid and senile. So I’m sure that every time he had a moment of forgetfulness or hesitated over a word it went into your ‘senile Reagan’ mental file. But there is no evidence that you are right, and much evidence that you are wrong.
There’s a difference between the general and the specific, and between what someone will say publicly for the record and what they’ll say when their guard is down.
I don’t care what his doctors said. The public saw what it saw. It was already a well-established, and widely believed meme that he was going senile well before he left office. His sputtering senior moments did not go unnoticed or unremarked upon, and the announcement that he had Alzheimers was about as shocking as the announcement that Clay Aiken was gay.
No problem - if you move south, there is a job waiting for you at FOX news.
Seriously, this is how ideological based talking points get started. An innocent grab for information that turns out to be totally incorrect… and then it gets repeated as gospel truth by others, either innocently or not so innocently as the case may be…
Reagan was allowed to answer a narrow area of questions when he gave press conferences. When he went off subject, his handlers were scared about what he might say. They used to grab his elbow and drag him off. After his days were over ,several of his staff members admitted he was showing signs of Alzheimers during his presidency.
Oddly, during the Iran Contra hearing the whole staff suffered from memory problems.
Absolutely true. Which I why I said I need to be more careful about that stuff. Of course, the reason I wasn’t was because of confirmation bias - I knew what I knew, and therefore didn’t look as closely as I should have when I found evidence supporting it.
Both sides are guilty of this, and it’s one of the reasons I post on the SDMB despite the general hostility of this place to my side. Peer review is always a good thing.
I hope you realize that both sides of the debate are equally susceptible to this - it’s not a ‘Fox News mentality’. It’s just that on a message board dominated by the left, such errors on the left tend to be missed - because of that same confirmation bias.
Fox News Mentality is a willful, and reprehensible act that is seen by many more eyeballs than any left leaning message board.
Boy, you folks have been busy!
Some of the posts made me think, which is always good.
I’m starting to wonder about her resigning from the Alaska Governorship. I don’t know who her “handlers” are, but this may have been a strategic move to get her out of a position in which she would not command any national spotlight… so now she is out “writing” a book, “stumping” for the tea party, (for $100K, no less), and doing whatever else pays.
I am also starting to wonder if our collective intellectual snobbery is coming under fire. There are more idiots out there than we care to admit. They are out there, and she is talking to them. What is more frightening to me is that they seem to be listening. She has crib notes on her hand? So what? Who hasn’t done that to get through an exam! She’s just like one of us! She uses funny words like hopery? That’s great! Obama and McCain (and Clinton and Dole and etc, etc, etc.) use big words!
Mainstream America is not watching the Sunday political shows, and if they are, most aren’t understanding them. Maybe Palin is talking to them in a way that we just don’t “get”. Not that we don’t understand ***what ***she’s saying, but why she has the appeal that she does.
I don’t want to argue about popularity numbers. If she’s over 20%, it’s mind boggling. 40%? That is just staggering.
I don’t think it matters that she’s a rising star in the Republican party… If she runs, and she appeals to the crowd that we stare down our noses at, the idiots may just be in charge. There are enough idiots in both parties to put her over the top.
I just hope she fades from view after the 2010 elections.
So does that make her the teabagger or the teabaggee? Oh the imagery.
WTF was that joke about iced tea? Does no one tell her she has no timing? She reminds me of the horrible contestants that get on American Idol after their family has told them how great they are their entire lives. I swear when I heard that joke I was waiting for the punchline:
What’s the difference between sweet tea and iced tea?
Lipstick
I can’t understand why her supporters aren’t upset that she resigned as governor. It’s pretty obvious she wanted to cash in on these speaking engagements.
This could be a first. I can’t recall any governor resigning because they were tired of the job. Usually it takes a health crises or scandal.
Huh?
Is the idea supposed to be that the glass with the sweet tea gets drunk, while the glass with the iced tea gets held until the person can find a discreet opportunity to set it down somewhere?
As I hypothesized, it could be as simple as that remaining Alaska’s governor for the duration of her term would not provide her the national spotlight she wants/needs/craves. Supporters must agree with this strategy. In general, I would agree with you that resigning an elected post such as a governorship would not on the surface seem to be a sound political move.
Cashing in on the speaking engagements is a no-brainer from her POV. If she remained governor, I think she would have faded into the background (and back into political oblivion) very quickly. But there seems to be momentum surrounding her. Maybe it’s as simple as everyone around her wanting to cash in with this revenue generating machine instead of letting it go. Fox is giving her a TV show. She’s commanding six-figures to speak in public. Financially, resigning was/is a windfall for her.
In many ways, she sort of parallels Danika Patrick’s entrance into NASCAR. An attractive woman with a fairly weak resume enters the Daytona 500 and the coverage has been almost exclusively on her running the race. I know it is interesting, it has a large curiosity factor, but if she boosts the ratings for NASCAR, they will continue to ride that pony. Perhaps Palin is tapping into that same thing.
say them aloud with a southern drawl