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Excellent post! A keeper!

Next assignment is to find out what Anthony Lewis, Michael Mandelbaum etc said about President Reagan last week.

ScaniaBoy

Great post.

BTW. Congrats on the game yesterday. Truly excellent team this year. This could be 1994 all over again.

Or with some bad luck against Italy and Denmark, an early exit :-)

Cheers.

A keeper! I thought so myself! I especially like the one where the Associated Press called Reagan a divider in 1984 and said he would lose the re-election... just before he took the country in a landslide LOL

Anthony Lewis has retired as a Times columnist, turning over the mantle of nonsensical liberal shrill to Maureen Dowd. He's most recently written bad things about President Bush and Abu Ghraib, claiming his actions are unilateral and lawless and we should join the ICC:

Instead of a country committed to law, the United States is now seen as a country that proclaims high legal ideals and then says that they should apply to all others but not to itself. That view has been worsened by the Bush administration's determination that Americans not be subject to the new International Criminal Court, which is supposed to punish genocide and war crimes.

I've found nothing from Mr. Lewis on President Reagan's legacy.

Michael Mandelbaum, now a senior fellow with the Council For Foreign Relations, worte in a June 8 Newsday op-ed:

Of all the participants in the events that brought European communism to an end, the one who contributed most to this outcome was Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union.

But he at least admits that:

Reagan's staunch and often-stated belief that Western values would prevail in the confrontation with communism, the major increase in the American armed forces he advocated that aggravated the Soviet Union's economic difficulties by raising the cost of the arms race with the United States, and his early recognition that Gorbachev was a different kind of Soviet leader - one with whom he could make mutually beneficial agreements - all contributed to the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation - very much for the better - of international politics.

Covering his bases, he also gives credit for the fall of communism to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter and George H.W. Bush, Ladt Thatcher and the tides of history.