I'm starting to understand what made Ronald Reagan such a great president

[delta22]

I'm starting to understand what made Ronald Reagan such a great president

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Happiest, like Cincinnatus, on his simple farmstead

At the weekend, I fulfilled a long-standing ambition and visited Ronald Reagan’s ranch, now held in trust by the wonderful Young America’s Foundation. It was here that the Gipper would withdraw whenever he could, to ride around the estate with Nancy. “The best thing for the inside of a man is the outside of a horse”, he used to say.

In other politicians’ homes, you find constant reminders of status: photographs with popes and monarchs, gifts from visiting statesmen, piles of books by famous contemporaries, cases of trophies and awards. But Reagan’s one-bedroom bolt-hole couldn’t be simpler. He painted and furnished it with his own hands, and enclosed it with a fence which he sawed from old telegraph poles.

The casual visitor wouldn’t guess that this had been the home of the leader of the free world, this the table where the greatest tax cut in America’s history was signed into law, this the telephone used to call the families of fallen American soldiers. Other than one or two historical works among the cowboy novels, the only political touch is the shower-head, which is in the shape of the Liberty Bell. Here, plainly, lived a man who was bien dans sa peau; a man who, unlike so many politicians, had nothing to prove. Mikhail Gorbachev, visiting the ranch, was distressed by how basic it was; Margaret Thatcher, by contrast, loved it, intuiting that it reflected the character of its inhabitant.

Karl Marx described Abraham Lincoln as “one of the few men to have become great without ceasing to be good”. It was one of the truest things he wrote, and the observation applies as aptly to the fortieth American president as to the sixteenth. To give just one example, Reagan had begun a correspondence in the 1960s with a young woman who had written to a number of Hollywood stars. Reagan happened to be the one who replied, and he continued to write to her regularly until Alzheimer’s overtook him, describing the great moments of his presidency with easy familiarity. He was, for want of a better phrase, an almost unbelievably nice man.

Even his fiercest critics generally allowed that he was good-hearted. Indeed, they caricatured him as an amiable dunce, an actor who needed someone else to write his lines, a simpleton. The notion that Reagan was unintelligent was comprehensively refuted when the Hoover Institute published Reagan In His Own Hand, a compilation of the texts for a series of radio broadcasts he had given in the 1970s, complete with his own annotations in pen. Here, plainly, was no simpleton.

Reagan did, however, have an unaffected simplicity. He was a straightforward patriot, who refused to get distracted from his two big ideas: tax cuts at home, and the defeat of the USSR abroad. He succeeded on both counts, giving his country its longest period of sustained growth, and liberating hundreds of millions from Communist tyranny.

To grasp the magnitude of Reagan’s impact on American politics, look at two things. First, the speech he made in 1964, in support of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign.

America’s voters were not yet ready for this sort of language, and Goldwater went down to one of the worst defeats in US history.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXBswFfh6AY&feature=player_embedded

Now look at the result when Reagan himself stood, twenty years later, on an almost identical platform.

The Republicans took every state except Walter Mondale’s Minnesota: the greatest triumph conservative America has ever secured.

Like all true patriots, Reagan tried to do the right thing by his allies, putting logistical and intelligence resources at Britain’s disposal when we fought to recover the Falkland Islands from the Galtieri dictatorship. How different, alas, is the attitude of the current US administration.

Reagan, more than any modern American leader, approximated the Founders’ ideal: a citizen president, who never allowed the magnitude of his office to turn his head and who, when his work was done, retired gratefully to the countryside, as Cincinnatus to his plough.

A Left-wing journalist once interviewed Reagan at his ranch and, surprised to find so Spartan a home, asked what the attraction was. Reagan pointed artlessly to the surrounding heights and quoted Psalm 121:

“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.”

[tellmewhen]

Whatever, I happened to be in the military when that clown took office. The stage was already his!! He was a famous actor, not seeing what you didn't see did not mean he was not a glory seeker. He already had that!!! The only political claim the man had was governor of the first state to go bankrupt, great guy, superior politician yah RIGHT!!!! He was the president that gave the government and police forces the ability to take private property away from citizens, great guy!!! my mom and dad had to fight these theives for two years to get their property (20 acres) back and alot of legal fees to boot. So, you don't get the idea my parents broke the law in any way, they were the mortgage holder of a property that had been purchased by a man that turned out to be a pot dealer.. That did not matter to the authorities that had already been granted executive power to sieze any property used for the execution of a feloy crime. What will be the next reason you give up our rights for pet laws or crosswalking stealing is still stealing, done in whatever name it's still stealing. I liked him to!!!! I thought he was a great president to!!! So, I guess in closing it doesn't matter how they look, it matters how well they protect our constitution, I hope I haven't been to harsh.

