Ronald Reagan

I find it hard to believe , on the day after, that there has been no post yet of the death of one who could be our greatest president ever, Ronald Reagan at 93. Shame on you guys.

Ronald Reagan single-handedly set back the fight against AIDS. He was president during the first decade of AIDS in America and refused to assist in the fight, largely, I suspect, because of a moral judgment based on who was getting infected and how.

As Barbra Streisand wrote years ago:

"I will never forgive my fellow actor Ronald Reagan for his refusal to even utter the word AIDS for seven years, and for blocking adequate funding for research and education, which could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Then came George Bush, once the moderate, who, in a Faustian bargain, allied himself with the same primitive, gay-bashing, immoral minority."

Reagan had a very long life. He died with plenty of care, probably not aware of much of anything at the end. Many of those who suffered and dies from AIDS died much more painful, much more gruesome deaths -- at, in many cases, a very young age.

As President, Reagan could have done much to aid in the fight against AIDS. He chose not to, while young American men were dying. Had it been a different group -- young soldiers, for example -- who among us could doubt that he would have mobilized the resources of the federal government to fight the disease? That he chose not to do so because its victims were gay, drug users and Haitians (remember the Haitians?) was inexcusable.

Reagan certainly used his populist themes to good effect on behalf of his conservative constituencies. But I could never think of him as one of our greatest presidents.

BG

There are several significant events that Ronald Reagan was involved in such as the Berlin Wall, end of the Cold War, appointment of the first female Supreme Court Justice, etc. He should be remembered for those items.

But, I'm in agreement with BG, there are other things for which he should have been held more accountable such as non-response to AIDS and throwing thousands of mentally ill patients onto the streets. (Many of our homeless people today are got there when they lost health care assistance under the Reagan administration.)

I'm still not a fan of Reagonomics (trickle down theory) and my life wasn't made any better with his economic policies.

However, I was glad to read the Kerry suspended his campaign to show respect for Reagan. According to the AP, "We're going to suspend any sort of overtly political rallies, events like that," Kerry said. He added that he would probably still have private meetings with advisers.

Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said the campaign would determine later in the day how long Kerry would observe Reagan's death and which activities he would cancel, but he would not pull his campaign advertising.

I think the lack of response by the gay community to his death speaks volumes concerning how he's viewed by many of us. I was glad to see him out of office and am sorry that he had to spend 10 years with Alzheimer's. I hope he's finally in place to be rewarded for his accomplishments and held accountable for his other actions.

He is one of those you love him for this you hate for that Presidents. While he didn't do all the right things he did do some. At least around the world. He will be remmebered by many for the things he did and those he didnt do. HUGS Chuck50 :9 :9 :9 :9

As my Grandmother said,"If you can't say something nice don't say anything at all."

the Cajun

Reagan did little or nothing to hasten the demise of Communism or bring down the Berlin Wall. The Communist system was rotting from within, but it was a shock and surprise to everyone (including our own benighted CIA) that the final collapse came so suddenly or so soon. However, the end would have come with or without Reagan. If anyone in the West had much to do with accelerating the end of Communism it was probably Pope John Paul II, who is widely credited with having helped hasten the fall of the Communist system.

Reagan did little or nothing to make the rest of the world safer, either. He certainly accomplished nothing in the Middle East, and left Iran as a regional power that was busily financing international terrorism. Of course, the never-ending mutual masturbation party with the Saudis continued unabated (although there's plenty of bi-partisan blame to go around for that situation). Of course, he ran up some of the biggest deficits in history, making the rich even richer while the rest of us got trickled down on. It took a DEMOCRATIC president to finally get the budget balanced and the national debt on a downward curve, all of which has been undone by yet another Republican friend of the super-rich. Meanwhile, the religious right got a gigantic boost from his administration, and we're dealing with the consequences of that until today. Amazingly, far too many Americans were somehow deluded into not seeing what the rest of the world could see: that the greatest power on Earth was being led by an increasingly ga-ga old man.

Yeah, it's definitely a record that justifies being remembered!

Iran-Contra, Savings & Loan theft, AIDS, Reaganomics, deregulation of big business, "we begin bombing in 5 minutes"...yea, lots of good stuff to remember Reagan for.

Please don't forget the 500 UNARMED Marines he sent overseas, placed them all in one BLDG to be blown up, and never apologized for it!

