Monday, June 07, 2004
Reagan
Being too young to really remember much of Ronald Reagan's Presidency, I'm left to hear about it from other people. Obviously after someone notable dies, you tend to hear the good things about their life. That being said, get ready for a major whitewash of Reagan's major faults-Iran-Contra, support of Hussein, etc.
Hitchens isn't afraid to kick a guy who's down or dead.
Also from Slate, Timothy Noah on how Reagan taught the GOP to be irresponsible:
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Hitchens isn't afraid to kick a guy who's down or dead.
"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."
Also from Slate, Timothy Noah on how Reagan taught the GOP to be irresponsible:
"But the only hot war waged during the Reagan administration was to remove a comic-opera Marxist government from the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada. The United States retreated from Lebanon after a suicide bomber killed more than 200 American soldiers. It is seldom observed that Saddam's gassing of the Kurds, which George W. Bush rightly denounced prior to the Iraq war, occurred on Reagan's watch. In 1984, when the Reagan administration got its first inkling that Iraq was engaged in chemical warfare, it chose not to make a fuss. The most ambitious foreign intervention during the Reagan administration--the funnelling of aid to the Nicaraguan contras--was done illegally, and, after it was discovered, embroiled Reagan's second term in a scandal from which it never recovered."
