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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (138284)	4/13/2001 11:18:35 PM
From: American Spirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Reagan was a charismatic leader of the right who could charm the skirts off a nun. Many of those behind him though were crass exploiters. The same kind of greed-is-good types going after our environment now fully exploited the S+L debacle thanks to Reagan signing the Garnes-St Germaine bill (which he probably didn't even understand, being an actor with no education gradually succombing to Alzheimers). You call him insightful but he was not vigilant. And he ignored the S+L problem completely, telling aides he didn't want to hear about it. Yes the military build-up might have tipped the Soviets out of business but Reagan didn't engineer anything he just made the speeches. Yes he gave us a feeling that we had balls again after the suspicious Iran Hostage situation (perhaps rightwing CIA engineered, aka "the October Surprise) and for that we thanked him. But in other ways he simply wasn't on the ball. It was scary when a friend of mine who's father is a billionaire oil-man told me that one year after RR was out of office they had lunch with him in Bev Hills and after lunch he couldn't even remember they had ever met. They were old friends too. So who was really running the show those last few years? And what if there had been a war? RR was more a symbol for the right than anything. He looked good and had great charisma. He was able to push unpoipular things past the middle-class even at their expense. He was able to finesse his way through almost anything. But signing the S+L bill alone without understanding why or what might happen was a 600 billion mistake we are still paying for, so never forget that sometimes behind the smiling leader are the real engineers with greed on their minds and they can cost us all dearly. That's politics. But again, soft money out, more integrity in. With both parties. So support it strongly. And try to look past the facades and see the substance, though I know it's hard. Clinton was a teflon President too, which is why the right-wing hated and envied him so much. When they couldn't defeat him they went after his sex life and even his wife. We spent 100 million bucks to find out Monica gave him a BJ. Talk about smaller government.

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (138284)	4/13/2001 11:28:32 PM
From: dale_laroy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

"The investment in Military build-up and technology created the fruit of the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union and the technology seeds of the information economy." Back in the late seventies, the RAND Corporation was commissioned to do a study on what steps taken by the U.S. could bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union by the end of the 80s. They ran many simulations assuming multiple strategies. The results were that, no matter what the U.S. did the Soviet Union would collapse by the end of the 80s. The greatest difference was that the greater the U.S. military buildup, the greater the risk of a preemptive nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. If the simulations were accurate, Reagan actually delayed the collapse of the Soviet Union by anywhere from a few months to a couple of years. Then again, in the early 80s, the computers of the National Weather Service were predicting supersonic winds at ground level. The National Weather Service, instead of going with these predictions, stated they were pretty sure the simulations had broken down. Personally, I think that while one simulation would not have been very conclusive, the fact that all the simulation of the RAND Corporation indicated that the Soviet Union would collapse by the end of the 80s regardless of what the U.S. did places the argument that Reagan was responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union in serious jeopardy.