Ronald Reagan dead at 93

[Tyek]

You guys are completely off topic again.

We are here to debate who is tougher, Karae or Winnow. I hate to see people derail a thread with Politics and debate, especially in a thread that is obviously about those two and not about anything else.

[Kylere]

I have ten bucks that says Winnow would slap down Karae like a Sumo on a flyweight.

[Aslanna]

Sounds like a Pay-Per-View event just waiting to happen.

[Arilain]

I want animated avatars to go at it! Which is better? Karae's Avatar or Winnow's? It's an even match!

[Marbus]

I just can't see why people can't give credit where credit is due...

Yes Reagan did help bring about the cold war, he did so by bankrupting the Soviet Union plain and simple. While that helped "win" the Cold War it did a lot of increase gang violence and send the country into a downward financial spiral with ridiculas interest rates thus helping to widen the gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots."

Bush Sr. tried to get us out of this with the Gulf War but it didn't work and thus... the people spoke and he didn't win a second term.

Clinton got into office and cut spending to the point of balancing the budget and helping to bring us into economic prosperity. The 90s ROCKED and while he couldn't have single handedly brought it about his Presedency was in power and were instrumental in keeping the country on top.

If we had any negatives in the 90s it was John Robert Starr who wasted millions of taxpayer dollers trying to get Clinton on a Land scandle but instead conceded to just bringing out he got a blow... the reaction of the ultraconservatives in this country to which made us the laughing stock of the world.

Marb

[Mawafu]

Dereliction of Duty by Lt. Col. Robert Patterson is a book I would suggest reading to see what kind of a president Clinton really was. Patterson was the "nuclear football" carrier (the guy with the nuke briefcase always by the preisdent's side) for part of Clinton's term in office. A good read regardless if you liked Clinton or not to give you an insight on what he was like behind closed doors.

Taken from the publisher to give you an idea what it's about

Lt. Col. Robert “Buzz” Patterson exposes the terrifying, behind-the-scenes story of the years when the most irresponsible President in our history had his finger on the nuclear trigger. Dereliction of Duty is the inside story of the damage Bill Clinton did to the U.S. military and how he compromised our national security. From his laughable salutes, to his arrogant, anti-military staffers, the message came through loud and clear: the Clinton Administration had nothing but contempt for America’s men and women in uniform.

Dereliction of Duty is the book every American concerned about our national security has been waiting for—written by a military man who was an eyewitness inside the Clinton White House, and who can no longer in good conscience keep silent.

[Chmee]

I just can't see why people can't give credit where credit is due...

Yes Reagan did help bring about the cold war, he did so by bankrupting the Soviet Union plain and simple. While that helped "win" the Cold War it did a lot of increase gang violence and send the country into a downward financial spiral with ridiculas interest rates thus helping to widen the gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots."

Huh? How did it increase gang violence? We did have a recession in the early 80s, but that was probably inevitable in returning to a sounder monetary policy to try to get away from the high inflation and high unemployment "stagflation" that had manifested. Interest rates peaked early in Reagan's first term, and fell after that after having been a problem for long before Reagan came into office. Granted, a good deal of the credit to this goes to Volcker the head of the Federal Reserve at the time (who was a Carter appointee). Reagan deserves some credit though for letting him continue even when the economy got fairly ugly before inflation came under control. After that, things improved markedly.

Bush Sr. tried to get us out of this with the Gulf War but it didn't work and thus... the people spoke and he didn't win a second term.

Clinton got into office and cut spending to the point of balancing the budget and helping to bring us into economic prosperity. The 90s ROCKED and while he couldn't have single handedly brought it about his Presedency was in power and were instrumental in keeping the country on top.

The most significant cutting Clinton did was to the defense budget. Remember the "peace dividend". I am not saying this was a bad thing in all, considering that the main military threat, the Soviet Union, had disappeared. But keep in mind that he did have the luxury of it being gone. Clinton did come into office with a bunch of bad economic ideas like ClintonCare, stimulus packages, etc. Most of those never got implemented though. To his credit, Clinton abandoned most of them and did a fairly decent job overall economically.

[Kluden]

I suggest reading that book too, it is both hilarious and scary at the same time!

Although I wouldn't put too much stock in the Clinton slamming the book basicly does, because I have no doubt every president ever could have a book like this written about them that makes them sound just as bad.

But the comedic value of some of the crap Clinton did is absolutely comedy gold!

[Marbus]

Chmee I attribute much of the gang violence in the late 80s to the economic devide between the classes and a government that seemingly didn't truly didn't care. Great post though, I think you are right on target. I did mean to say, that much of what Clinton cut was the military... possibly even too much but it did help to balance the budget and get the country going again.