One good thing to remember him for is the slogan Mr. Kerry should use against Bush in November;

"Are you better off today than you where four years ago"

>I find it hard to believe , on the day after, that there has

>been no post yet of the death of one who could be our greatest

>president ever, Ronald Reagan at 93. Shame on you guys.

I agree with you. I greatly admired Ronald Reagan. Prior to President Clinton, President Reagan is the only other president to have served two terms in the White House. That says a lot about how people felt about this man as this nation's 40th president. I think everything has been said about Ronald Reagan the political figure. What I found the most endearing about Mr Reagan was his upbringing. He grew up in poverty, his parents struggled with money. He grew up in a very strict household. He struggled, he persevered to achieve something in his life. When Ronald Reagan was in his late teens, he was a life gurard and he saved seventy seven people's lives. For me that's fairly remarkable. He had a very successful career. He was a sports radio announcer, actor, president of the screen actors guild, tv host for Play House 90, political activist, governor and finally the presidency. All of this from humble beginnings

Lou Cannon who was one of Mr Reagan's official biographers often noted that Ronald Reagan believed in " America The Beautiful " and that shiny light on top of the hill. I personally will always remember Ronald Reagan for his smile. In 1994, in his farewell letter to the nation, he said that in his twilight years, he wanted to sail into the sunset with his wife Nancy and spend more time with his children whilst he had the chance to do so. I think he got his wish, may he rest in peace.

Rohale

RE: Read it while you wheep....!

The Reagan legacy

He was a true believer who moved the country divisively to the right. But compared to the current president, Ronald Reagan looks like a moderate.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

By Rick Perlstein

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/06/07/reagan/

June 7, 2004 | I feel bound to respect Ronald Reagan, as every American should -- not least because he chose a career of public service when he could have made a lot more money doing something else, and not least because he took genuine risks for peace. (President Bush, in contrast, seems to know only how to derange the world with war.) But in the necrophiliac orgy that is now upon us, there are three messages that I -- as a historian of the rise of the modern conservative movement in the 1960s, and as a reporter on the conservative regency in election year 2004 -- wish that more people would hear.

The first is that if Reagan's partisans succeed in creating an indelible memory of him as someone that everyone loved all the time, they will have won an important political struggle with consequences for today.

The second is that if his partisans succeed in minting Reagan in public memory as a repository of bedrock principle, they will have been complicit in letting forgetting win the battle against remembering -- because on their own, conservative terms, Reagan was often a sellout.

And last, if they manage to make the rest of us remember Reagan as the embodiment of the kind of genial conservative even a liberal could love -- a refreshing counterweight to the lunatic conservatives we have to deal with now -- they will have scrambled history instead of helping to inform it. Because Reagan was always much more frightening than the sunny optimist of now-popular legend.

The Reagan memory industry has been chugging along at full steam for over a decade now, from the successful attempt to put Reagan's name on the former National Airport in Washington to the (so far) unsuccessful ones to put his mug on the dime and Mount Rushmore. Do not mistake the deeply ideological thrust behind these campaigns. The aim is to make the notion that Reagan was the most beloved American politician ever seem self-evident -- and to make the kind of militaristic, minimal-government conservatism he championed seem just as natural.

For a short period at the beginning of his presidency, after John Hinckley's assassination attempt against him, and in the middle of his term, before the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan was indeed stratospherically popular. But averaged out over his political lifetime -- Reagan first won office as governor of California in 1967, serving two terms prior to his two terms as president beginning in 1981 -- Reagan's popularity was, well, just average. Often, it was far below average.

When Reagan was governor, he worried about the "very dangerous precedent" of the state Constitution's recall provision being exploited by "well-organized groups for political recrimination." Yes, that's right. Though Reagan's latter-day acolytes led the lusty campaign to recall Democratic Gov. Gray Davis in 2003, Reagan would not have approved. And for good reason: He was the subject of two recall attempts himself. The first came in 1968, and it wasn't hard to understand why a group of liberal organizers, working on a shoestring, were able to obtain hundreds of thousands of signatures for his ouster: His approval rating was an anemic 30 percent. (In the next few weeks you are unlikely to hear that Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan had roughly equivalent degrees of popularity during their presidencies, with Clinton's often higher, including when both left office.)

The activists in the second recall attempt weren't liberals, however. In 1967, Reagan, after campaigning, as he always did, as a tax cutter, passed the single largest tax hike in the history of any state up to that point. By 1971, some of his former supporters on the right had tired of what they saw as Reagan's serial betrayals of conservative principles and launched a recall movement of their own.

