RIP Ronald Reagan

[muckefuck]

I'm still keeping my exposure to news (particularly television news) low, so I haven't seen anything of the "flood" of eulogies that many on my Friends list are complaining about. I did do a Google search on "Reagan achievements", hoping to jog my memory with a solid, concise list. Out of the first twenty hits, only three seem positive enough to be considered encomia and one of these is over six years old. (The author laments the lack of a true successor and the eclipse of the Reaganite legacy among conservatives; it left me truly curious how he would evaluate Shrub, whose few good qualities--chief among them hawkish moral conviction--are among those he most admired in Reagan.) Most speak, at best, of a "mixed legacy". I'm guessing that this eulogy deluge is mostly a televised thing.

Some of you have mentioned that you hope there's this much of a fuss when Carter kicks it. Now, by contrast to the last four presidents, there's someone with an unmixed legacy: I can't name a single good thing he did while in office. Admittedly, I was very young at the time, but I'm hardly alone in conceiving of the late 70's as a time of stagnation and malaise. He's a good man and all, but, then, so was Neville Chamberlain, I'm sure. Should he also have a motorway named for him?

I've also heard several people deny that Reagan won us the Cold War. Or they grudgingly admit that he did only to point out that the USSR would've collapsed anyway. Yes, but when? In two years? In fifty? At what additional cost in suffering? Again, to reach for a WWII analogy, the Nazi regime in Germany was unsustainable in the long term and would've collapsed eventually, too. Does that mean that FDR's offensive in Europe wasn't necessary? And does anyone--even paleolithic bedrock conservatives--deny that he won WWII for the Allies? (Not in the sense that he did it alone, of course, but in the sense that victory wouldn't have occurred without his leadership.)

princeofcairo has mentioned to me how he's forced to grit his teeth and admit that a president whose social policies he abhors was the only candidate who would've made the morally correct choices and saved the world from barbarism. He's hoping for the day when American liberals will come to view Reagan in the same way he views FDR. After a decade of resistence, I'm willing to. I won't be shedding any tears for the Gipper, but I'm not about to join in the singing and dancing on his grave either.

Comments

[gopower.livejournal.com]

As I recall, Ford negotiated the Panama Canal treaty -- a fact Reagan tried to use against him; Carter only signed it. Much like Clinton claims credit for Nafta when, in fact, the Reagan administration conceived it and G.H.W. Bush largely negotiated it.

While I can't see that the treaty generated any tangible benefits, even to Panama, it clearly has not had any negative effects on the U.S. So if the rest of the world feels better with one fewer example of U.S. dominance staring them in the face, God bless 'em.

[carneggy.livejournal.com]

Well, Ford and Nixon had both been trying to negotiate the same Panama Canal treaty for years, so it's arguable as to who should get the credit.

[gopower.livejournal.com]

The treaty was signed in September, 1977, only eight months into the Carter administration and likely less than six months after his cabinet was confirmed and put in place. That means either that he worked incredibly fast on a complicated international treaty or that it was already mostly completed.