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Nice column about Reagan...

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by BrianKagy, Jun 7, 2004.

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BrianKagy Member

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Not.

#1 BrianKagy, Jun 7, 2004

twhy77 Member

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Not. Workingest. Link. Ever.

#2 twhy77, Jun 7, 2004
Rocketman95 Hangout Boy

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Ain't coming up.

#3 Rocketman95, Jun 7, 2004
RocketMan Tex Member

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Looks like the gubmint took care of the website before anybody could read it!

#4 RocketMan Tex, Jun 7, 2004
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Do people actually take Greg Palast seriously?

#5 Buck Turgidson, Jun 7, 2004
twhy77 Member

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Wow, that guy truly sucks.

#6 twhy77, Jun 7, 2004
MadMax Member

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wow..that's a lot of hate.

#7 MadMax, Jun 7, 2004

BrianKagy Member

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Link works for me.

#8 BrianKagy, Jun 7, 2004
Rocketman95 Hangout Boy

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Still can't get the link to work, though it doesn't sound like I want to. I may have disagreed with President Reagan on various issues, but there's no denying that he was a good-hearted person. I wish we could go back to that time when there wasn't so much hatred between fellow Americans.

#9 Rocketman95, Jun 7, 2004
bnb Member

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Link worked for me.

Don't waste your time.

Stupid and shallow.

#10 bnb, Jun 7, 2004
mc mark Member

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Even though I questioned a lot of Reagan's policies, that article was pretty classless.

#11 mc mark, Jun 7, 2004
TL Member

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from the "about greg" section of his web site:

"Michael Moore calls his reporting for BBC television 'courageous.' "

the dude's article is disgusting.

#12 TL, Jun 7, 2004
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Sure Reagan was a dick, but you don't say that the day after he died. Give his family (and admirers) some time to reflect.

#13 GreenVegan76, Jun 7, 2004

SamFisher Member

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Hitchens savages him too. Or does he?

fighting words
Not Even a Hedgehog
The stupidity of Ronald Reagan.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, June 7, 2004, at 10:03 AM PT

Not long ago, I was invited to be the specter at the feast during "Ronald Reagan Appreciation Week" at Wabash College in Indiana. One of my opponents was Dinesh D'Souza: He wasn't the only one who maintained that Reagan had been historically vindicated by the wreckage of the Soviet Union. Some of us on the left had also been very glad indeed to see the end of the Russian empire and the Cold War. But nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.

Ronald Reagan claimed that the Russian language had no word for "freedom." (The word is "svoboda"; it's quite well attested in Russian literature.) Ronald Reagan said that intercontinental ballistic missiles (not that there are any non-ballistic missiles—a corruption of language that isn't his fault) could be recalled once launched. Ronald Reagan said that he sought a "Star Wars" defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R. Ronald Reagan professed to be annoyed when people called it "Star Wars," even though he had ended his speech on the subject with the lame quip, "May the force be with you." Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars. Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the "End Times" foreshadowed in the Bible. In the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan told Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal, on two separate occasions, that he himself had assisted personally at the liberation of the Nazi death camps.

There was more to Ronald Reagan than that. Reagan announced that apartheid South Africa had "stood beside us in every war we've ever fought," when the South African leadership had been on the other side in the most recent world war. Reagan allowed Alexander Haig to greenlight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, fired him when that went too far and led to mayhem in Beirut, then ran away from Lebanon altogether when the Marine barracks were bombed, and then unbelievably accused Tip O'Neill and the Democrats of "scuttling." Reagan sold heavy weapons to the Iranian mullahs and lied about it, saying that all the weapons he hadn't sold them (and hadn't traded for hostages in any case) would, all the same, have fit on a small truck. Reagan then diverted the profits of this criminal trade to an illegal war in Nicaragua and lied unceasingly about that, too. Reagan then modestly let his underlings maintain that he was too dense to understand the connection between the two impeachable crimes. He then switched without any apparent strain to a policy of backing Saddam Hussein against Iran. (If Margaret Thatcher's intelligence services had not bugged Oliver North in London and become infuriated because all European nations were boycotting Iran at Reagan's request, we might still not know about this.)

One could go on. I only saw him once up close, which happened to be when he got a question he didn't like. Was it true that his staff in the 1980 debates had stolen President Carter's briefing book? (They had.) The famously genial grin turned into a rictus of senile fury: I was looking at a cruel and stupid lizard. His reply was that maybe his staff had, and maybe they hadn't, but what about the leak of the Pentagon Papers? Thus, a secret theft of presidential documents was equated with the public disclosure of needful information. This was a man never short of a cheap jibe or the sort of falsehood that would, however laughable, buy him some time.

The fox, as has been pointed out by more than one philosopher, knows many small things, whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn't like him all that much. He met his second wife—the one that you remember—because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see. Year in and year out in Washington, I could not believe that such a man had even been a poor governor of California in a bad year, let alone that such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon.

However, there came a day when Mikhail Gorbachev visited Washington and when the Marriott Hotel—host of the summit press conferences—turned its restaurant into the "Glasnost Cafe." On the sidewalk, LaRouche supporters wearing Reagan masks paraded with umbrellas, in mimicry of Neville Chamberlain. I huddled from dawn to dusk with friends, wondering if it could be real. Many of those friends had twice my IQ, or let's say six times that of the then-chief executive. These friends had all deeply wanted either Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale to be, presumably successively, the president instead of Reagan. They would go on to put Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen bumper stickers on their vehicles. No doubt they wish that Mondale had been in the White House when the U.S.S.R. threw in the towel, just as they presumably yearn to have had Dukakis on watch when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I have been wondering ever since not just about the stupidity of American politics, but about the need of so many American intellectuals to prove themselves clever by showing that they are smarter than the latest idiot in power, or the latest Republican at any rate.

******

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2101842/
Click to expand...

#14 SamFisher, Jun 7, 2004
RocketMan Tex Member

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He makes some valid and truthful points, but his style reminds me of long fingernails scraping across a chalkboard.

#15 RocketMan Tex, Jun 7, 2004
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I do not like Christopher Hitchens. He make some valid points on Raygun, but his agenda appears to be "whoever is President is evil".

My opinion of Raygun starts and stops with tripling the national debt while in office (which does not take into consideration the off-the-books $500 billion S&L bailout).

#16 No Worries, Jun 7, 2004
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Originally posted by GreenVegan76
Sure Reagan was a dick, but you don't say that the day after he died.
Click to expand...

Not sure you say it two days after he died either.

#17 Rocketman95, Jun 7, 2004
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Originally posted by No Worries
I do not like Christopher Hitchens. He make some valid points on Raygun, but his agenda appears to be "whoever is President is evil".

My opinion of Raygun starts and stops with tripling the national debt while in office (which does not take into consideration the off-the-books $500 billion S&L bailout).
Click to expand...

I think Hitchens just hates anybody with any kind of power and enjoys being an intellectual contrarian.

#18 SamFisher, Jun 7, 2004

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Originally posted by GreenVegan76
Sure Reagan was a dick, but you don't say that the day after he died. Give his family (and admirers) some time to reflect.
Click to expand...

Good job, sometimes I love the class that is exposed on this board. I should know better than to come to this forum.

#19 Bogey, Jun 7, 2004
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Originally posted by Bogey
Good job, sometimes I love the class that is exposed on this board. I should know better than to come to this forum.
Click to expand...

Yeah, because there's been a huge level of disrespect thrown around by the liberal posters at the news of his death.

#20 Rocketman95, Jun 7, 2004

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