Reagan - more to the man than you expected

**attaboy** · 09-12-2006, 01:34 PM

1968
California Gov. Ronald Reagan issued an executive order that establish the state's first formal efforts at affirmative action by establishing the Career Opportunities Development Program

1974
California Gov. R. Reagan directed state agencies to develop affirmative action plans with timetables for increased-integration of women and minorities into the workforce. Eventually he formed an affirmative action division of the Personnel Board.

Surprised?

**raycarey** · 09-12-2006, 02:05 PM

reagan illegally sold weapons to the iranians and then gave the proceeds to a murderous insurgency in central america.

reagan didn't utter the word AIDS until over 6,000 americans had died from it.

the reagan administration wanted to classify ketchup a vegetable in school lunches.

hell of a guy.

**Begbie** · 09-12-2006, 07:08 PM

Originally Posted by attaboy

1968
California Gov. Ronald Reagan issued an executive order that establish the state's first formal efforts at affirmative action by establishing the Career Opportunities Development Program

1974
California Gov. R. Reagan directed state agencies to develop affirmative action plans with timetables for increased-integration of women and minorities into the workforce. Eventually he formed an affirmative action division of the Personnel Board.

Surprised?

Very surprised. He must have signed these off on a monday morning.

**Butterfly** · 09-12-2006, 07:36 PM

His GOP legacy will be destroyed thanks to Jr extraordinary work.

Reagan who ? nobody will remember him. Jr a job well done.

Reagan had a heart and some common sense even though he wasn't too smart. I actually liked him. He wasn't a bad prez, just badly advised. He stopped the Neocons in 1986 from escalating the cold war conflict. They hated him for that.

**man with no head** · 09-12-2006, 08:36 PM

Reagan was the only President who demonstrated to his Soviet counterpart who really wore the pants in the U.S.-U.S.S.R.'s relationship.

I wonder if Reagan would have gone to China and sold us out like Nixon did. I somehow doubt it.

**Boon Mee** · 09-12-2006, 08:59 PM

Reagan brought down the Berlin Wall.
Freed the I-Rainian Hostages.
Got double-digit interest rates under control.
Best president we've had since Lincoln...

**barbaro** · 09-12-2006, 09:50 PM

Originally Posted by attaboy

1968
Surprised?

Surprised?

Not at all.

Reagan did a lot of things.

One among the was forcing to study Spanish. That was wrong. It should have been voluntary.

As for this tenure at the Federal Exetutive Branch, the single most massive, successful, and monummental act he performed was the:

TAX REFORM ACT OF 1985.

Donald Regan was Secretary of Treasury at the time.

**Butterfly** · 11-12-2006, 10:45 AM

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

Reagan brought down the Berlin Wall.

oh, did he ? I must have missed that memo. That's typical NeoCons bullshit. The Berlin wall fell under Bush 1 watch and the collapse originated from a self destructing system, much like capitalism. See it collapse in the US in a few years time when the Chinese will own the rest of the world with their production.

**barbaro** · 11-12-2006, 11:29 AM

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

Reagan brought down the Berlin Wall.

Reagan was one of several factors in bringing down the Iron Curtain.

I tend to agree with Richard Nixon's assessment on the primary causes.

**barbaro** · 20-05-2010, 12:52 AM

Reagan in 1961 on socialized medicine.

**larvidchr** · 20-05-2010, 02:49 PM

Gorbatjov's actions where instrumental in bringing down the berlin wall more than anyone else IMO.

**AntRobertson** · 20-05-2010, 04:53 PM

What a fucking joke.

**slackula** · 20-05-2010, 05:36 PM

Christopher Hitchens was spot on about Reagan, the man was an an idiot, a hypocrite and a liar. It is his fault that the religious right holds so much sway in America (and therefore US foreign policy) now:

Ronald Reagan claimed that the Russian language had no word for "freedom." (The word is "svoboda"; it's quite well attested in Russian literature.) Ronald Reagan said that intercontinental ballistic missiles (not that there are any non-ballistic missiles—a corruption of language that isn't his fault) could be recalled once launched.

Ronald Reagan said that he sought a "Star Wars" defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R. Ronald Reagan professed to be annoyed when people called it "Star Wars," even though he had ended his speech on the subject with the lame quip, "May the force be with you."

Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars. Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the "End Times" foreshadowed in the Bible. In the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan told Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal, on two separate occasions, that he himself had assisted personally at the liberation of the Nazi death camps

There was more to Ronald Reagan than that. Reagan announced that apartheid South Africa had "stood beside us in every war we've ever fought," when the South African leadership had been on the other side in the most recent world war. Reagan allowed Alexander Haig to greenlight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, fired him when that went too far and led to mayhem in Beirut, then ran away from Lebanon altogether when the Marine barracks were bombed, and then unbelievably accused Tip O'Neill and the Democrats of "scuttling."

Reagan sold heavy weapons to the Iranian mullahs and lied about it, saying that all the weapons he hadn't sold them (and hadn't traded for hostages in any case) would, all the same, have fit on a small truck. Reagan then diverted the profits of this criminal trade to an illegal war in Nicaragua and lied unceasingly about that, too. Reagan then modestly let his underlings maintain that he was too dense to understand the connection between the two impeachable crimes.

