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


To: Michael M who wrote (56584)10/1/1999 12:38:00 AM
From: E  Read Replies (3) | Respond to of 108807
 
The reason I have to keep mentioning that Reagan was a puppet is because you keep forgetting it and acting as though he was an actual, real-life president, running a country. I wish you would stop doing that!

I will call him the Stepford President now, since you don't like "puppet." Who runs Stepford types? Handlers? Programmers? Maybe you will like that more than "puppeteers."

Michael! I'm the one who said it was an unappetizing menu to choose from! They're all crappy! I might lean toward Carter simply on the basis of his low body count in foreign misadventures and his evident personal decency, though he surely did have his limitations as a president. I do happen to have a particular distaste for war criminals, though; so focusing on that criterion, I would put RR way down on my personal list of faves.

You write:

<<<I fail to see how you can hold Reagan responsible for war crimes and at the same time claim he was out of touch with reality -- literally had no idea what was going on. Very curious.>>>

Hey, you take your choice! Was he, to you, a war criminal, or, was he non-culpable morally because he couldn't mentally grasp the constitutional restrictions he was violating in sponsoring the murderous contra exercise?

I think, though, that moral non-culpability due to simplemindedness would not be a legal defense before a war crimes tribunal, even though it has a certain feeling of fairness to it-- a child-like mind isn't "guilty" in the same way an adult mind would be.



To: Michael M who wrote (56584)10/1/1999 12:43:00 AM
From: E  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 108807
 
While you and your fellow Reagan-admirers are festooning his colorized image, please try to figure out how to drape this strand attractively around his shoulders:

Edmund Morris on Reagan's ecological understanding of the real world, from Newsweek excerpts:

"The world that rotates inside his cerebellum is, if not beautiful, encouragingly rich and self-renewing. It is washed by seas whose natural "ozone" produces a healthful brown smog over coastal highways, and rinsed by rivers that purify themselves whenever they flow over gravel. Its rocks suppurate with so much untapped oil that Alaska "alone" has more petroleum reserves than Saudi Arabia. Americans should not feel guilty about pumping this bounty into their private cars; the automobile has "exactly the same" fuel-efficiency rating as the bus.

Reagan's world is not entirely without environmental problems. It glows with the 'radioactivity' of coal burners (much more dangerous than nuclear plants), and is plagued by 'deadly diseases spread by insects, because pesticides such as DDT have been prematurely outlawed.' Acid rain, caused by an excess of trees...
"

Eeewww, I just got tired of typing. I do appreciate, though, as giggle-evoking evidence (I am a giggler) of my point that Ronald Reagan was a dimwit, and so someone else was clearly running the country (the "programmers," Michael -- Stepford presidents have to be run by somebody, don't they?), the following notes on the guy's views:

"'Almost all' [of world leaders], with the exception of Margaret Thatcher, are older than himself; China seems determined to reincorporate with Taiwan, although Reagan's personal preference would be to recognize them both; similarly North and South Vietnam should never have been permitted to join, having been 'separate nations for centuries.'..."

Do you think, as Neocon does, I believe, that these items are instances of "misspeaking"?

Oh, Michael. So much evidence, so little time to type....