We didn't hear a lot about that movement when conservatives were dropping Reagan's name left and right in support of their bid to run Gov. Gray Davis out of Sacramento on a rail in large part because he had ... raised taxes.

Reagan's hagiographers, having their cake, eating their cake and smearing their cake all over the historical record, have a word for the occasions when this supposedly principled man violated his principles: They call them "pragmatism." But liberals have to give the man credit for his ability, unlike President Bush, to shift course when he was walking into a wall.

Still, it's too easy to convert the image of Reagan the pragmatist into a Reagan who wasn't really right wing. And from that it is but a short step to the most irritating Reagan myth of all: that he was nothing but a sunny optimist. Do not forget that he also frightened people with talk of apocalypse.

Reagan first came to public prominence as a political figure in the early '60s. The movie actor, hard on his luck, had become a kind of roving motivational speaker for General Electric. More and more, however, as he became more and more conservative, his talks focused on politics. Much of Reagan's stomping ground of Southern California had converted itself into a kind of McCarthyite petri dish, breeding paranoid patio dads and housewives by the thousands, each one eager and ready to find Reds beneath, beside and on top of every bed.

On any given weekend, interested citizens in Orange County could watch showings of films like "Communism on the Map" -- a geopolitical melodrama in which blood- or pink-colored ink leached over country after country, sparing only Spain, Switzerland and the United States (which was covered by a giant question mark) -- or find a study group assiduously poring over the organizational structure of what J. Edgar Hoover laughably called a "state within a state" -- the almost nonexistent Communist Party.

Reagan soon became one of the hottest tickets on the anti-Communist lecture circuit -- where sunny optimism was not the order of the day. "We have 10 years," he would say in just about every speech. "Not 10 years to make up our mind." (He was referring to the choice as to whether to embrace the Republican right or the march of communism, among whose avatars he numbered, in a famous 1960 letter to Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy.) But "10 years to win or lose -- by 1970 the world will be all slave or all free."

Remember this: The hellfire never left him, and the hellfire ended up making the world a more dangerous place. As a candidate for elective office, even as president, his handlers always cleaned him up for popular consumption, but the same strange holdovers from the McCarthyite fever dreams continued to pop up in his discourse. One of his favorites was an invented quote of Lenin, popularized by the founder of the John Birch Society, to the effect that after the Reds took over Eastern Europe, they would "organize the hordes of Asia," as Reagan said in a 1975 interview, they would move on to Latin America and "then the United States, the last bastion of capitalism, [would] fall into their outstretched hands like overripe fruit."

Overripe words, yes, but also very characteristic of Reagan. It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly. In 1964, observers horrified by Barry Goldwater pined for the sensible Robert Taft, the conservative leader of the 1950s. When Reagan was president, liberals spoke fondly of sweet old Goldwater.

Nowadays, as we grapple with the malevolence of President Bush, it's Reagan we remember as the sensible one. At the risk of speaking ill of the dead, let memory at least acknowledge that there was much about Reagan that was not so sensible.

Again and again as president, Reagan let it slip that he concurred with fundamentalists' belief that the world would end in a fiery Armageddon. This did not hurt him politically. The kind of people offended by such talk had already largely abandoned the Republican Party. Those attracted by it -- evangelicals who had gone overwhelmingly for fellow evangelical Jimmy Carter in 1976 -- adopted Reagan, and his conservative Republicanism, as their own, and they never looked back. And in the eschatology of Cold War America, Christian apocalyptic thinking had everything to do with the assumption that the Armageddon would be a nuclear one, a confrontation with the anti-Christ bailiwick Russia, which Reagan identified in a March 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals as the "Evil Empire."

No wonder that when, in November 1983, NATO launched a war games exercise code-named Able Archer, the Soviet Union misread its intentions as offensive and put its nuclear forces on alert, and the world came closer to ending than it ever had before.

It took this near miss -- and not, certainly, the largest mass demonstration in American history, the million people who gathered in Central Park in 1982 to demonstrate for a nuclear freeze (another moment you probably won't read about in all the Reagan eulogies) -- to get Reagan thinking seriously about negotiating an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union. To his enormous credit.

But he never did make a similar peace with the "welfare queens" he fabricated out of whole cloth to push his anti-compassionate conservatism. Nor with the African Americans he insulted by launching his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were slaughtered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964. Nor with the Berkeley students demonstrating in a closed-off plaza whom he ordered tear-gassed by helicopter in 1969.

Nor, last but not least, with the tens of thousands of AIDS corpses whose disease he did not even deign to publicly acknowledge until 1987.

