And never fear, the miserable, envious reprobates MUST throw in their two bits:
Associated Press: "Over two terms, from 1981 to 1989, Reagan reshaped the Republican Party in his conservative image, fixed his eye on the demise of the Soviet Union and Eastern European communism and tripled the national debt to $3 trillion in his single-minded competition with the other superpower."
BBC: "His foreign policy was criticised for being in disarray. . . . His October 1983 invasion of the small Caribbean island of Grenada was dismissed as a clumsy sham. Then there were his gaffes. . . . The report [from Congress on the Iran-contra kerfuffle] was seen as a devastating indictment of Mr Reagan's style of government. . . . More of a figurehead than a strong leader with a grasp for detail . . ."
Reuters, in the lead paragraph of an obituary: "Ronald Reagan, who died on Saturday at 93, was one of the great mysteries in American politics--was he the man in charge or simply a puppet, the master politician or a manipulated performer?" (Hey Reuters, isn't one man's manipulated performer another's freedom fighter?)
Reading stuff like this reminds us of just how similar the complaints about President Bush are to those about Reagan when he was in office: "cowboy," "simplistic," "warmonger," "dim-witted," "figurehead." The only one missing is "movie actor," and in a particularly imaginative bit of Bush-bashing, the Times' Alessandra Stanley manages to disparage the current president for not being an actor:
After American troops seized Baghdad, President Bush donned a flight suit and landed by jet fighter on an aircraft carrier festooned with the words "Mission Accomplished." Mr. Reagan stopped wearing costumes when he left Hollywood. Yesterday, he once again stole the show.
Stanley's colleague Adam Nagourney tries to find hope for the Democrats: "Some Republicans said the images of a forceful Mr. Reagan giving dramatic speeches on television provided a less-than-welcome contrast with Mr. Bush's own appearances these days, and that it was not in Mr. Bush's interest to encourage such comparisons."
Well, maybe. Certainly Bush isn't as eloquent as Reagan was. Then again, neither is John Kerry. When Bush speaks, you often imagine Reagan might have said the same thing better. When Kerry speaks, you imagine Reagan would disagree--assuming he could even figure out what Kerry was saying. I love BotW.
Natan Sharansky (né Anatoly Shcharansky), the Soviet dissident turned Israeli official, tells a story of Reagan in today's Jerusalem Post:
In 1983, I was confined to an eight-by-ten-foot prison cell on the border of Siberia. My Soviet jailers gave me the privilege of reading the latest copy of Pravda. Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of President Ronald Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an "evil empire." Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan's "provocation" quickly spread throughout the prison. We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth--a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us.
Let's remember that Reagan took a lot of flak for that statement--from many of the same people who now criticize President Bush for, among other things, identifying the axis of evil. In 1983 they agreed with Pravda rather than Sharansky. Apparently they are condemned to repeat history.
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'He Is a Very Famous Man'
Ronald Reagan made no public appearances during the last decade of his life, but in November 1997 the New York Times published an article that provided a glimpse into his twilight years and the toll Alzheimer's disease was taking. We managed to find a copy on the Web site of the Standard-Times of New Bedford, Mass., and here are two anecdotes that stuck with us all these years:
In February 1996, George Shultz went to visit his old boss, Ronald Reagan, at the former president's home in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles. He drank tea with Reagan and his wife, Nancy, and talked a little politics. In all, he stayed perhaps an hour.
That night Shultz, the former secretary of state, received a call from Mrs. Reagan, who told him that "something poignant happened today that you would like to know about."
At one point in the visit, Reagan had left the room briefly with a nurse. When they came back, Mrs. Reagan went on, "he said to the nurse: 'Who is that man sitting with Nancy on the couch? I know him. He is a very famous man.' " . . .
This summer, walking in Armand Hammer Park near his home, Reagan was approached by an elderly tourist and his 12-year-old grandson, Ukrainian emigres now living near Toledo, Ohio. They spoke with him for a moment, and the grandfather snapped a picture of the boy sitting with the former president. An article about the encounter, and the picture, appeared first in The Toledo Blade and then in newspapers around the country.
The other day, the grandfather, Yakob Ravin, recalled their meeting.
"We went to the park, for a picnic, with our friends," he said. "And then we saw President Reagan. And we began to cheer him, and said, 'Mr. President, thank you for everything you did for the Jewish people, for Soviet people, to destroy the communist empire.'
"And he said, 'Yes, that is my job.' "
Last month, as the Baltimore Sun notes, Mrs. Reagan said at a Beverly Hills, Calif., fund-raiser that "Ronnie's long journey has finally taken him to a distant place where I can no longer reach him." Joanne Drake, Mr. Reagan's chief of staff: "While it is an extremely sad time for Mrs Reagan, there is definitely a sense of relief that he is no longer suffering and that he has gone to another place."
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Patriotic in Hindsight
In an editorial on the 60th anniversary of D-Day, the New York Times argues that today's war just doesn't meet the high standard set by World War II:
It's tempting to politicize the memory of a day so full of personal and national honor, too easy to allude to the wars of our times as if they naturally mirrored World War II. The iconic starkness of the forces that met on the beaches of Normandy makes that temptation all the greater. But beyond the resemblance of young soldiers dying in wars 60 years apart, there is no analogy, and that is something we must remember today as well. D-Day was the result of broad international accord. By D-Day, Europe had been at war--total war--for nearly five years, at profound cost to its civilian population. American civilians, in turn, had willingly made enormous material sacrifices to sustain the war effort. There was no pretense that ordinary life would go on uninterrupted and no assumption that America could go it alone.
So in the Times' view, a war of liberation is worthwhile only if it's a "total war" that lasts "nearly five years," entails a "profound cost to [the] civilian population" and "enormous material sacrifices" and "no pretense that ordinary life would go on uninterrupted." We guess Sept. 11 wasn't "profound" enough for the Times. How many American civilians do the terrorists have to kill before the paper's editorialists will deign to approve of our country's efforts?
And what's this about a "broad international accord"? If we remember our history right, at least three major countries--Germany, Italy and Japan--weren't on America's side of World War II. Italy and Japan both have troops in Iraq, even if Germany was pro-Saddam. Seems to us two out of three ain't bad. Stories at Best of the Web.
Communist Cuba harshly criticized Reagan in its first public reaction to his death, saying Monday: ``He who never should have been born has died.''
``As forgetful and irresponsible as he was, he forgot to take his worst works to the grave,'' the government's Radio Reloj station said in an editorial broadcast across the Caribbean island. link.