Larry King is seriously having an hour dedicated to talking about Ronald Reagan. I see that Mario Cuomo is representing, so maybe it won’t be a total hagiography. In any case, Reagan was an addled old man that let George Bush and William Casey run his foreign policy, with largely disastrous results. His domestic policy was shameless and immoral. And his administration had more people get indicted or resign in shame than any in history. Dubya’s administration is worse on all fronts, but not by that much. The big difference is that Ronald Reagan was a nice guy.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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they’re showing these Reagan clips and what is really remarkable is just how much of total person he was compared to the abortion of a human being that occupies the Oval Office right now.
I miss Nixon. He was one seriously fucked-up dude. And he said (more or less):
Don’t worry, if Clinton is elected, you’ll have Nixon back, minus the five o’clock shadow.
The feeling I had during Reagan’s term was that he wasn’t a nice guy; every just thought he was and he did know how to smile as he stabbed you in the back.
Bush can only manage a bad smirk.
I was a young man when that fool was our president. He started the whole deficit, trickle down, praise the lord crap that has haunted us until this very day. During his press conferences I would become so enraged that I had to stop watching the clown.
Nancy Reagan took me to the edge of the abyss. Even seeing her and I would lose what little stability her husband had left me. I hope at her passing she meets “Ronnie” and they can continue their love affair in hell. Any questions?
We began our descent into hell when we let the Iran-Contra bunch off the hook. How many of them subsequently rose to or remained in positions of immense power? I’ll let others do the counting.
The big difference is that Ronald Reagan was a nice guy.
That’s true of a surprising number of sociopaths. They can be very amiable on a personal level while sending millions to anonymous destruction. A number of high ranking Nazis were apparently possessed of considerable social graces. Even Hitler, if you caught him in a good mood, was pleasant to be around.
The trouble is that people tend to judge other people on the basis of their public personas instead of a broad consideration of their actions. Reagan was a “nice guy”, but his policies caused untold human suffering at home and abroad. The Contra insurgency he equated with our Founding Fathers engaged in savagery that exceeded that of the Nazis in degree, if not in scale. But he had a sunny disposition, and so people remember that instead of the chilling inhumanity of his actions.
It’s hardly a behavior limited to conservatives, either. Liberals heap praise on a mentally-ill president who was an outspoken racist, shut down newspapers that spoke out against him, interned POWs in prisons where they were deliberately left to die of starvation, disease, and exposure, systematically targeted civilians in warfare, suspended habeas corpus, launched an incompetently conducted and needlessly bloody war under a manufactured pretext to save his political career, and undermined core principles of the constitution. But because he — Lincoln — ended slavery as a result, he is remembered largely for that alone instead of the rather Bush-like aspects of the rest of his presidency.
People are psychologically more comfortable with consistent pictures. People are also inherently inconsistent. Horrid people do occasional good things, and good people do occasional horrid things. The human mind, however, prefers to pick one or the other rather than deal with the uncomfortable mental tension of entertaining both.
Reagan was a nice guy in the sense that Al Capone, Stalin, Jeff Daumer, and the Bushes were/are nice guys. By the magic of blog synergy, Steven D’s meditation on cute animals vs humans above is eerily relevant to Reagan-worship. He was the ravening beast of the apocalypse but he had big round eyes, a well-painted grin, and played the part of a refugee from Norman Rockwell nicely.
It begins to look like that’s all history requires these days to create heroes out of trash.
The big difference is that Ronald Reagan was a nice guy.
Yes, things change. Boy, can they change.
What we have experienced the last seven years would not have happened without Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan a nice guy? Maybe in the social sense. But he gets a lot of the “credit” for where we are today.