Reagan's 100th birthday has been an endless source of amusement for me, since the day's regularly scheduled Two-Minute's Hate against Sarah Palin was thrown off course by the grayer members of the audience suddenly distracted by their old bête noire.
The very best of the counter-encomia thus far have managed to blame everything from Glenn Beck to homelessness on the Gipper, and even fairly mainstream CNN got in on the act with a piece of conspiranoia charging the GOP and conservatives with trying to steal Reagan's legacy from... well, from whom it's being stolen is never made very clear.
Kids, if you came of age after 1988 or so and don't really remember watching the news back then, Ronald Reagan was a very naughty man who was as evil as Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and even George W. Bush all rolled into one. Even though nobody but a couple of hicks in flyover country ever voted for him, he was somehow president for eight years, eight of the worst years of American history, when everyone except the cast of Dynasty was homeless and dying of AIDS and we lived in fear of him blowing up the world. If you don't believe me, you can go read old NYT editorials and look at political cartoons or old Doonesbury strips from those days, then you'll see...
Goebbels would have been proud of his media offspring in this country's corps of liberal elite.
ReplyDelete"Ronald Reagan was a very naughty man who was as evil as Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and even George W. Bush all rolled into one"
ReplyDeleteYou make that sound like it is a bad thing.
I still think the bit I saw about Reagan's being responsible for 9/11 is the winner (thus far). See, Reagan supported the anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Thus Bin Laden and the Taliban came directly from Reagan's blind enmity towards the Soviets. Osama Bin Laden ran the group that destroyed the WTC, therefore . . . Yeah, and I'm the Easter Bunny.
ReplyDeleteLittleRed1
That is not the way I remember it, but I just read it here on the internet so it must be true!!1!
ReplyDeleteFunny, I remember Robin Williams making jokes about Reagan's stupidity that I heard again during GWB's time...
ReplyDeleteBecause winning the Cold War is something anybody could have done...
ReplyDeleteYeah, Doonesbury was pretty funny in the '70s; those strips still hold up well. But the '80s started the downhill slide to Derangement Syndrome.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure that subjecting people to the 1980s era of Doonesbury strips is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions. Then again, I feel that way about all of the Doonesbury comics these days.
ReplyDeletePriceless.
ReplyDeleteReagan did at least one great thing for the GOP: he got the liberals to stop whining about Nixon, for a while, only 6 years after Tricky Dick left office.
ReplyDeleteWhy would liberals whine about a man who was in favor of wage and price controls?
ReplyDeleteBecause they weren't THEIR wage and price controls. And because he made friends with their BFF Chairman Mao.
ReplyDeleteRonald Wilson Regan was so bad ...
ReplyDeleteHOW BAD WAS HE?!?
He carried 44 states in his first election and 49 states in his re-election. And that is why the Libs hate him. He put LBJ's historic landslide win over Goldwater into the dustbin of history. Winning 98% of the states (86% of Obama's states) was such a repudiation of Democrat policy that Mr. Regan will remain The Evilist in their eyes.
W/V = stastsi Now that's too creepy for words.
It's interesting. We have the same observation of the media's treatment of the 1980s. I noticed it most pronouncedly in the late 1990s when the media was struggling to keep Bill Clinton's legacy up - the more trouble Clinton got in, the better things were in the 1990s and the worse things were in the 1980s...
ReplyDeleteIt will be interesting to see if George W. Bush can achieve the same level of hate as Reagan...
And yet, the liberal media were falling all over each other to compare Obama with Regan after his state of the union address.
ReplyDeleteApparently, two years of comparing him to that New Deal guy wasn't so great for circulation.
At least it gave Jane Pauley something else to do between specials on the Kennedy family and "Camelot".
ReplyDeleteOne of the things I've noticed in my lifetime is, starting with Gerald Ford, every Republican president has been portrayed by the media as a complete idiot. Some of that bypassed Bush 1 to land on Dan Quayle (perhaps being the former head of the CIA has its perks?). But "Democrats are brilliant and Republicans are idiots" is a meme I'd like to see go away, but I doubt it will.