Marb

[Kilmoll the Sexy]

I don't know that it would be any kind of quick win for Winnow. Karae kind of reminds me of Danny Bonaduce....and he did fairly well in celebrity boxing. So Winnow would have his work cut out for him......

On the other hand, liberals do tend to be pussies....

[Aslanna]

Another take...

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ ... TopStories

Gorby had the lead role, not Gipper


By LAWRENCE MARTIN
Thursday, June 10, 2004 - Page A23



Fiction has its place -- especially at the time of one's passing. And so, the American airwaves glisten these days with tales about how it was Ronald Reagan who engineered the defeat of communism and the end of the Cold War.

It was his arms buildup, Republican admirers say, and his menacing rhetoric that brought the Soviets to their knees and changed the world forever. He was a pleasant man, the 40th president, which makes this fairy tale easier to swallow than some of history's other canards. Truth be known, however, the Iron Curtain's collapse was hardly Ronald Reagan's doing.

It was Mikhail Gorbachev, who with a sweeping democratic revolution at home and one peace initiative after another abroad, backed the Gipper into a corner, leaving him little choice -- actors don't like to be upstaged -- but to concede there was a whole new world opening up over there.

As a journalist based first in Washington, then in Moscow, I was fortunate to witness the intriguing drama from both ends.

In R.R., the Soviet leader knew he was dealing with an archetype Cold Warrior. To bring him around to "new thinking" would require a rather wondrous set of works. And so the Gorbachev charm offensive began. The first offering, in 1985, was the Kremlin's unilateral moratorium on nuclear tests. "Propaganda!" the White House declared.

Then Mr. Gorbachev announced a grandiose plan to rid the world of nuclear weapons by 2000. Just another hoax, the Reagan men cried. More Commie flim-flam.

Then came another concession -- Kremlin permission for on-site arms inspections on Soviet land -- and then the Reykjavik summit. In Iceland, Mr. Gorbachev put his far-reaching arms-reduction package on the table and Mr. Reagan, to global condemnation, walked away, offering nothing in return.

Glasnost and perestroika became the new vernacular. For those in the White House like Richard Perle, the prince of darkness who still thought it was all a sham, Gorby now began a withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan. He released the dissident icon Andrei Sakharov and hundreds of other political prisoners. He made big strides on freedom of the press, immigration and religion. He told East European leaders that the massive Soviet military machine would no longer prop up their creaking dictatorships. He began the process of something unheard of in Soviet history -- democratic elections.

By now, the U.S. administration was reeling. Polls were beginning to show that, of all things unimaginable, a Soviet leader was the greatest force for world peace. An embarrassed Mr. Reagan finally responded in kind. Nearing the end of his presidency, he came to Moscow and he signed a major arms-control agreement and warmly embraced Mr. Gorbachev. A journalist asked the president if he still thought it was the evil empire. "No," he replied, "I was talking about another time, another era."

The recasting of the story now suggests that President Reagan's defence-spending hikes -- as if there hadn't been American military buildups before -- somehow intimidated the Kremlin into its vast reform campaign. Or that America's economic strength -- as if the Soviets hadn't always been witheringly weak by comparison -- made the Soviet leader do it.

In fact, Mr. Gorbachev could have well perpetuated the old totalitarian system. He still had the giant Soviet armies, the daunting nuclear might and the chilling KGB apparatus at his disposal.

But he had decided that the continuing clash of East-West ideologies was senseless, that his sick and obsolescent society was desperate for democratic air. His historic campaign that followed wasn't about Ronald Reagan. It would have happened with or without this president. Rather, it was about him, Mikhail Gorbachev: his will, his inner strength, his human spirit. As for the Gipper, he was bold and wise enough, to shed his long-held preconceptions and become the Russian's admirable companion in the process.

In the collapse of communism he deserves credit not as an instigator, but an abettor. Best Supporting Actor.

OMG.. Who to believe!

http://www.tol.cz/look/TOL/article.tpl? ... icle=12240

The Man Who Scared the Empire to Death



It seems it is possible to make history without even paying much heed to what you are doing, without even being aware of the implications, and without taking any pride in what has been achieved, as if everything that happens does so naturally.

Yet the late Ronald Reagan was the man to whom the Soviet Union owes its demise and to whom Eastern Europe owes the end of what it called “the Soviet occupation” and its accession to a quite different Europe.

For a start, the Soviet people owe him for the introduction of a bastardized version of the “prohibition act,” [TOL: a reference to the anti-drink campaign launched by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, a move partly driven by his desire to increase Soviet productivity] and then, after what seemed an endless sequence of major and minor problems and mishaps that befell the empire, the emergence of the great reformer Boris Yeltsin, whose rule in turn brought about the advent of the great stabilizer Vladimir Putin and life as we know it today.