As the eulogies come down the pike, don't let conservatives, once again, win the ideological struggle to determine mainstream discourse. Remember Reagan; respect him. But don't let them make you revere him. He was a divider, not a uniter.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

About the writer

Rick Perlstein is the author of "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus."

RE: Read it while you wheep....!

May all the followers of Reagan and Regaannomics all go to meet there hero in a very hot place very very soon.

He was a SOB and he is now rotting in hell for his sins against humanity.

I don't believe in pinning roses on the dead. I was not a fan of Ronald Reagan, though I must admit he looks pretty benign in light of our current presidential disaster, Dubya.

Reagan deserves a mountain of credit for blurring the line between church and state, hence aiding the religious right in their grand entrance to the political stage. His decision to establish diplomatic recognition of the Vatican was really stupid. I'm waiting breathlessly for Dubya to do the same thing for the Unification Church and the Moonies.

I'll give credit where credit is due: Reagan as an actor did a good job of appearing presidential. But as is generally true with simple minds, he became so attached to his folksy little stories that even when his aides would tell him they weren't true, he would continue to repeat them. As Commander in Chief, he believed that if we accidentally launched nuclear tipped missiles, we could call them back. And from time to time, he would speak of his military service in WWII (he never served, but was in movies like "Hellcats of the Navy") For Reagan, there wasn't much of a division between fantasy and reality.

Sane Liberal Patriots v. Hatemongering Freaks

HATEMONGERING FREAK:

>May all the followers of Reagan and Regaannomics all go to

>meet there hero in a very hot place very very soon.

>He was a SOB and he is now rotting in hell for his sins

>against humanity.

Sounds a lot like Rev. Fred Phelps - he says "Fags Burn in Hell." Liberals like this say: "Republicans Burn in Hell." What's the difference?

SANE LIBERAL PATRIOT:

Statement from former President Bill Clinton

By Associated Press

Saturday, June 5, 2004

``Hillary and I will always remember President Ronald Reagan for the way he personified the indomitable optimism of the American people, and for keeping America at the forefront of the fight for freedom for people everywhere. It is fitting that a piece of the Berlin Wall adorns the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington.''

>I agree with you. I greatly admired Ronald Reagan. Prior to

>President Clinton, President Reagan is the only other

>president to have served two terms in the White House. That

>says a lot about how people felt about this man as this

>nation's 40th president.

I'm sure you can't really have meant that Clinton and Reagan are the only two presidents to have served two terms. US Presidents elected to two terms have included:

George Washington (1789-97)

Thomas Jefferson (1801-09)

James Madison (1809-17)

Jsmes Monroe (1817-25)

Andrew Jackson (1829-37)

Abraham Lincoln (1861-65; elected to two terms but assasinated)

Ulysses Grant (1869-77)

Grover Cleveland (1885-89 and 1893-97)

Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909)

Woodrow Wilson (1913-21)

Franklin Roosevelt (1933-1945; elected to four terms and died in office)

Dwight Eisenhower (1953-1961)

Richard Nixon (1969-74; elected to two terms but resigned)

Ronald Reagan (1981-1989)

Bill Clinton (1993-2001)

BG

RE: Good Riddance

My comment on Reagan's death is, "Good riddance to bad rubbish."

Reagan supported vicious tyrants like Saddam Hussein and Ferdinand Marcos throughout the eight years of his presidency. That is why anyone who claims Reagan was a lover of freedom and liberty should be met with derisive laughter. His interest was not in freedom or liberty, merely in winning whatever battles presented themselves even if it meant cozying up to lots of dictators and murderers in every quarter of the world.

When Saddam used chemical weapons against the rebellious Kurds the Kurdish leaders asked Reagan to impose sanctions on Iraq but he refused, insisting on maintaining our alliance with Saddam despite these atrocities. His decision to run away from Lebanon and his willingness to trade arms for hostages make a mockery of his image as a tough, resolute leader -- these actions showed Islamic militants that America could be successfully intimidated and blackmailed if the right tactics were used.

It was thanks in part to his policies that Saddam was able to survive his disastrous war with Iran and that Bin Laden was able to build the organization that came to be known as Al Qaeda. If I were to choose one word to characterize Reagan's foreign policy, that word would be "Blowback." Our country's foreign policy today is based almost entirely on dealing with problems that Reagan helped create.

