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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DMaA who wrote (49960)	6/11/2004 8:25:45 AM
From: Tom Clarke	Respond to of 793964

The effect, to my ears, was a liberal pretending his head was exploding from listening to Reagan. ROFL! Good one!

To: DMaA who wrote (49960)	6/11/2004 8:27:44 AM
From: Andrew N. Cothran	Respond to of 793964

Reagan taught us to stand tall as Americans Published June 11, 2004 The evolution from Kennedy Democrats to Reagan Republicans at our house wasn't that inconceivable. The same kind of changeover happened in millions of other families. And today, the late President Ronald Reagan will be buried. So today is a day of reckoning about such things. Both Reagan and Kennedy were appealing. Each cut taxes and fought the communists, and each had his Hollywood connections. At our house, we liked Kennedy, especially my dad. Kennedy couldn't stand communists, and my dad couldn't and, as often happens in families, we couldn't either. This wasn't a theoretical argument. It was personal, since the communists didn't try to convince my dad with fine arguments about the brotherhood of man. Instead, they repeatedly tried to kill him in the old country. They shot up the village and stole food from starving people at gunpoint and killed those who disagreed with them, including teachers, and used their politics as cover to settle disputes by gutting those they stole from. But that was over there, and my brothers and I were born here, desperate to become real Americans. So we ducked and covered with the best of them at school and waited for nuclear annihilation. It seems quaint now, like episodes of "Bewitched" you might flip past while scanning for something to watch on TV. We've forgotten. In this country we forget everything. We're trained to forget, so we can buy the new stuff somebody's selling. The idea that the Soviet Union was intent on world domination seems quaint now too. But it wasn't quaint then. We lived every day with it. We tried to ignore it, but it wormed away at us, working on the insides of everyone in this country. The missiles were never fired, but I figure they killed just the same. Haven't you ever wondered how many people died too soon, worn down over time by anxieties about nuclear war? After Kennedy was assassinated, we supported Johnson, but only because he was president. Supporting the president was what you did in times of war. I was just a kid, but LBJ lost me when he picked up his dogs by the ears until they howled. By the late '60s, with the race riots and the protests and the Vietnam War going badly, order was required and Nixon was the one at our house. But then Daley was the one at our house too. At our home, we respected Nixon, though baseball was more important to us then than politics. Nixon had this pinched look on his face. It was the look of a person who decided early on that he would never be loved, so he decided to be feared. That kind of man can order people around. But he can't lead. He can't inspire people to do great things. He was feared, and finally hated. Then came Watergate and revulsion with Nixon, and the Democrats beckoned again with Carter. We adopted Carter at our house. The consensus around the kitchen table was that Carter was a decent man. But we confused decency with strength. The Soviets weren't confused. Carter was a hand-wringer. Hand-wringers make fantastic equivocators and can rationalize bad behavior, explain subtle nuances, encourage other hand-wringers to increase the size of their bureaucracies. And hand-wringers can discuss all those shades of gray that the East Coast establishment keeps reminding us about in certain editorials. But there's one problem. Hand-wringers know many things but don't believe in much. They're moral relativists. There is no right and wrong in them. Only those shades of gray. And shades of gray can't lead human beings. The Soviets figured Carter for a weakling and us for weaklings for electing him, and in a sense we were weaklings then. They moved in Central and South America, Asia and Africa and kept hold of Europe. And we didn't have the leadership to confront them or stop them. But then came Reagan. He didn't care about satisfying the establishment by waxing on about shades of gray. He understood that there was good and evil in the world and that we weren't evil. The Soviets were evil because they squashed the individual in the name of the collective. Big central governments everywhere are determined to maintain themselves at the cost of the individual. This is the nature, the danger, of bureaucracies. Reagan understood this. He rebuilt the military, confronted the communists and broke them. He cut taxes and unleashed the vitality of the U.S. economy. He did it all by sticking to conservative principles and was respected by Americans. This outraged the hand-wringers and the shades-of-gray crowd. It enrages them still, which is why they're so eager to diminish him, to peel him, even in death. And what happened in the world? They call it freedom. They call it the American Century. They don't call it the Soviet Century. Thank you, President Reagan. jskass@tribune.com