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

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

The ability to have trade relations with one of the biggest countries on the planet would also be useful, I'd think.

If sheer size was all that mattered when it came to trade, then only China scholars would ever have heard of a 1,000 sq. km. speck on the map called "Hong Kong". How recently was it that our bilateral trade with all the rest of China exceeded that of our trade with this one little port? Getting back to the point, did Carter actually establish trade relations with China or just "make it possible"?

We haven't ever had diplomatic relations with North Korea. I guess that means we never negotiate with them about anything. If only we could get them accept one of our ambassadors, all this lingering tension from the Korean War would just melt away!

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Getting back to the point, did Carter actually establish trade relations with China or just "make it possible"?

Credit where credit is due:

"On March 1, 1979, the United States and China formally established embassies in Beijing and Washington, DC. During 1979, outstanding private claims were resolved, and a bilateral trade agreement was concluded."

State Department Background Note: China

This was a bipartisan effort, started with Nixon and continuing into the Reagan years, but the Carter administration did AFAICT conclude the first trade agreement with China.