I always believed he was. He had to sign some crummy democratic bills to rebuild our military after Carter ran it into the ground but he never stopped trying to advance conservatism. I don't see Bush doing this at all.
We are out of the world court, and no longer send foreign aid that's earmarked for abortions by the recipient country.
The Dems are screaming all over the Internet about Bush's military spending (sound familiar?), he's defunding the WOD and channeling the extra $$$ to the Border patrol so that they can do their jobs.
If you remove the offending section of CFR, it's actually a pretty good bill, bad for the Libs, which would put it right in that 75-80% range that we've been talking about.
Reagan signed a farm bill, Reagan also said the following about immigration:
And now, let me speak directly to the young people and the students here. I wonder yet if you've appreciated how unusual--terribly unusual--this country of ours is?I received a letter just before I left office from a man. I don't know why he chose to write it, but I'm glad he did. He wrote that you can go to live in France, but you can't become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Italy, but you can't become a German, an Italian. He went through Turkey, Greece, Japan and other countries. but he said anyone, from any corner of the world, can come to live in the United States and become an American.
Some may call is mysticism if they will, but I cannot help but feel that there was some divine plan that placed this continent here between the two great oceans to be found by people from any corner of the earth -- people who had an extra ounce of desire for freedom and some extra courage to rise up and lead their families, their relatives, their friends, their nations and come here to eventually make this country.
The truth of the matter is, if we take this crowd and if we could go through and ask the heritage, the background of every family represented here, we would probably come up with the names of every country on earth, every corner of the world, and every race. Here, is the one spot on earth where we have the brotherhood of man. And maybe as we continue with this proudly, this brotherhood of man made up from people representative of every corner of the earth, maybe one day boundaries all over the earth will disappear as people cross boundaries and find out that, yes, there is a brotherhood of man in every corner.
Thank you all and God Bless you all.
Speech at the Westminster College Cold War memorial, 1990
Now, some here may claim that Ronnie would have never said those things in the aftermath of 9/11, I tell you that they are wrong, he would have said these things in response to 9/11.
Ronald Reagan would have never changed his vision of America because of the fear-mongering tactics of a coven of homicidal maniacs.
To Ronnie, that would have amounted to admitting defeat.