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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (56449)	9/29/1999 6:03:00 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

And yet- he says about Reagan and IRan Contra that although Reagan clearly DID trade arms for hostages, the pure force of his own belief made him sure he did NOT. In other words the man was so convincing, such a good actor, he could even convince himself. Such people may indeed be capable of leading people- but since they are not in touch with reality one has to wonder where they will lead. I think that far from being some regenerative force, Reagan allowed Americans to become full of false pride and complacency. We needed a leader to say "America IS great but not perfect- here is what is broke, let's fix it" , but instead we got morning in America, and pandering to the corporations, and no serious introspection and no serious address to our true national and cultural malaise- which is STILL with us. Ignoring problems may make them seem to disappear but oddly enough they don't ACTUALLY disappear. And people wonder why disaffected youth go off on shooting sprees? Why our jails are filled with drug offenders (who have no business being in prison)? Why, why, why? Because we never address the really hard problems in ways that make long term sense. We go with the "feel good". And Ronnie baby made everyone feel good (unless you were poor, or close to being poor- then he didn't make you feel so good). It is easy to say you don't want intellectual presidents if you only want to minister to the short term exigencies, in reactive short sighted ways. I grant you a moron with no vision is really good for that.

To: Neocon who wrote (56449)	9/29/1999 8:54:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 108807

I think that all of what you quote Morris as saying in his official biography of Reagan is probably true, and am unsurprised by it, never having heard anyone say that Reagan wasn't a nice guy. (It is usually indicated that his niceness was of a particular, and rather odd, detached, kind. In a radio interview I heard in the car, for example, Morris replied to the question "Do you think President Reagan cared about the poor and unfortunate in this country?", "No.") I won't read the book, but I'll pick up the Newsweek and see what else Morris says about Ronald Reagan. I agree with everything X says in this post: Message 11400595 It is astonishing to me that a person like you, Neocon, can admire a man who was patently a puppet, and who didn't know the difference between the life he had lived and the lives he had pretended on the movie screen he had lived; or simply, in his gaga way, those he had imagined himself living-- presumably because doing so made him feel a certain pleasant way. Neocon, this is not normal ideation; the man was deranged. You liked this puppet, though, and approved of how the puppeteers pulled its strings. Is all. Those puppeteers were clever men, indeed, and they knew how to manage this simple fellow so that he would believe that the policies they favored were the very ones necessary to the implementation of the simple precepts he comprehended; or at that he least felt good mouthing. And so that even clever fellows like you would buy the package, in spite of your having observed that there had to be something wrong with the brain of the President of the United States. Really, when you think about it, the whole thing is quite horrifying. Our president was nutso.