21 thoughts on “It Was 24 Years Ago Today”

  2. But…but…Reagan caused world war III. We all died in a nuclear conflagration! Every liberal Democrat told us it was gonna happen. He was a “cowboy”. Dangerous. A threat to world peace. Or whorled peas. It got a little fuzzy towards the end.
    But Reagan was EVIL!!! EVIL!!! Noam Chomsky hated him!!!

  3. Nah, Kermit.

    Reagan increased taxes, promoted a failed economic variant of the disastrous trickle down theory, and dramatically increased both our debt and our size of government. And his contribution to either the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the soviet union have been greatly exaggerated by the right.
    http://penigma.blogspot.com/2011/02/raggin-on-reagan-reality-of-his-legacy.html

    Lets not forget the folly of his star wars plan for defense, which in some quarters earned him the nickname of Ronnie Ray-gun:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative

    ” The Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) was set up in 1984 within the United States Department of Defense to oversee the Strategic Defense Initiative.

    The ambitious initiative was “widely criticized as being unrealistic, even unscientific” as well as for threatening to destabilize MAD and re-ignite “an offensive arms race”.[2] It was soon derided as Star Wars, after the popular 1977 film by George Lucas. In 1987, the American Physical Society concluded that a global shield such as “Star Wars” was not only impossible with existing technology, but that ten more years of research was needed to learn whether it might ever be feasible. [3]”

    Unless you mean by that he was EVIL, more generally, for violating so many of the concepts and principles to which you give lip service, while doing the opposite?

  4. Kemit….I was a youngster under President Reagan, but remember the hate that the Democrat left had for him. It struck me more than the hatred we saw directed at Bush 43, perhaps because I was an innocent kid who couldn’t figure out why this venome was directed at the President.

    I have posted some of this before, but a couple of example spring to mind:

    -My older brother bringing home the UW-Eau Claire Spectator (student newspaper) and saw how their cartoons showed Nancy Reagan’s head on a dogs body. Imagine if a student newspaper would put Michelle Obama’s head on a monkeys body.

    -The Milwaukee Journal refusing to print anything President Reagan said in his addresses to the nation, but in the same edition, printing almost the entire Democrat response. Instead they wouild paraphrase him in a way to make the President look bad.

    – Entertainment TV shows portraying President Reagan as an idiot. But remember what Ann Coulter wrote….every current Republican President is the most stupid President ever. According to MSM.

    – We all talk about Dan Rather’s fake Air Guard docs he used against Pres Bush (43), but we forget about the setup he used against Bush 41 (as Reagan’s VP) that backfired against him.

  5. DG,

    For someone who has the – words fail me – gall to call me a “sloppy researcher”, you really seem to have no ability to do more than uncritically ape the curent lefty chanting points – and by “ape”, I mean take the chanting points that are started for you up at Media Matters and passed down through the leftyblogosphere, to be, well, uncritically chanted.

    For example:

    Reagan increased taxes,

    Nope. While the left has been chanting “Reagan increased taxes” ever since he was in office, there are two facts that they can never square with the chanting point; his cuts cut far more than his raises raised, and he didn’t raise anything (when forced by the O’Neill Congress which, let’s remember, was a Dem majority, and a particularly feckless and worthless one, all a long) until the economy had switched to puree.

    Chanting Point: Fail.

    Next in a bit.

  6. promoted a failed economic variant of the disastrous trickle down theory

    Do you even know what you are talking about when you say that?

    Because Reagan was not only an unfettered success, in terms of real growth, but his successes on many levels were directly responsible (along with the results of the 1994 election) for the unparallelled prosperity of the 1990s.

    Economist Robert Lindeman of Heritage noted that even the most controversial part of Reagan’s legacy – his deficit – had paid for itself with interest by the mid-nineties. More on that in a bit here.

  7. and dramatically increased both our debt and our size of government.

    “His” debt increases – a tiny fraction, in terms of share of GDP, of Obama’s – were a product of having to trade domestic spending to get defense spending out of the O’Neill Congress.

    And Lindeman noted, again, that the debt was a direct antecedent of the “Peace Dividend” that Clinton was able to cash in the next decade; the growth from both the Reagan and Clinton eras that was a direct result of that peace dividend amounted to vastly more money than we ran up in debt during the Reagan era.

    Yet again, you’re reciting chanting points you don’t really understand.

  8. And his contribution to either the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the soviet union have been greatly exaggerated by the right.

    And that is just dishonest on so many levels, it hardly warrants a response.

    There’s been a ton of revision from the left on this – but Soviet-bloc insiders of the era ( esp Anatonii Dobrynin, cited in Dinesh D’Souza’s bio of Reagan) debunk it with prejudice. The USSR had problems- but Reagan’s leadership, from the Spasowski incident to Granada to Rejkjavik,was what finally, definitively focused the west on truly containing and finally defeating the Soviets.

