A GREAT AMERICAN DIES! :(Follow

I probably wouldnt put Kennedy that high either as to Taft he is the only one to have served as both President and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. I would say that Woodrow Wilson deserves some recognition as well for top 5 in the 20th century. My top 5 would probably be in no order would be Teddy R, Truman, FDR, Wilson and Clinton, Johnson would get honorable mention but the Vietnam thing was not good, his Civil Rights legislation was good though.

Top 5 all time would be harder but probably Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR then Truman.

Reagan would probably make top 10 of the century and top 25 of all time. But I do remember growing up with him as the President and thinking what a great place the US was to live in. It wasnt til I actually read about and saw the after effects of what he did that I rated his legacy down. Still sad to see anyone die, and I did love him once upon a time so yes its sad but if he was truly suffering as I have been led to believe then its probably all for the best.

I was only 3 when he was elected President so I can only remember that as a kid I liked him being our leader. I just finished watching Dateline's special on him and am pretty sad that I was too young to appreciate his speeches. I really had no idea that he was such a funny guy.

Despite his homophobia I don't think he should be discounted as a "great American", Smash. =[

The special kept replaying this line, "Whatever else history may say about me when I am gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears, to your confidence, rather than your doubts." Brings to mind another President, doesn't it? :P

Edited to add that Reagan was a friggin' hottie when he was young!!

Edited, Sun Jun 6 18:44:44 2004 by pikko

Taft was a giant in American politics. Kennedy's rhetorical brillance and vision led to civil rights reform, landing men on the moon, and so on.

Kennedy was a rhetorical genius and a leader who's ideas shaped the later part of the twentieth century. Look at the world before Kennedy and the world after Kennedy and you can begin to see why he is so critical to modern governance of the US.

It's impossible to place Regan anywhere near the top 5 for either this century or all time. You really can't even make the argument that he belongs in the top 5 Republican president's of all time.

Seriously, you think he was more important, and more accomplished than:

Lincoln, Rosevelt, Eisenhower, Taft, or McKinley?

For fuc[b][/b]k sake, Nixon was more accomplished and historically important than Regan was.

Jackson was no better than Hitler. Though, considering this was America and the victims were Native Americans, I guess it doesn't really matter, does it? They're just savages.

Jackson did some good, but the bad he did more than outweighs the good.

FTFY

To say Reagan was anything but a great man and leader is to have little knowledge of who the man really was. I doubt many who post to this site were even old enough to have experienced Reagan as president.

Reagan single handedly ended the cold war. Not to mention, he did it without firing a shot. If that is not the accomplishment of a great man then perhaps our wonder over people like Gandhi is ill placed. Or have people all but forgotten this single great fact about Reagan. I am sure the Soviet Union never will. In the end it was not the will of the super powers to end the war, it was the resolve of one man. I would call that great.

Reagan stepped into American politics as a Governor of the largest economic state in the country. He was hailed as a great success as a Governor and so it was no surprise that he was destined to be great as a President. What many Americans fail to see is how great he was. It does not matter that he was an actor turned president. What does matter is that he succeeded in the greatest ventures in life. He was successful in giving Americans a reason to be proud again, after such times as the “Watergate” period or the runaway inflation of the Carter administration.

I do not believe another president since Roosevelt can stand up to the test of character, that is the presidency of the United States, in such a way as the actor from California did.

He was indeed a great man. We are all better for having known him, or having been alive during his life.

I get it now! Stok is Alex P. Keaton's sock puppet!

Eb

Hitler Youth

And you dare criticize Reagan when Taft whom you think was better is quoted:

What are you, some kind of 18th Century English Fop.

"I say! He almost gave you the vapors."

Eb

Sniff the handkerchief.

Edited, Mon Jun 7 20:20:42 2004 by pickleprince

I can't believe you french kiss your grandma with that mouth!

To answer your o-so-well-formed question: maybe.

Eb

You seem to have a lot of gay imagery in your postings for a "straight" guy.

I remember when Regan was president and I agree that he appealed to our best hopes.
Unfortunately he also shot them down in the long run.
How many republicans criticised Clinton for the cuts being made to the military? All of them I think, too bad they didn't look to see who signed the cuts. Regan and the republican party created the cuts, got them approved, and signed them into action. Then he and father Bush used delaying tactics, decreased the ammount of the cuts going on at the time while delaying what should have happened then for a few more years, keeping the manpower in the military up while slowly cutting the budget, yet still authorizing expantion of military hardware. If Regan and father Bush had decreased the size of the military as per thier own bill, the first war against Iraq would have taked 3 times as long.
Clinton stepped up and saw the original plan and implemented it, letting the military handle how the reductions would happen, rather then the republican way of having congress determine which bases to close and which units to cut. Many of my coworkers in various units would talk bad about how Clinton had caused the reduction in the military, yet all he really did was demand that the military handle the reductions in a way that would enable the remaining soldiers to live with some dignity. Clinton's only reforms to the original bill were in upgrades to housing and standard of living expenses. By the way, the upgrades to military housing were budgeted seperately during his terms and using that portion of the budget for other expenses, like new office furnature for officers, was punished by moving that ammount from the normal budget to the housing budget. The new Bush (Named by various european and arabic news agencies as "Bush the son") nearly halted the housing improvement package for the military, again assigning the funds to "new and improved weaponry" rather then giving our soldiers a place to live that was not considered substandard by "inner city" standards.

