Reagan and Bush

So, I've made no secret that I'm not President Bush's biggest fan. Reagan, on the other hand, I wish dearly that I could have met. If there is one man that proves that principle alone can get you somewhere, I believe that man was Ronald Reagan. It's been interesting in the last two weeks to hear how suddenly popular President Reagan was. After all, for the last two decades he's been a favorite punching bag of the liberals who uniformly dispise him and often call him the worst President in American history (they must have forgotten that Jimmy Carter was President for four years, but then so did most of the rest of the country.) It's good to see that once you die, you actually become more popular, my guess is that this happens becuase you can no longer confound liberals with that pesky thing known as the truth. They are free to re-write your legacy since they seem to control history currently. So it's interesting to consider what liberals said about Reagan while he was in office. I found this at National Review and I just took the whole thing. I hope no one over there minds (not that they read this site anyway...) It's a political quiz of twenty quotes from various media outlets. Try to guess which was said about Reagan and which was said about President Bush:



20 Quotes: Is it Reagan or W.?



1)“European discomfort with the President, however, goes beyond the political differences that preceded and will outlast his presidency. It has, as well, a personal basis. He appears to Europeans to be ill equipped for the responsibility that he bears, a kind of cowboy figure, bellicose, ignorant, with a simplistic view of the world…



2)“[The President] came to Europe to persuade people that he is not the shallow, nuclear cowboy of certain unkind assessments. Said [a] White House spokesman … on the eve of departure, ‘Some in Europe do not know or understand him.’ But now that the president has been among them… Europeans may think they got him right the first time.”



3)“For many Europeans… America has become paranoid… [which has] led them to take their distance from us… Mutual recrimination becomes political action. Both sides of the Atlantic, writes … an editor of the influential Hamburg weekly Die Zeit, are ‘losing interest in each other.’ … The estrangement has not come naturally. The communality of heritage and beliefs between the United States and Europe is old and powerful and has withstood frequent vicissitudes. However, an accumulation of events and developments has built up enough discord to threaten the most solid of foundations.”



4)“The anti-American theme, a popular subject for campaigning politicians, is aimed mostly at U.S. policy and the [U.S.] administration. This country is pictured as a French David standing up to an American Goliath. [The French foreign minister] warned during the … controversy: ‘There is a progressive divorce between Washington and Europe …. The U.S. seems totally indifferent to our problems.’”



5)“In a day of protests across Western Europe, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated against the [American policy]… The protest organizers said about 1.2 million people took part in the demonstrations…. Hundreds of thousands jammed central London in what was said to be the largest protest of its kind in British history. In Rome, an estimated 350,000 marchers paraded through the center of the city.”



6) “Europe Sees U.S. Foreign Policy As Out Of Control” – Los Angeles Times headline



7) “Speaking to members of the American Stock Exchange, [Senator Edward] Kennedy said, ‘Our present course is taking the United States toward unilateral intervention … toward a war, whether we want it or not, whether we like it or not, (that) will inevitably involve American forces in combat. But surely, an American invasion… would plunge us into the most unwanted, unnecessary and unjustified war in our history,’ Kennedy said…. Kennedy said Congress must propose ‘an alternative policy with a real prospect of success.’ ‘So, as a first step, we must call off the dogs of war,’ he said.”



8)“[W]e have a President who is obsessed by the subject. [Nicaragua for Ronald Reagan – or Iraq for George W. Bush] is his Moby Dick. Like a political Ahab, he pursues it beyond reason, beyond humanity, beyond safety. In his frustration, he spews out rage and hate, fear and falsehood.”



9) “[The President] has substituted a mindless militarism for a foreign policy… frightening our friends… Already, the cost of [the President’s] policies is devastating to our country in economic strength, in diplomatic influence, in national security, in moral stature.”



10) “‘This has been a foreign policy without a guiding star,’ said… a former official in Republican administrations… ‘It has been the most ideological administration of U.S foreign relations I've seen and the least conceptual, in terms of a clear vision of what the world ought to be like and what we would do to get there.’”