[dinar_stud]

10 Things Conservatives Don’t Want You To Know About Ronald Reagan

1. Reagan was a serial tax raiser.

As governor of California, Reagan “signed into law the largest tax increase in the history of any state up till then.” Meanwhile, state spending nearly doubled. As president, Reagan “raised taxes in seven of his eight years in office,” including four times in just two years. As former GOP Senator Alan Simpson, who called Reagan “a dear friend,” told NPR, “Ronald Reagan raised taxes 11 times in his administration — I was there.” “Reagan was never afraid to raise taxes,” said historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited Reagan’s memoir. Reagan the anti-tax zealot is “false mythology,” Brinkley said.

2. Reagan nearly tripled the federal budget deficit.

During the Reagan years, the debt increased to nearly $3 trillion, “roughly three times as much as the first 80 years of the century had done altogether.” Reagan enacted a major tax cut his first year in office and government revenue dropped off precipitously. Despite the conservative myth that tax cuts somehow increase revenue, the government went deeper into debt and Reagan had to raise taxes just a year after he enacted his tax cut. Despite ten more tax hikes on everything from gasoline to corporate income, Reagan was never able to get the deficit under control.

3. Unemployment soared after Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts.

Unemployment jumped to 10.8 percent after Reagan enacted his much-touted tax cut, and it took years for the rate to get back down to its previous level. Meanwhile, income inequality exploded. Despite the myth that Reagan presided over an era of unmatched economic boom for all Americans, Reagan disproportionately taxed the poor and middle class, but the economic growth of the 1980′s did little help them. “Since 1980, median household income has risen only 30 percent, adjusted for inflation, while average incomes at the top have tripled or quadrupled,” the New York Times’ David Leonhardt noted.

4. Reagan grew the size of the federal government tremendously.

Reagan promised “to move boldly, decisively, and quickly to control the runaway growth of federal spending,” but federal spending “ballooned” under Reagan. He bailed out Social Security in 1983 after attempting to privatize it, and set up a progressive taxation system to keep it funded into the future. He promised to cut government agencies like the Department of Energy and Education but ended up adding one of the largest — the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, which today has a budget of nearly $90 billion and close to 300,000 employees. He also hiked defense spending by over $100 billion a year to a level not seen since the height of the Vietnam war.

5. Reagan did little to fight a woman’s right to choose.

As governor of California in 1967, Reagan signed a bill to liberalize the state’s abortion laws that “resulted in more than a million abortions.” When Reagan ran for president, he advocated a constitutional amendment that would have prohibited all abortions except when necessary to save the life of the mother, but once in office, he “never seriously pursued” curbing choice.

6. Reagan was a “bellicose peacenik.”

He wrote in his memoirs that “[m]y dream…became a world free of nuclear weapons.” “This vision stemmed from the president’s belief that the biblical account of Armageddon prophesied nuclear war — and that apocalypse could be averted if everyone, especially the Soviets, eliminated nuclear weapons,” the Washington Monthly noted. And Reagan’s military buildup was meant to crush the Soviet Union, but “also to put the United States in a stronger position from which to establish effective arms control” for the the entire world — a vision acted out by Regean’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, when he became president.

7. Reagan gave amnesty to 3 million undocumented immigrants.

Reagan signed into law a bill that made any immigrant who had entered the country before 1982 eligible for amnesty. The bill was sold as a crackdown, but its tough sanctions on employers who hired undocumented immigrants were removed before final passage. The bill helped 3 million people and millions more family members gain American residency. It has since become a source of major embarrassment for conservatives.

8. Reagan illegally funneled weapons to Iran.

Reagan and other senior U.S. officials secretly sold arms to officials in Iran, which was subject to a an arms embargo at the time, in exchange for American hostages. Some funds from the illegal arms sales also went to fund anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua — something Congress had already prohibited the administration from doing. When the deals went public, the Iran-Contra Affair, as it came to be know, was an enormous political scandal that forced several senior administration officials to resign.

9. Reagan vetoed a comprehensive anti-Apartheid act.

which placed sanctions on South Africa and cut off all American trade with the country. Reagan’s veto was overridden by the Republican-controlled Senate. Reagan responded by saying “I deeply regret that Congress has seen fit to override my veto,” saying that the law “will not solve the serious problems that plague that country.”

10. Reagan helped create the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden.

Reagan fought a proxy war with the Soviet Union by training, arming, equipping, and funding Islamist mujahidin fighters in Afghanistan. Reagan funneled billions of dollars, along with top-secret intelligence and sophisticated weaponry to these fighters through the Pakistani intelligence service. The Talbian and Osama Bin Laden — a prominent mujahidin commander — emerged from these mujahidin groups Reagan helped create, and U.S. policy towards Pakistan remains strained because of the intelligence services’ close relations to these fighters. In fact, Reagan’s decision to continue the proxy war after the Soviets were willing to retreat played a direct role in Bin Laden’s ascendancy.