> What I found the

>most endearing about Mr Reagan was his upbringing. He grew up

>in poverty, his parents struggled with money. He grew up in a

>very strict household. He struggled, he persevered to achieve

>something in his life.

His father was an alcoholic. His parents struggled with money because much of it was spent on booze and it was hard to earn more with a hangover. Historians may attribute his drunken deficit spending to these early childhood experiences.

Still, you have to like a guy who dresses up like a woman and hangs out with other men in a place they call Bohemian Grove. The odd initiation ceremonies that Bush and Kerry enjoyed at Skull and Bones, don't come close to the kinkiness that Reagan promoted.

RE: Good Riddance

> That is why anyone who claims Reagan was a lover of freedom

>and liberty should be met with derisive laughter.

Wow, look at the roster of people who merit your derision and laughter:

John Kerry : “Now, his own journey has ended-a long and storied trip that spanned most of the American century-and shaped one of the greatest victories of freedom. Today in the face of new challenges, his example reminds us that we must move forward with optimism and resolve. He was our oldest president, but he made America young again."

Bill Clinton: "Hillary and I will always remember President Ronald Reagan for the way he personified the indomitable optimism of the American people, and for keeping America at the forefront of the fight for freedom for people everywhere. It is fitting that a piece of the Berlin Wall adorns the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington.''

Mikhail Gorbachev: "I don't know whether we would have been able to agree and to insist on the implementation of our agreements with a different person at the helm of American government. True, Reagan was a man of the right. But, while adhering to his convictions, with which one could agree or disagree, he was not dogmatic; he was looking for negotiations and cooperation. And this was the most important thing to me: he had the trust of the American people.

The personal rapport that emerged between us over the years helped me to appreciate Ronald Reagan's human qualities. A true leader, a man of his word and an optimist, he traveled the journey of his life with dignity and faced courageously the cruel disease that darkened his final years. He has earned a place in history and in people's hearts."

New York Times Editorial Board: "President Reagan was, of course, far more than some kind of chief executive turned national greeter. He will almost certainly be ranked among the most important presidents of the 20th century, forever linked with the triumph over Communism abroad and the restoration of faith in free markets at home."

RE: Good Riddance

Doug:

I understand the point you are trying to make. I would only caution you not to read too heavily into the public pronouncements of politicians at funerals.

Reagan had many supporters who loved him. I suspect that some of the politicians who are issuing glowing statements now may not privately have been among his fans.

BG

RE: Good Riddance

>I understand the point you are trying to make. I would only

>caution you not to read too heavily into the public

>pronouncements of politicians at funerals.

>

>Reagan had many supporters who loved him. I suspect that some

>of the politicians who are issuing glowing statements now may

>not privately have been among his fans.

Only one of the quotes I posted came from a person who is running for public office. For the others, it is certain that they will not be running for anything.

Way more importantly, I am not so cynical as to think that people like John Kerry or Bill Clinton or the NYT Editorial Board are going to say that an individual who, according to Woodlawn, was devoted to authoritarianism and freedom-suppression was, in fact, a defender and promoter of freedom merely to score political points. I don't think they would say that he was a person who lived his life fighting for Freedom unless they really thought that was true.

It's one thing for people to try and say nice things about someone when they die. But that's a whole universe away from praising someone as being a stalwart defender of freedom when, in reality, you think that they were the opposite. For you to believe that someone would do THAT - namely, that they would praise someone they believed to be a defender of authortianism as a Freedom Fighter just in order to score political points - is a rather severe condemnation of their character.

I don't think that Clinton, Kerry, Gorbachev and the NYT Editorial Board are guilty of that. I don't think they would say that Reagan was committed to the promotion of Freedom if they really thought that he was an tyrannical fascist. I guess I think a lot more of their honesty and integrity than you do.

RE: Good Riddance

>It's one thing for people to try and say nice things about

>someone when they die. But that's a whole universe away from

>praising someone as being a stalwart defender of freedom when,

>in reality, you think that they were the opposite. For you to

>believe that someone would do THAT - namely, that they would

>praise someone they believed to be a defender of authortianism

>as a Freedom Fighter just in order to score political points -

>is a rather severe condemnation of their character.

You may be right. It gives a lot of insight into Clinton, Kerry and Gorbachev if they believe that Reagan stood for freedom for everyone. Did Ronnie agree with the 1964 Civil Rights bill? Did he ever repent? Did he support freedom for Mandela, or an end to apartheid before he lost his mind? The answer on both counts is emphatically, no. It shows that these three opportunists are as bad if not worse than the Ray Gun! Good riddance to bad rubbish!!

