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Do you recall his trees cause pollution statement? If he said something like that in the youtube/internet era, he’d have been raked over the coals as well.

How about some of thse other beauties:

“A tree is a tree. How many more do you have to look at?” — Ronald Reagan, 1966, opposing expansion of Redwood National Park as governor of California

“I have flown twice over Mt St. Helens out on our west coast. I’m not a scientist and I don’t know the figures, but I have a suspicion that that one little mountain has probably released more sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere of the world than has been released in the last ten years of automobile driving or things of that kind that people are so concerned about.” — Ronald Reagan, 1980. (Actually, Mount St. Helens, at its peak activity, emitted about 2,000 tons of sulfur dioxide per day, compared with 81,000 tons per day by cars.)

SNL and the media would have had field days with those today. Remember how they killed Gore for his exaggerations?

Or his 1976 widely panned and ridiculed plan to cut the budget by 90B and raise state taxes that likely cost him NH against Ford and thus the nomination. He was somewhat of a laughingstock after that one. Didn’t hurt him much going forward.

Here’s TIME Magazine from Jan, 1976:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,913876,00.html

Headline: Reagan’s 90 Billion Dollar Blunder

Here’s an excerpt:
As he began stumping for the Republican presidential nomination last week, Reagan may well have begun to regret the whole idea. Reason: the $90 billion statement is threatening to turn into the sort of gaffe that has helped sink previous presidential campaigns: Barry Goldwater’s 1964 proposal to make Social Security voluntary and George McGovern’s 1972 recommendation that the Government pay every American $1,000 a year. Above an editorial at tacking the scheme, New Hampshire’s Portsmouth Herald last week carried the headline REAGAN DIGS HIS OWN GRAVE. Although federal taxes would be decreased, Gerald Ford’s campaign aides—and Democrats—point out that state and local taxes would soar.

Said a Reagan aide:

“It taught us a lesson. This is a presidential campaign, and we have to be much more cautious and carefully researched.” What is more, the idea has such a tar-baby quality that Reagan is now perfectly willing to share its paternity. In snowy Conway, N.H., last week, he credited Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy with similar notions and shrugged: “It isn’t a new idea.

Reagan wasn’t perfect, either. He made a bunch of mistakes. Fortunately he had a complete failure like Carter to go up against in 80.

And she never said she could see Russia from her house. Another media liee(Just as the NYT this week admitted they’ve been lying about he whole clothes thing for more than a year). She simply made the point(in retrospect, probably a very bad idea), that Alaska is very close to Russia and that as Governor you need to be aware of certain issues related to that such as jet incursions and also by virtue of the closeness Alaska and Russia have certain cultural and trade relationships of a kind that no other state really has with a foreign country. So she did have some experience in dealing with other nations and the issues involved. Also, Russia and other countries have consolates in Alaska and the Gov meets with representatives especially from the Far East, not something that happens in every state(like DE, for example).

I also think that if that whole Russia-Georgia thing hadn’t happened a few weeks earlier they never would have brought it up. Russia was in the news so they mentioned it. A throw-away point, if you will.

Sort of like how Obama kept saying he had foreign policy experience because he lived in Indonesia when he was 6 and went to Pakistan in college. But the media never called him on that or replayed those clips thousands of times.

Again, to bring it up as some proof of foreign policy experience was probably a stupid move but the fact was that she really had no foreign policy experience so they needed something to point to. Something that at least people could say “Well, she is close to Russia, better than nothing”. Besides, it was obvious to everyone that McCain, Lieberman and his team would run the foreign policy side of things and she’d have nothing to do with it. In fact, as VP she’d have had nothing to do with much of anything.