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Musicmystery -> RE: Reagan's 100th birthday: 10 defining moments (2/6/2011 12:02:54 PM)
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I don't want to spark another silly left/right food fight. But objectively....
I think Reagan was a very nice man who took some enticing ideas and ran with them simplistically. Those wanting easy answers embraced them without analysis.
People make mistakes, including leaders, and Reagan at least did what he believed was right (in contrast to Bush II's administration, who were motivated by arrogance and disregard for anything outside of their agenda). To ignore his mistakes is to fuel the current difficulties, particularly in the economic arena:
*turning the largest creditor nation in the world into the largest debtor nation
*leaving 25% of U.S. assets in foreign hands
*quadrupling the national debt
*promoting arms proliferation, particularly Star Wars
*ignoring the Constitution in the Iran/Contra scandal
*funding/arming Osama bin Laden in his zeal to fight the USSR
*convincing people our complex problems had simplistic solutions
*trickle-down economics, which merely widened the gap between rich and poor, reversing earlier progress
*missing the chance to get rid of TB, merely because it was "only" in 3rd world countries--it instead came back, in more dangerous strains
*ignoring the emergence of AIDS as merely an affliction of gays and drug users, losing precious time to contain the world wide outbreak
*cutting down more acres of trees in the U.S. than were cut in all the world's rain forests combined
*building roads into national forests, facilitating poaching
*cutting trees right to the border of national parks
*reversing/eliminating the Carter administration's energy conservation and alternative energy initiatives
*a blatant disregard for pollution control
*firing all the experience air traffic controllers at once, creating the current problem of mass retirements
*deregulation of banking and telecommunications--some benefits, yes, but a disregard for the complications
*deregulation of airlines, creating primarily problems
Others will debate this, of course--but to assign Reagan credit for the fall of the Soviet Union is to credit a passerby for a hurricane. Gorbachev's reforms and the workers of the USSR, particularly Poland's, deserve the real credit. Otherwise it was a race to see who could go bankrupt first.
Additionally, Reagan's embrace of the religious right, at a time when people like Jerry Falwell were spouting such absurd and hateful nonsense, scared the hell of out me--and motivated me to action.
I had been fiercely independent. I instead registered as a Democrat, and have voted Democrat ever since, believing then and now that the era of the reasonable Republican I could support had changed, replaced by something only the Democrats could hope to contain. I'd love to support a third party instead, but as long as the extremists push the Republican agenda, I have to remain a Democrat.
And this all started with Reagan.
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