I can remember local conservatives around here saying (this was before AlGore invented the Internet) that Reagan was not conservative enough for them. They don’t like to be reminded of that, now.
“it seemed good to repost this article.”
Yes, thanks. I was waiting for the believers to fashion some kind of text wherein Reagan wasn’t a politician. Reminds me of those who think Obama’s no votes in his Illinois days were “pressing the button mistakes” as he claims.
A repeating theme of Mitt Romney’s campaign has been to trash Reagan’s legacy to make Mitt look like less of a schmuck.
Lou Cannon’s books on Reagan are fantastic. He tried to be very accurate and as he said: “neither a detractor nor a beautifier”
Has anyone else noticed the increase in opinions from the MSM trying to redefine Reagan? A little revisionism going on.
Oh, and we are at war with Oceania; we have always been at war with Oceania...
He obviously wasn’t adamantly pro-choice, although it may seem that he flip-flopped.
I don’t think it’s important. Reagan was, what he was. He was the greatest President, certainly of the 20th century and perhaps one of the greatest of all time.
I heard an idiot on Sean Hannity yesterday belittling Hannity and Reagan and the “What would Reagan do” crowd by saying Reagan was an imbecile and he already had Alzheimer’s when he took office. I forget the rest of what the bozo said, and turned the show off because it was just pissing me off listening to the idiot.
Honestly, having met and conversed with the man several times, I say that Reagan was an intelligent man, and wasn’t suffering any sort of diseases that affected his mental acumen during his stay at the White House.
Instead what afflicted him was a bunch of silly asses in the Media, not the least of which was the newly created Cable News Network and some of their reporters, and of course his main nemesis, Sam Donaldson (NO RELATION!).
Reagan’s politics grew from common sense and from the common sense application of good governing techniques - and from a sound mind, and choosing other sound minds around him to be his Cabinet and advisers. His most important contribution, that I personally saw, to government, was Leadership - and the ability to ask questions of the people around him, rather than to go off half-cocked and with half an idea in him.
When he stood up and did a speech, even though many were written by other people, you could tell he had re-written the speech himself - AND he ad libbed a LOT MORE than people know.
Having been backstage many times watching our poor audiovisual folks run the teleprompters trying to keep up with him or run the speech forward or backward to keep him where he was trying to speak. Invariably he would tell a joke or story that wasn’t even in the speech, and the poor AV guy would be peeing on himself trying to figure out what was happening.
(In those days the teleprompters were conveyor belt devices that held the pages of the speech, which was played forward on the belt, and controlled by some knobs on the device. A camera picked up the image and projected it to some glass devices on either side of the podium for the President to use and read as he did his speech)
Thank you.