Of course, Ronald Reagan was no Nostradamus and during the reign of Yuri Andropov in the USSR, he could never have foreseen the advent of Putin. Yet there is something symbolic about the fact that Ronald Reagan died a natural death at the age of 93 in his bed surrounded by his loved ones. He died at a time when Putin rules Russia, after the Russian president had just been sworn in for his second term in office.

I am deeply convinced that none other than Ronald Reagan--the former Hollywood actor who wiped out bandits and swindlers in the Wild West’s outhouses, to paraphrase Putin, and did exactly the same with the left-wingers and communists among his colleagues, who later became president and whose mental faculties were openly derided by the best commentators both in the Soviet Union and in the States--was the one who triggered all the changes that befell the Soviet Union and, subsequently, Russia.

For the sovok, as the Soviet people used to contemptuously refer to their homeland, Reagan was a kind of American Ivan the Simpleton from Russian folk tales, who either inadvertently or by some ingenious intent--God knows which--pushed the first domino in a long row of dominoes, and the empire collapsed, ushering in the changes. And all that happened because Ronald Reagan was a very simple person who, in spite of his simplicity, was so ingenious that he was destined to succeed in fulfilling his most complicated task.

“They are all dying on me,” he joked as the Soviet Union buried Chernenko, the third decrepit Soviet ruler after Brezhnev and Andropov to die while Reagan was in office.

He defeated and outwitted them all by inventing--especially for the old Kremlin dotards--an exciting and terrifying fairytale, the horror story titled “Star Wars.” They had almost all certainly watched George Lucas’ “Star Wars” at closed performances organized for them in great secrecy.

And the secrecy of those screenings inevitably intensified the impact of a film on those who were deemed themselves as men of genius. And since many others had not seen those films and had not known what was going on in the Soviet leaders’ heads, the Kremlin moviegoers had no one to consult with.

The Kremlin dotards were scared of the prospect of Star Wars. The first time they really got scared was when they gunned down a South Korean jet killing dozens of passengers on board. They seriously geared up for war with the States then.

And upon hearing the horror tale about Star Wars, they suddenly realized that the country they ruled was underdeveloped technologically and militarily. So scared were they that they opted for the young Gorbachev. He came to office, like all of his predecessors, with no clear-cut agenda and no definite plans.

But to the Kremlin elders he seemed tough enough to modernize the country, although the concept of modernization was somewhat unclear in their minds. No one in this country, neither the people nor the establishment, sincerely sought radical changes or reforms. Gorbachev was not the only one to have no plan of action. Nobody had a plan.

They daydreamed, harboring illusions and believing it was possible to “improve” the Communist Party, to build socialism with a human face; they believed that the planned economy could be efficient provided the planning was done more thoroughly; they believed the friendship among the brotherly Soviet peoples would last forever; and they believed that eradicating alcoholism and boosting labor productivity was possible by forcing a Russian worker to abstain from drinking before two in the afternoon. And only today does everyone realize how absurd all those ideas were!

After hearing too much about Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars tales, the Kremlin geriatrics panicked. Today many of the steps taken then, in the mid-1980s, seem to some to be the first steps aimed at steering clear of the legacy of Soviet-era idiocy.

But the real tragedy for the country is that by embarking on the road to change our leaders were never guided by their own sincere convictions, or a true awareness that something needed to be changed, that the Russian people deserve a better, happier life. They did so because they were scared.

They were forced to take those steps, at first out of the fear that Reagan’s West was stronger militarily, and then upon realizing they had lost the historic race against another superpower that had proven to be more powerful. Nonetheless, the Soviet leaders never felt guilty for what they had done; no, they claimed they had done everything right but that the other side was pushing harder and our allies had walked out on us.

They were scared to death! By Ronald Reagan. Now that the man is dead we will have to wait for another Reagan to come and scare us into new, more or less decisive changes. And that is the way we live--from one scare to another.

"The Man Who Scared the Empire to Death"

I guess we'll never know!



And an unrelated baby panda.. Because everyone loves pandas!

[Kelshara]

Awww that is so cute

[Siji]

Fuck Reagan.

I'm so fucking sick of every form of media spamming the public with him. Before this week I had no real opinion on Reagan, good or bad. Didn't give it much thought, and when he was in office I didn't much care about politics. But right now, I'm just sick of him. He's dead. Move along already.

[Winnow]

Fuck Reagan.

I'm so fucking sick of every form of media spamming the public with him. Before this week I had no real opinion on Reagan, good or bad. Didn't give it much thought, and when he was in office I didn't much care about politics. But right now, I'm just sick of him. He's dead. Move along already.

Reagan invented the motorcycle.