posted
In case you haven't heard, there's a movement to put Reagan's image on a ton of items these days. Things ranging from putting his image on currency to putting him on Mt. Rushmore.
Ok, I can understand that Republicans love Reagan for all he did. What I'm having problems understanding is what he did that was so great as to warrant having him on Mt. Rushmore. Maybe some people here would be so kind to enlighten me?
quote: Up to now, the biggest victories have been the renaming of Washington’s National Airport after the 40th president and the opening in Washington of the Ronald Reagan Building, the second largest government office building after the Pentagon. Last year the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan was commissioned.
....
Then there is Mount Rushmore.
It will take a long time to study the geophysical and artistic feasibility of that project, Butler said. But “is he great enough to be on Mount Rushmore? Yes.”
I think it's a very high honor to have an airport named after you. Even more so to have an aircraft carrier named after you (which was odd, as they generally do not name ships after people who are still alive).
quote: Chris Butler of the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, which has the goal of seeing a Reagan commemoration in every American county, said its top legislative priority is the $10 bill.
This paragraph really bothered me. Still, I guess it's good for the economy or something that they're out there tossing (what I'm assuming to be) lots of money at their dreams.
This line of thinking makes me wonder: what exactly is enough for them? Should we change all currency to Reagon in different poses? Should we rename ourselves the United Reagan States of America?
Posts: 851 | Registered: Oct 2001
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People will tell you he won the Cold War, people will tell you he established the modern US economy. I, a Republican all my life until Bush Jr., will tell you he did none of those. His greatest accomplishment was overseeing the biggest tax cuts in history, tax cuts that were sorely needed and probably would have happened anyway.
Posts: 369 | Registered: Nov 2003
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I think you mean idolatry, and no, I don't think this qualifies, even if I did disagree with renaming the airport. The aircraft carrier, though, is a fitting tribute.
Posts: 471 | Registered: Jul 2002
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I'm pretty sure Reagan himself would never want to have his image replace Alexander Hamilton's. The latter I have no qualms calling the Father of American Capitalism.
Maybe we should let Latin America vote on the issue Posts: 1839 | Registered: May 1999
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Hmmm....Reagan's legacy for deserving this? None.
This is the president responsible for Iran Contra.
This is the president who created a system called "Reaganomics," which basically had the idea that raising taxes, increasing spending, running the country at a deficit, devaluating the dollar, and increasing the national debt was good for the country and was not mortgaging our future.
Yes, the walls came down during his tenure. I think that this was due more to Gorbachev, the death of Andropov (long time KGB head), Solidarity (the Polish Labor union), the Pope, the German people and leaders, and the times than anything Reagan did.
Other posters were correct when they said that people liked Reagan because of tax cuts.
Inflation also decreased during his presidency. This was due more to Carter's mistake than Reagan's actions. President Carter raised the minimum wage five times in four years. Any time you raise this, you get inflation and the buying power goes down. Do this as often as Carter did, and it became runaway inflation. Reagan's solution was not to raise the minimum wage for about six years.
We all were horrified when 17 of Nixon's political appointees served jail time and resigned in disgrace due to their actions. We were equally horrified when this happened to over 60 of Carter's people. We must have become used to this and ignored it when it happened to over 200 of Reagan's people (In fact, we made Oliver North into a hero!).
One other thing that made Reagan popular was bringing home the Iranian hostages (which did not happen during the Carter era). The bad thing was, which came out a few years later, was that Reagan's people had secretly negotiated with the Iranians to hold them in captivity until Reagan took office and then release them (which means that Reagan kept 100+ Americans in foreign imprisonment longer than necessary to increase his image). This act alone, if he were not so popular, should have brought immediate impeachment.
The idea of Reagan on Mt. Rushmore is one that is not new. His own people were pushing this when he was leaving office. Their idea, at the time, was to carve Reagan's picture over the top of Teddy Roosevelt (thereby taking Roosevelt off of Mt. Rwshmore). This idea was not well received.
I do not think that, 100 years from now, history will be kind to any of our modern era presidents. Reagan will be considered mediocre at best for all of his mistakes.
This is the Reagan legacy. He does not belong on my money.
Posts: 279 | Registered: May 2004
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I prefer the idea of putting him on the quarter. Washington gets to stay on the dollar bill, and nobody gets removed from money.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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No, it's not revisionist. It simply relies on the argument that the "Cold War" would have been winnable by other methods. That he was president when we won the Cold War one way does not imply that the Cold War could not have been won in a far better way.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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I think that's a Georgia quarter, ssywak. I don't think Reagan is any worse or better than Kennedy. The folks who like him really like him and the folks who don't like him think it's an amazing joke that there are folks who like him.
P.S. The people who are out to immortalize him in every county must think the Republican Party can only go downhill from here. As a Lincoln Republican, I don't see that Reagan exemplified Republican ideals. He was just very charismatic, like Clinton, and served the party ends successfully.
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So where can we buy those Reagan butt keychains? I think that this is about as close to my money as any part of him needs to be.
Posts: 279 | Registered: May 2004
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It seems to me that the biggest landmarks for the end of the cold war are the fall of the Belin wall and the Soviet Union. Both happened while Bush was president.
The Berlin Wall fell on 9 November, 1989. The Soviet Union collapesed in 1991.
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A Regan monument in every county??? Ick... Keep it out of mine. I don't mind him on stamps or some obscure coin... but NEVER on Rushmore.
I grew up with Regan...he was an optimist and a GREAT public speaker. He showed us how a President should act....but he wasn't ALL THAT and a bag of chips.
[ June 09, 2004, 02:09 PM: Message edited by: Telperion the Silver ]
Posts: 4953 | Registered: Jan 2004
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"He showed us how a President should act...."
Yeah, especially when he lied to a Congressional investigation about treasonous activities. Bill Clinton should have taken notes.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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I just want to make sure I understand something:
Reagan lied, under oath, about an illegal military operation.
GWB mislead the country and the world about the presence of WMD, based on information he knew to be false, and started a war in direct opposition to the directives of the United Nations.
Bill Clinton lied about having sex with an intern. Oh, and after 6-8 years and 26 million dollars of prosecution by a special (Republican appointed) prosecutor, regarding an alleged $100,00 to $250,000 fraud scheme, he was found not guilty of any wrongdoing.
So which is the good president, and which is the bad?
Posts: 1862 | Registered: Mar 2000
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The reason people weren't up in arms about Iran-Contra?
We liked the Contras. In making aid to them illegal, Congress acted against the popular will (you know, the sort of thing that recently got the President of Spain removed from office?). During the Reagan presidency, an awful lot of people were convinced that since the Contras were fighting communism, they must be great folks. If not being "disenfranchised" is the most important thing, then Reagan (or his aides, if he really didn't know) did right.
Now it's true that we weren't entirely right--the Contras did some pretty unpleasant things in their fight against the Sandinistas--but if anything that demonstrates the utility of the government sometimes acting against the people's immediate wishes.
Posts: 1114 | Registered: Mar 2004
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Closer to $60million was spent by Special Prosecutor KenStarr in his Republican attempt to force witnesses to perjure themselves. Starr left the office only to collect a share of the money stolen by his firm through pension fund looting.
Posts: 8501 | Registered: Jul 2001
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Reagan's popularity went down 30% in the week following the revelation of Iran-Contra. For a bit of perspective, it took LBJ nearly 4years of the VietnamWar and various US large-scale war/desegregation/etc protests/demonstrations/riots to lose that much support.
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