11)“The tangible achievements of his first term have been relatively modest. His economic program, in the judgment of many experts, has succeeded almost in spite of itself – and the current recovery is built on record deficits that will burden the nation for a generation. His foreign policy has lacked coherence…”



12) “Unilateral intervention by a truculent and trigger-happy Uncle Sam might delight some U.S. citizens – frustrated by events, eager for easy answers – but elsewhere… it would only serve to reaffirm the worst fears…”



13) “The United States has a myopic, ideological foreign policy that really isn't a policy at all, but a collection of maneuvers produced by prejudice and instinct. The men responsible for American diplomacy, it seems, often fail to grasp they have put us into grave trouble around the world…. [The President] has angered and undermined his closest ally in Europe, [the British Prime Minister], and he has aggravated the gravest problem facing the United States, a problem symbolized by the largest protest demonstrations in Europe since World War II...”



14)“To win that vote [congressional vote to authorize support for its foreign policy goals], the Administration is now reduced to McCarthyite tactics: the insinuation that foes of its … policy are … stooges or worse. Can Congress be whipped by these tactics into a policy of such moral, military and political degradation?”



15)“When a politician claims that God favors his programs, alarm bells should ring… If there is anything that should be illegitimate in the American system, it is such use of sectarian religiosity to sell a political program. And this was done not by some fringe figure, but by the President of the United States.”



16)“What is the world to think when the greatest of powers is led by a man who applies to the most difficult human problem a simplistic theology – one in fact rejected by most theologians?... What must the leaders of Western Europe think of such a speech? … The exaggeration and the simplicities are there not only in the rhetoric but in the process by which he makes decisions.”



17)“Perhaps even more dangerous, [the President’s] smug view, if further inculcated in Americans, will preclude self-examination, humility, a willingness to concede error. Are we so clearly a God-directed, chosen people that we have no need to question our virtue, or the evil of our rivals? If [the President] really thinks so, he has shaken off the strongest restraints on human conduct – doubt and fear.”



18) "[Pollster Lou Harris] believes that [the President] is polarizing the country more than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt and that, when such strong political polarization occurs, it tends to lead to a greater voter turnout. That would benefit the Democrats…"



19) "'[The President] has been a divider, not a uniter… The American people will reject four more years of danger, four more years of pain,’ [a leading congressional Democrat] said."



20) "[One state Democratic chairman] said: '[The President] has a lot of problems. The less he does, the better he does; the more he does, the worse he does. He keeps polarizing the voters, and the Republican Party is not big enough to allow that. An incumbent President must unite the country, not divide it. It’s unbelievably bad strategy on their part.'"



Don't scroll down until you're ready for the answers!

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The answer? They're all about Ronald Reagan:

1) Michael Mandelbaum, Foreign Affairs, ”America and the World 1985”

2) Mary McGrory, Washington Post, June 10, 1982

3) New York Times, May 9, 1982

4) US News & World Report, December 20, 1982

5) James M. Markham, New York Times, October 23, 1983

6)Los Angeles Times headline, December 4, 1986

7) United Press International, June 11, 1985

8) Anthony Lewis, New York Times, March 24, 1986

9) John B. Oakes, former senior editor, New York Times, November 1, 1981

10) Don Oberdorfer, Washington Post, November 20, 1983

11) Tom Morganthau, Newsweek, August 27, 1984

12) Editorial, Los Angeles Times, August 7, 1985

13) Robert Kaiser, Washington Post, October 30, 1983

14) John B. Oakes, New York Times, March 7, 1986

15) Anthony Lewis, New York Times, March 10, 1983

16) Anthony Lewis, New York Times, March 10, 1983

17) Tom Wicker, New York Times, March 15, 1983

18) Haynes Johnson, Washington Post, January 29, 1984

19) The Associated Press, January 30, 1984

20) Dom Bonafede, The National Journal, May 5, 1984



Now, I'm sure no one reading this site is especially shocked by this. But keep this in mind when you hear about the current debate and Bush's policies. In a small way, this helps me to like President Bush just a little more. It also reminds me that some things never change.