RE: Good Riddance

>Way more importantly, I am not so cynical as to think that

>people like John Kerry or Bill Clinton or the NYT Editorial

>Board are going to say that an individual who, according to

>Woodlawn, was devoted to authoritarianism and

>freedom-suppression was, in fact, a defender and promoter of

>freedom merely to score political points. I don't think they

>would say that he was a person who lived his life fighting for

>Freedom unless they really thought that was true.

Excuse me, Doug, but neither Clinton nor Kerry said anything that contradicted my post. Certainly neither Clinton nor Kerry nor YOU can deny the truth of what I said -- that Reagan supported dictators like Saddam and Marcos (not to mention Noriega and half a dozen others I could name). Do you deny that? Do you deny that Reagan sent Rumsfeld to Baghdad in 1983 as his personal representative to assure Saddam of his support? That at Reagan's direction our government gave Saddam intelligence and financial assistance that was crucial in his survival during his war with Iran? That Reagan refused to drop the alliance with Saddam after Saddam used chemical weapons on his own people? If you don't deny this, I guess you'll have to admit that Reagan was quite willing to forget all about freedom and liberty when he thought that would help him achieve other objectives. Right?

> For you to

>believe that someone would do THAT - namely, that they would

>praise someone they believed to be a defender of authortianism

>as a Freedom Fighter just in order to score political points -

>is a rather severe condemnation of their character.

The people you're talking about aren't here to tell us what they meant. But facts are facts, Doug. And neither you nor they can deny the facts I've presented. The facts, the undeniable and uncontrovertible facts, show that Reagan was quite willing to help even the nastiest, most vicious dictators who ever lived. Right?

RE: Good Riddance

>Excuse me, Doug, but neither Clinton nor Kerry said anything

>that contradicted my post.

You said that anyone who claims that Reagan was devoted to freedom deserved derisive laughter. Kerry, Clinton, Gorbachev, and the NYT Editorial Board all said exactly that. I was just pointing out a small fraction of the rather luminous (and left-leaning) roster of people whom you accused of deserving derisive laughter.

Certainly neither Clinton nor

>Kerry nor YOU can deny the truth of what I said -- that Reagan

>supported dictators like Saddam and Marcos (not to mention

>Noriega and half a dozen others I could name). Do you deny

>that? Do you deny that Reagan sent Rumsfeld to Baghdad in

>1983 as his personal representative to assure Saddam of his

>support?

The fact that someone allies themselves with authoritarian regimes does not preclude the fact that they fought for freedom, since sometimes alligning oneself with an authoritarian regime is a necessary means for fighting for freedom.

If you - or anyone else - has any doubt about this painfully obvious fact, just ask yourself this: FDR formed an alliance with Josef Stalin, one of the most vicious, evil and pathological dictators in history, during World War 2. Does that mean that anyone who suggests that FDR fought for freedom deserves derisive laughter, or is it possible to form alliances with dictators and other bad people precisely because, in an imperfect world, doing so is necessary to advance the cause of freedom?

RE: Good Riddance

>If you - or anyone else - has any doubt about this painfully

>obvious fact, just ask yourself this: FDR formed an

>alliance with Josef Stalin, one of the most vicious, evil and

>pathological dictators in history, during World War 2.

>Does that mean that anyone who suggests that FDR fought for

>freedom deserves derisive laughter, or is it possible to form

>alliances with dictators and other bad people precisely

>because, in an imperfect world, doing so is necessary to

>advance the cause of freedom?

>

>

Doogie:

Just how did Reagan forming alliances with Saddam Husssein advance freedom? It may have advanced certain U.S. interests, but I doubt it was freedom they were thinking about.

RE: Good Riddance

Today during the newscasters describing the ceremony in Simi Valley,one of the women who work with me broke down crying.

Her Son was a victim of the death squads in El Salvador that operated with the support and financial backing of the Reagan administration.

Chile,the Philipines,El Salvador,Argentina

All had murderers in power that were supported by Reagan,Bush Sr. and the rest of the traitorous gang in the white house.

And this monsters death is not supposed to be a cause for celebration?

Again I Declare,May his soul rot in hell.

RE: Good Riddance

>My comment on Reagan's death is, "Good riddance to bad

>rubbish."

Second most eloquent epitaph I've heard for him.

First place goes to my grandmother (1902-1998). Early in Reagan's second term, she made the only political remark I ever heard from her:

"...and we thought Hoover was bad."