ReplyDeleteAt least I've seen no evidence of retro-interpretation on this one -- Eisenhower and Nixon had their quirks and downright faults, but "stupid" wasn't one of them.
Reagan basically ran on the JFK platform: Reduce taxes and get the government off the back of business.
ReplyDeleteWere JFK around today, he'd be vilified as an Evul Konseruhtive.
The other thing the Libs hated was Reagan's love of the nation, and the way he restored hope after the Carter-era malaise and sense of doom.
Viewing gov as the problem, not the solution, and maintaining the strength of his convictions...it ain't rocket science, a fact that drives hahvahd intellectuals batshit crazy.
ReplyDeleteHappy 100, Ronnie...I miss you.
AT
"...and look...old Doonesbury strips..."
ReplyDeleteI'd rather dig out my eyeballs with a rusty spoon.
The LSM are historical revisionists and 'The Won' is all wrapped up in his wannabe presidency as he darts from idea to failed idea in a mad quest to avoid wresting the the label "Worst Failed Presidency Ever" from Jimmah Carter.
ReplyDeletePS... Doonesbury sucked in the 70's too.
Gmac
Reagan's greatest legacy was the fall of the communist regime, caused by their failure to keep up with his defense programs. He was single-handedly responsible for some other countries' allowing for our placement of bases that threatened the ComBloc countries. That's how personality can win a [cold] war.
ReplyDeleteBut never forget that he kicked off the War On [some] Drugs.
LBJ was at least as important a President as RR, where are his retrospective condemnations?
ReplyDeleteRight there with JC's- you'll never see them, he wore the wrong label. Bad Ds go down the memory hole.
Actually I remember the froth of anti-Reagan "news" coverage, and thought it just crazy at the time.
A generation from now, it will be used in Journalism schools-
"See what it was like before the internet, and news only came from eight outlets?
Google proves it- xxxx New York Times homelessness stories from June to November 1984, yy during the next six months.
Oddly enough, same in 1992. Anyone see a pattern?"
What I still can't get my mind around is Andrea Mitchell complaining that Republicans and conservatives were trying to "appropriate" Reagan.
ReplyDeleteUmmmm... was it the setup for a brilliant joke that Noonan ruined by interrupting? Or is Mitchell really that stupid? How can can anyone say something so incredibly asinine?
I discard the rhetorical question whether she thinks we're that stupid - of course she does.
"...never forget that he kicked off the War On [some] Drugs."
ReplyDeleteNo, that was Nancy. Even the most powerful man in the world can be pussy-whipped.
AT
IMHO, President Reagan was one of the best men to serve in the White House during my lifetime. I'm very proud of the fact that he was President when I was commissioned into the USAF, and like all men he had his flaws; but he certainly restored the US military, re-instilled our sense of pride in our profession and our mission, and made us proud to serve in the US Armed Forces. While everyone wouldn't agree on his policies, he certainly brought Honor and Dignity to the White House. And yes, I remember the joke Reagan made about "We've solved the Russian problem - the bombing starts in 5 minutes." The thing is...Reagan scared the crap out of the Russians and the Ayatolla's. That's why they didn't want to mess with him, and it was quite a refreshing change after the previous four years of shame and humiliation.
ReplyDeleteWho else but Ronald Reagan could have held their own when walking side by side with the "Iron Lady," Prime Minister Thatcher? I can't imagine Bill Clinton or Barack Obama being able to even hold her umbrella, much less hold up to her level of statesmanship or dignity.
WOSD began in 1969. Nixon. The "no knock" deal was the brainstorm of his AG, John Mitchell.
ReplyDeleteThe first-ever no-knock raid was on a wrong-address WashDC apartment.
Doonesbury started awful. After a while it became awful. Now it is awful. Boring? Predictable? Not as predictably boring as Doonesbury.
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