Steve, One good thing we can say about Reagan: when his philosophy proved not to work, he changed his mind. I don't think we have that type of flexibility in govt. any more and are not likely to get it with another four years of Bush or Kerry. When his tax cuts were a failure, Reagan put on what was, at the time, the largest tax increase in history, followed by another tax increase. That may have saved the country before it was too late, and Bush and Clinton did even more to right the listing boat. When his tough guy stand on the USSR didn't work, he agreed to nuclear disarmament, something he swore he would never do. That allowed the Bryzhenski gambit of bogging the Soviets down in Afghanistan to play out.
I don't agree with the criticism about the fact he armed Saddam and created Al Qaida. Both were great ideas at the time and neither of those entities, separately, or together, matched a smidgeon of the threat from the USSR. To fight them without involving US troops was brilliant and providing Saddam as a bulwark so they couldn't leverage their victory with a slaughter of Sunnis and a taking of oil fields made sense.
On Central America, South African apartheid, Lebanon amd corporate cronyism, he comes off much worse. On Aids, he looks like a bum. But, his wife did change her mind and now supports stem cell research. C'mon, Nancy, make Geron go up. Squash Bush and his goofy ideas. <G> |