    And not even Reagan said that he did the job himself; he worked as part of a team, he and Thatcher and Kohl and blue-dog Congressional leaders like Sam Nunn and Charlie Wilson and, of all people, the AFL-CIO’s Lane Kirkland in the early years. And when the Politburo decided (as a DIRECT RESULT of Granada) to forego the hard-line and appoint a new, “moderate” premiere in Gorbachev, Reagan’s role in getting concessions out of Gorbachev was – according to Gorbachev himself – the tipping point in ending the USSR as we knew it.

    To say otherwise goes well beyond naive, chanting-point-based wishful thinking. It’s utterly disonest. The Soviet leaders of the era tell us so.

  9. Lets not forget the folly of his star wars plan for defense, which in some quarters earned him the nickname of Ronnie Ray-gun

    If, say, a desperately-addled obsessive stalker calls me “Mitch the Bitch”, does that make me, well, a bitch?

    You cite a really, really stupid nickname as “evidence” that SDI was misguided?

    Seriously?

    Again – Soviet leaders of the era debunk that with their own statements,and debunked it at the time with their own actions; they devoted miillions of their own scarce hard-currency dollars to pay the western “peace” movement to protest, in part with moronic nicknames; would the KGB really spend money trying to attack a system that they didn’t fear? Dobrynin cited SDI’s role in convincing the Politburo they needed to moderate.

  10. Penigma may be the first blog I ever read where the writing and reasoning got worse with practice.

  11. One more point for the factually challenged Dog Gone:
    Reagan had a Democrat congress that overrode his veto of a tax bill, thus raising taxes. Remember that? Didn’t think so. Reagan did NOT increase taxes, because a president does not have that authority.

    As for the “the folly of his star wars plan for defense”, what would a moron do to try to defend America against missile attacks? Oh yeah. Nothing.

    Doggie, you are not as smart as you think.

  12. Kermit

    If DG (the self advertised “smart cookie”) actually managed to get a college degree she really should ask for her money back

  14. Hey Kel, they’ll give anyone a college degree if they can shell out the $60K. Our university system is a bad joke.

  15. promoted a failed economic variant of the disastrous trickle down theory

    This one always kills me. The Left is the biggespractitionerer of “tricke down economics.” They believe we should send trillions of dollars to Washington and let it trickle down through layers of corrupt bureaucracy until it reaches the people it’s intended to help. For every dollar we put in we’re lucky to see 43% reach its final destination.

  16. It’s worthwhile to recall just what a miserable thing 20th century communism was and how the American Left, the “Anti-anti-communists” carried water for virtually every anti-American regime up until, say, 1991.
    Communism was supposed to free mankind. Instead it enslaved him. Communism was supposed to make man wealthy. Instead it impoverished him. Communism was supposed to be the birth of a scientific, rational, materialist view of history, the universe, and man’s place in it. In the end it ended up in history’s garbage heap. It might as well have been the creation of Gypsy fortune tellers.
    What communism taught us is that when you put the bourgeois in charge of the minutiae of peoples’ lives, you end up with dogs feasting on bodies in the street.

  17. Wow, Terry, that is a very astute comment. I posted it on FaceBook (and attributed you, of course)

  18. Well we are getting a good, long look at what Obama Socialism looks like. Real unemployment pushing 20%. Gas prices pushing $4 a gallon. Inflation forcing grocery prices waaay up. A crisis in the Middle East that threatens to erupt globally.
    It’s no wonder the MSM is focusing on Anthony’s Weiner. Their false messiah is royally screwing the pooch.

  20. “I hate commies.”

    Ditto that Terry. I’d add Socialists, Progressives, and self-aggrandizing Liberal Left as well.

  21. It is convenient to have Dog Gone write here occasionally. Helps to remind us that there is a sizeable chunk of the population that lives in another world, one where things we Conservatives personally remember plain did not happen.

    I have a crystal clear memory of watching Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill on television saying that President Reagan’s proposed budget was “Dead On Arrival” in the Democrat-controlled House. The reason was not because Reagan proposed to balance the budget by raising taxes, but rather because he proposed to cut government spending to control the size of government, as endlessly and futilely explained by his Budget Director, David Stockman – perhaps the last man in Washington who actually understood the federal budget. Stockman didn’t have to pass a bill to find out what was in it.

    That’s all been air-brushed away in Penigma-land. It never happened. Roosevelt didn’t smoke. Nikolai Yezhov never walked with Stalin. Reagan didn’t set in motion the policies that won the Cold War. Never happened.

    And Mithc, here’s the scary part: they honestly believe it, as much as they believe there are five lights. Not four. Five.

    How can you hope to reason with people like that?

    .

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