counting down the days until George W. Bush attempts an unconstitutional coup declaring martial law, invalidating the 2008 presidential election, starting world war III, and installing himself as supreme commander for life. Remember- You Read it Here First!
posted by Model Consumer at 15:50
3 comments
"Myth No. 2: Reagan was a uniter, not a divider. Reagan's tenure is being depicted as a brief moment of national unity before the advent of today's strident partisanship. In fact, apart from Richard Nixon, it's hard to think of a more divisive president of the twentieth century. As I've noted, Reagan was, during his first two years, one of the least-liked presidents of the postwar age. The festering economic doldrums, the worsening Cold War tensions, and doubts about his temperament conspired to make him less popular than Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, and even Carter were at comparable points in their terms. Nor was Reagan's second term free of strife. Starting in 1986, the Iran-contra scandal revived widespread criticism of his leadership—including calls for his impeachment—and his poll ratings went into free fall...
Myth No. 4: Reagan restored faith in government and the presidency. This claim is as bizarre as it is common in the recent Reagan encomiums—bizarre because people still don't trust government (even after Sept. 11, which did boost public confidence in the state somewhat). Polls show that levels of trust did edge upward between 1980 and 1984—probably a result of the economic rebound—before falling again by 1988. But Reagan never restored confidence to the levels of the 1950s and 1960s, nor did he reverse the general decline, which in fact resumed after the uptick of his first term. Long after his departure from office, journalists and political scientists have continued to study the problems of depressed voter turnout and rampant political apathy. That candidates of both parties now routinely run against Washington further shows that it is an enduring cynicism toward government and politicians, not a renewed faith in them, that has been central to Reagan's legacy.
Myth No. 5: Reagan's get-tough policy with the Soviet Union brought about the end of the Cold War. Historians will be debating this one for some time, but the conventional wisdom—that Reagan, by building up the military and spouting feisty Cold War speeches, cowed the Soviet Union into submission—compresses all of Reagan's eight years into one brief moment. Reagan does deserve credit for bringing U.S.-Soviet hostilities to a close, but not for the simplistic reasons usually cited.
Though few Americans realized it, by the mid-1970s the Soviet system was collapsing. Its aggressive acts of that era, like its invasion of Afghanistan, turned out not to be harbingers of a renewed Red menace but the last gasps of a tottering power. Yet Reagan's coterie of hawkish advisers foresaw only an unending struggle. Accordingly, in his first term, they cheered Reagan's provocative rhetoric and counseled hard-line policies—notably his abandonment of high-level summits and arms-control talks—that escalated tensions. But in Reagan's second term, Secretary of State George Shultz gained the upper hand in the administration (especially after the housecleaning that followed the Iran-contra scandal). Reagan's more hawkish advisers had disdained his dreamy rhetoric about peace and abolishing nuclear weapons, but Shultz took it seriously. And both Shultz and Reagan broke from the hawks to embrace Mikhail Gorbachev as a historic reformer. The speed with which they moved from the 1985 Geneva summit to the 1987 INF treaty vouched for the wisdom of Reagan's turnabout. Thus the irony: Summitry, not missile defense or bellicose speech-making, marked Reagan's real contribution to ending the Cold War...
posted by Model Consumer at 06:38
2 comments
Mr. Model Consumer was raised by good working/middle class parents in the upper midwest. He now resides in Northeast Georgia and is happily married to Hollybot.