I remember when Clinton first started the housing upgrades, I was in Fort Hood Texas, and was moved from one building that had been condemned, repainted, and put back into use as a barracks for the soldiers into another with the same history while the first was destroyed and a new barracks was built. Having two adults live in a 20 by 20 room with a bathroom at each end of the hall, one male, one female, in a 3 story building with shower rooms centrally located on each floor, top and bottom for males, center for females, did not give me the impression of "living like an adult". It gave the impression of college living, and many soldiers took that to heart, being right out of high school they acted the same as they did before, as if thier actions could not land them in jail when they broke the law.

On a second note, Regan never did implement any policies concerning standards of action, nor did father Bush, leading many NCOs to believe the way they were treated as they advanced in rank was proper treatment for soldiers. Clinton tried to make adjustments, but it takes more then 8 years to change the way people act. The "abuse" of prisoners in Iraq was of no surprise to me, as many NCOs did similar things to thier own soldiers, even up to last year I saw NCOs forcing soldiers to do demeaning actions and even one soldier who ended up with a broken jaw while in the barracks, yet was too afraid of his NCOs to say anything about what happened. Prisoner abuse comes from soldier abuse, soldier abuse dates back to the Vietnam war, when NCOs believed the only way to make soldiers do what they said without question was to make them fear what would happen if the didn't. Trying to change that attitude in the military places Clinton well above Regan in my books.
Regan tried, and in the end that's all we can really ask of our leaders, but when he stated that he could not remember concerning the Iran-Contra affair, he was either lying under oath, or he should have realized that he was loosing his memory. Had he stepped down, or even offered to, based on his loss of memory, I would place him higher on my list. As it is I would place Regan maybe at 6th, probably at 7th. Clinton's lying was the result of being cornered, any man will fight when being hounded as he was, the Star investigations went beyond what they were tasked for. If Eisenhower or Rosevelt had been "investigated" like that you can be sure that someone would have ended up dead or in jail. Clinton's restraint, and his willingness to do what he said he would if at all possible, place him over Regan in my eyes.

...and I'm back.

The great part about arguing on multiple websites is that I can pretty much copy-and-paste the arguments used to disprove whatever the people are saying; the Legion of Limbaugh et al tends to follow very, very similar thought patterns. Good thing they all spew out the exact same points, or this would be difficult.

Point #1) Reagan created what was (then) record deficits and then blamed it on a 'spending-crazy' Congress. In fact, the difference between Reagan's proposed budgets and the ones Congress actually passed is .6%, or .006 of the total budget- in real money terms, over a period of 8 years a difference of only 197 million dollars, or 24 million per year (Specific figures for every year available upon request- I'm cribbing here from the Reagan homepage table, which I know has some inaccurate figures which might lead to a slight discrepency on the numbers game, but it's about right).

Reagan ran for a fiscally responsible government- ran against Carter by pointing out the growing national debt. "A trillion dollars would be a stack of $1,000 bills 67 miles high." - Reagan, Feb 1981, warning that the national debt was approaching $1 trillion. When Carter left office in 1980, the national debt was $789 billion dollars. When Reagan left office, the debt was $2.6 trillion dollars. Throughout the 90's the argument was over how to balance the national debt. Without Reagan's massive, unprecedented and until now unbroken deficit spending there would be no argument on how to balance the national debt- it would already be balanced (or, rather, would have been until Bush Jr. took office).

Point #2) Reagan, in fact, didn’t end the Cold War. Or, rather, it was not a result of his actions that the cold war ended; while he certainly presided over the beginning of the end (Bush Sr. presided over the tail end of the collapse) the cause of the end had a lot less to do with his policies than it did with a host of other factors; for instance, the continuation of Truman’s containment policies; Lech Walesa’s independent trade union, Solidarity; Perestroika and Glastnost introduced in 1985; and Gorbachev’s decision to abandon the Brezhnev Doctrine (essentially the Soviet version of the Monroe Doctrine along with the Roosevelt Corollary; the USSR would interfere in any attempt by a member nation to leave the Warsaw Pact- ensuring the continuation of Communism in the Soviet satellite nations by force). There are no real relevant figures to pull out here; there aren’t any statistics that you can point to that can completely and accurately illustrate the collapse of a country due to both internal and external forces. I leave you to make your own decision here- you’ll either believe it was due to Reagan or you won’t, but all of Reagan’s containment policies stemmed directly from Truman’s; according to the words of Marshal Viktor Kulikov, the former Warsaw Pact commander, “Reagan was a logical extension of what started with Truman.”

Point #3) Iran-Contra. As even a certain Richard Cheney (former R-WY) observed, “You have to admit it’s a pretty fundamental flaw that would allow a lieutenant colonel on the White House staff to act in total defiance of the law”. Iran-Contra was not a case of patriots helping the United States government- it was a case of government corruption, the destruction of separation of powers and of the United States Constitution. According to North, ventures like Iran-Contra could be trusted because “they were being run by Patriots like [himself]”.

Amazingly, that’s exactly what the Gestapo said.

The sum result of Iran-Contra is that Reagan was either incompetent (unaware of events going on right under his nose, manipulated by his aides to provide support for the project) or treasonous, ordering (or, if not ordering, ‘implying’ what actions he wanted taken) his staff workers to break a law passed by Congress.

And YOU are what I can't stand about Humanity....

Someone who thinks they can some up life in some trite anecdote.

Fu[i][/i]ck you.

Eb