Politics As Usual

[Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)]

Originally posted by baltassoc


So I find it extremely ironic that the markets will be closed on Friday. Is this any way to mourn the death or clebrate the life of the man many credit with saving America's financial well being? Is this what Reagan would have wanted?

Was the Reagan Center for International Trade, which I understand is the largest civilian federal building anywhere (or maybe built in the last 50 years or something), a suitable monument?

No. The problem is that the folks trying to honor him do it blindly and unthinkingly.

Of course, the NYSE made its own decision based on historical practice.

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
Was the Reagan Center for International Trade, which I understand is the largest civilian federal building anywhere (or maybe built in the last 50 years or something), a suitable monument?

No. The problem is that the folks trying to honor him do it blindly and unthinkingly.

Of course, the NYSE made its own decision based on historical practice.

Agreed. He's turning over in his grave 1 time for each additional dollar spent to honor him.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sgtclub
Agreed. He's turning over in his grave 1 time for each additional dollar spent to honor him.

If his presidency is any indication, he would have been fine with spending government money on such things, so long as it was accompanied by lots of empty talk about cutting spending, and tax cuts to ensure that the future generations would be stuck with the tab.

[SlaveNoMore]

Tyrone Slothrop
If his presidency is any indication, he would have been fine with spending government money on such things, so long as it was accompanied by lots of empty talk about cutting spending, and tax cuts to ensure that the future generations would be stuck with the tab.

Reagan Lied!!!!

[Not Me]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Reagan Lied!!!!

Well, he did used to hold his hand up to his ear and pretend that he couldn't hear press questions.

[Atticus Grinch]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Reagan Lied!!!!

If you are so thoroughly convinced that GOP politicians are, in fact, so much better than the rest of us that the very thought they have uttered untruths is a punchline to you --- and one worthy of such regular repetition in violation of the Rule of Threes --- I would think you'd be marching in the streets for more and larger government, because election to public office makes one so much more honorable and truthful than any random sample of private figures.

Yes, Reagan lied. So has every president since, I believe, Lincoln. It would scare me to think that any of you believe he survived eight years of office without ever having done so.

You may proceed with your lionization.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Reagan Lied!!!!

I wasn't going to say anything, but since you mentioned it, here are a few words in memorial from Christopher Hitchens, who is always happy to savage the recently dead:

• [N]othing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.
  
  Ronald Reagan claimed that the Russian language had no word for "freedom." (The word is "svoboda"; it's quite well attested in Russian literature.) Ronald Reagan said that intercontinental ballistic missiles (not that there are any non-ballistic missiles—a corruption of language that isn't his fault) could be recalled once launched. Ronald Reagan said that he sought a "Star Wars" defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R. Ronald Reagan professed to be annoyed when people called it "Star Wars," even though he had ended his speech on the subject with the lame quip, "May the force be with you." Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars. Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the "End Times" foreshadowed in the Bible. In the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan told Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal, on two separate occasions, that he himself had assisted personally at the liberation of the Nazi death camps.
  
  There was more to Ronald Reagan than that. Reagan announced that apartheid South Africa had "stood beside us in every war we've ever fought," when the South African leadership had been on the other side in the most recent world war. Reagan allowed Alexander Haig to greenlight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, fired him when that went too far and led to mayhem in Beirut, then ran away from Lebanon altogether when the Marine barracks were bombed, and then unbelievably accused Tip O'Neill and the Democrats of "scuttling." Reagan sold heavy weapons to the Iranian mullahs and lied about it, saying that all the weapons he hadn't sold them (and hadn't traded for hostages in any case) would, all the same, have fit on a small truck. Reagan then diverted the profits of this criminal trade to an illegal war in Nicaragua and lied unceasingly about that, too. Reagan then modestly let his underlings maintain that he was too dense to understand the connection between the two impeachable crimes. He then switched without any apparent strain to a policy of backing Saddam Hussein against Iran. (If Margaret Thatcher's intelligence services had not bugged Oliver North in London and become infuriated because all European nations were boycotting Iran at Reagan's request, we might still not know about this.)

cite

eta: Obviously, not all of this is lying, but he kinda gets worked up, like Jim Belushi towards the end of Animal House, and it seems wrong to mess with his rhythm.

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
Sometimes, with 1 or 2 posters here, I think you could take their posts and exchange them for other posts they did at other points in a thread and it would make little difference.

Hank, don't be so hard on yourself. Your ever-changing avatar makes up for what your posts lack. As Abu Gharaib taught us, a picture really is worth a thousand words.

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Reagan Lied!!!!

I know he said that Congress passed legislation outlawing the Soviet Union, and bombing would begin in five minutes, and you got all excited, but it was a joke and you have to let it go now.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by ironweed
I know he said that Congress passed legislation outlawing the Soviet Union, and bombing would begin in five minutes, and you got all excited, but it was a joke and you have to let it go now.

Whatever he did took a few more years to kick in, but you have to admit that the CCCP ain't there anymore.

[SlaveNoMore]

Tyrone Slothrop
I wasn't going to say anything, but since you mentioned it, here are a few words in memorial from Christopher Hitchens, who is always happy to savage the recently dead:


eta: Obviously, not all of this is lying, but he kinda gets worked up, like Jim Belushi towards the end of Animal House, and it seems wrong to mess with his rhythm.

I read that one this morning.

Hitchy did sound a bit over the top in that one. Methinks he either (1) drank far too much coffee before writing that one, or (2) the mere mention of Reagan makes him reflexively shrink back to his Stalin-admiring years.

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
you have to admit that the CCCP ain't there anymore.

Although you don't see it now, someday, you will say the same thing about GWB and the end of radical islam.

[Not Me]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Methinks he either (1) drank far too much coffee before writing that one

It was scotch, but that is just me being a timmy.

[Not Me]

Originally posted by sgtclub
turning over in his grave

Coffin, but that is just me being a timmy again.

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I wasn't going to say anything, but since you mentioned it, here are a few words in memorial from Christopher Hitchens, who is always happy to savage the recently dead:
[list]
[N]othing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.

According to the many Reagan bios I've read, including the not so favorable one by Morris, Hitchy gets it a little wrong. The consensus seems to be that statements like these, while clearly untrue, were not intentional lies because Reagan lived in a sort of make believe world where he actually believed the things he was saying were true.