He then switched without any apparent strain to a policy of backing Saddam Hussein against Iran. (If Margaret Thatcher's intelligence services had not bugged Oliver North in London and become infuriated because all European nations were boycotting Iran at Reagan's request, we might still not know about this.)

One could go on. I only saw him once up close, which happened to be when he got a question he didn't like. Was it true that his staff in the 1980 debates had stolen President Carter's briefing book? (They had.) The famously genial grin turned into a rictus of senile fury: I was looking at a cruel and stupid lizard. His reply was that maybe his staff had, and maybe they hadn't, but what about the leak of the Pentagon Papers? Thus, a secret theft of presidential documents was equated with the public disclosure of needful information.

This was a man never short of a cheap jibe or the sort of falsehood that would, however laughable, buy him some time.
The fox, as has been pointed out by more than one philosopher, knows many small things, whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn't like him all that much. He met his second wife—the one that you remember—because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see. Year in and year out in Washington, I could not believe that such a man had even been a poor governor of California in a bad year, let alone that such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon.

However, there came a day when Mikhail Gorbachev visited Washington and when the Marriott Hotel—host of the summit press conferences—turned its restaurant into the "Glasnost Cafe." On the sidewalk, LaRouche supporters wearing Reagan masks paraded with umbrellas, in mimicry of Neville Chamberlain. I huddled from dawn to dusk with friends, wondering if it could be real. Many of those friends had twice my IQ, or let's say six times that of the then-chief executive. These friends had all deeply wanted either Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale to be, presumably successively, the president instead of Reagan. They would go on to put Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen bumper stickers on their vehicles. No doubt they wish that Mondale had been in the White House when the U.S.S.R. threw in the towel, just as they presumably yearn to have had Dukakis on watch when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I have been wondering ever since not just about the stupidity of American politics, but about the need of so many American intellectuals to prove themselves clever by showing that they are smarter than the latest idiot in power, or the latest Republican at any rate.
The stupidity of Ronald Reagan. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

**Humbert** · 20-05-2010, 06:14 PM

He was a stooge for the Orange Country republican power-elite. Among his claims to fame was the fact that he was a informant during the McCarthy witchhunts.
He was also a well paid spokesman for GE and hosted thier weekly series on TV in the 50's.

**sabang** · 20-05-2010, 07:21 PM

Yeh, the first of the 'Talking head' Presidents.
But certainly not a disaster like Dubya.

**larvidchr** · 20-05-2010, 08:10 PM

Originally Posted by larvidchr

Gorbatjov's actions where instrumental in bringing down the berlin wall more than anyone else IMO.

Originally Posted by AntRobertson

What a fucking joke.

If that was to me, here is a couple of links, I could go into this very extensively but I wont, I realize Americans always think they alone are behind everything but in this case it is not so, I can assure you that if any other of the old hardliners in the Soviet central committee had been chosen instead of Gorbatjov the wall would have stayed much longer. The policies of Perestrojka and Glasnost and with those the policy of non interference in eastern bloc countries, made it possible for unheard of changes in the EB countries, his decision to withdraw the soviet forces from East Germany left Honecker the last eastern bloc hardliner alone and exposed, he resigned and was replaced by Erik Krenz and the wall came down shortly after.

I'm not trying to take anything away from Regan/Bush here but without Gorbatjov Regan could have shouted "tear down that wall" until he got blue in the face.

Gorbachev on 1989 | The Nation

/www.essortment.com/all/berlinwallfall_rgvq.htm

**AntRobertson** · 21-05-2010, 08:01 AM

Originally Posted by larvidchr

If that was to me, here is a couple of links

No not at all, you post-jumped me.

I actually agree totally with what you're saying, Gorbachev had a significant role in the bringing down of the Wall. However that's whitewashed in favour of the matinee idol view of Ronald Regan that some hold. A view that has no more basis in reality than one of his awful 'B' movies.

**Boon Mee** · 21-05-2010, 08:26 AM

^
Poppycock

W/out Reagan's speech with the lines "Bring down this Wall Mr. Gorbachev" that there wall would still be there...

**barbaro** · 30-05-2010, 09:50 PM

Originally Posted by larvidchr

Gorbatjov's actions where instrumental in bringing down the berlin wall more than anyone else IMO.

Gorbechev was instrumental.

I like this speech by Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate.

**Boon Mee** · 07-06-2010, 03:05 PM

What D-Day would be complete without these immortal words from Ronald Reagan:

**aging one** · 07-06-2010, 03:21 PM

He was best in this role

Good in this role as well.

DaffyDuck · 07-06-2010, 03:29 PM

Originally Posted by Begbie

Very surprised. He must have signed these off on a monday morning.

You didn't know much about Reagan, then.

He was my favorite President.

**slackula** · 07-06-2010, 03:31 PM

Originally Posted by aging one

Good in this role as well.

Bonzo was better.

**AjarnJonesy** · 07-06-2010, 11:12 PM

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

^
Poppycock

W/out Reagan's speech with the lines "Bring down this Wall Mr. Gorbachev" that there wall would still be there...

Agreed....
I would take another couple of terms with Reagan than the complete tool we have in the the office now.... Their policies were soooo different.... Big ears could learn something if he would look back at Reagan's policies...

**slackula** · 07-06-2010, 11:25 PM

Originally Posted by AjarnJonesy

Big ears could learn something if he would look back at Reagan's policies..

You mean like raising taxes and selling weapons to terrorists?

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