In his mind, it appears so. If he only realized how tasteless and disrespectful his words look to many, maybe he would realize this isn't the time for a discussion on the political policy of the Reagan administration. Instead it's a time to mark the passing of a truly larger than life man, who for 8 years was the face and voice of our nation.Originally Posted by WVRed
Perhaps it would be best if we just ignore the moronic asshat.
I believe the equivalent to this word got me a one week suspension. I think he deserves the same.
If you disagree with Michael stop replying to him and baiting him to continue. Simple.
I'm not sure how many times I need to say this but dying does not make you a better person nor should it make you forget what he/she has done in their life. You can hero worship all you want, I prefer to properly account for a person's deeds.
and the "hiding behind a keyboard" bit was funny, thanks for that. Would you rather have me rent billboard space?
Ok Rush, just when exactly is it acceptable to discuss what Reagan did or did not do while in office? or, as most Republicans would think, is Reagan above and beyond all of us and nobody should ever dare say a thing about him?
Reagan is not a god and the more you glorify him without ever seriously looking at his administration, the more of an "asshat" you come off as.
Dear lord, watch the Fox News Channel, they've become the RTN (Reagan Tribute Network.)
The "moronic asshat" has as much right to lambast Reagen as you do him, note though he didn't stoop to breaking forum rules to do it either.
Michael is allowed to state his opinion and may continue to do so, even if it causes some of the others to have to look at aspects of Reagen's tenure that never touched their lives.
Reagan sentenced no one to die. Individuals, regardless if they are homosexual or heterosexual, that is not the issue, place the sentence upon themselves when they feel they can live a promiscuous lifestyle, while laughing at monogomous relationships, and think they can do so with impunity.
So I think it is hyperbole to try and divert the blame onto any one individual, whether it is a President or whoever, just because many in our society want to practice behaviour that now carries with it an even greater and more deadlier risk than just an STD, but basically a death sentence.... AIDS.
It's funny how many want more and more money for research, which I am not against one bit because they have increased research monies/grants over the last 20 years; but they are still no closer to finding a cure for this virus. But what concerns me is that many within our society still want to put the burden of accountability and responsibility on others (i.e. the government, scientists, etc), while not accepting any themselves.
And they may not be the politically correct thing to be saying; but it is the hard truth.
"In my day you had musicians who experimented with drugs. Now it's druggies experimenting with music" - Alfred G Clark (circa 1972)
Exactly.
BTW, Ive noticed the Clinton News Network and MSNBC carrying nothing but Reagan. I guess we should label them conservative now.
Does anybody listen to Air America? Id love to hear what the FoxNews wannabes have to say.
GAC, I completely agree with the vast majority of your post, but there was one part of it that bothered me.
There is a great number of people that are suffering from HIV/AIDS that acquired the disease from other means than a promiscuous life style. There are Doctors, nurses, paramedics, firefighters, police officers, etc. that have acquired the virus "in the line of duty" so to speak and in some cases have passed it on to the person that they are in a monogamous relationship with. While a large number of sufferers acquire the disease as a result of their behavior, there's other ones that acquired it through no fault of their own so I don't think it's fair to make that generalization.Reagan sentenced no one to die. Individuals, regardless if they are homosexual or heterosexual, that is not the issue, place the sentence upon themselves when they feel they can live a promiscuous lifestyle, while laughing at monogomous relationships, and think they can do so with impunity.
But I totally agree with the rest of your post. Reagan didn't kill anybody. It's not like they've found a cure for the disease. They're not even close. So no one can say that if he had paid more attention to the disease that there would have been lives saved. Three presidents and many billions of dollars later, we're still wracking up huge numbers of victims each year. Is that his fault too?
Not to mention the large number of people who did absolutely nothing at all besides have a blood transfusion, or was given a shot with a contaminated needle.There is a great number of people that are suffering from HIV/AIDS that acquired the disease from other means than a promiscuous life style. There are Doctors, nurses, paramedics, firefighters, police officers, etc. that have acquired the virus "in the line of duty" so to speak and in some cases have passed it on to the person that they are in a monogamous relationship with.
I know there are tons of things individuals can do to try to prevent getting HIV/AIDS, but I strongly dislike the implication that anyone "deserves" to get it because of their behavior. That's just wrong.
The great divider
In the orgy of fond memories of Ronald Reagan, let's keep the historical record straight: Our sunny former president could use fear and hate as political weapons when he had to.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
June 7, 2004 | I feel bound to respect Ronald Reagan, as every American should -- not least because he chose a career of public service when he could have made a lot more money doing something else, and not least because he took genuine risks for peace. (President Bush, in contrast, seems to know only how to derange the world with war.) But in the necrophiliac orgy that is now upon us, there are three messages that I -- as a historian of the rise of the modern conservative movement in the 1960s, and as a reporter on the conservative regency in election year 2004 -- wish that more people would hear.
The first is that if Reagan's partisans succeed in creating an indelible memory of him as someone that everyone loved all the time, they will have won an important political struggle with consequences for today.
The second is that if his partisans succeed in minting Reagan in public memory as a repository of bedrock principle, they will have been complicit in letting forgetting win the battle against remembering -- because on their own, conservative terms, Reagan was often a sellout.
And last, if they manage to make the rest of us remember Reagan as the embodiment of the kind of genial conservative even a liberal could love -- a refreshing counterweight to the lunatic conservatives we have to deal with now -- they will have scrambled history instead of helping to inform it. Because Reagan was always much more frightening than the sunny optimist of now-popular legend.
The Reagan memory industry has been chugging along at full steam for over a decade now, from the successful attempt to put Reagan's name on the former National Airport in Washington to the (so far) unsuccessful ones to put his mug on the dime and Mount Rushmore. Do not mistake the deeply ideological thrust behind these campaigns. The aim is to make the notion that Reagan was the most beloved American politician ever seem self-evident -- and to make the kind of militaristic, minimal-government conservatism he championed seem just as natural.
For a short period at the beginning of his presidency, after John Hinckley's assassination attempt against him, and in the middle of his term, before the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan was indeed stratospherically popular. But averaged out over his political lifetime -- Reagan first won office as governor of California in 1967, serving two terms prior to his two terms as president beginning in 1981 -- Reagan's popularity was, well, just average. Often, it was far below average.
When Reagan was governor, he worried about the "very dangerous precedent" of the state Constitution's recall provision being exploited by "well-organized groups for political recrimination." Yes, that's right. Though Reagan's latter-day acolytes led the lusty campaign to recall Democratic Gov. Gray Davis in 2003, Reagan would not have approved. And for good reason: He was the subject of two recall attempts himself. The first came in 1968, and it wasn't hard to understand why a group of liberal organizers, working on a shoestring, were able to obtain hundreds of thousands of signatures for his ouster: His approval rating was an anemic 30 percent. (In the next few weeks you are unlikely to hear that Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan had roughly equivalent degrees of popularity during their presidencies, with Clinton's often higher, including when both left office.)
The activists in the second recall attempt weren't liberals, however. In 1967, Reagan, after campaigning, as he always did, as a tax cutter, passed the single largest tax hike in the history of any state up to that point. By 1971, some of his former supporters on the right had tired of what they saw as Reagan's serial betrayals of conservative principles and launched a recall movement of their own.
We didn't hear a lot about that movement when conservatives were dropping Reagan's name left and right in support of their bid to run Gov. Gray Davis out of Sacramento on a rail in large part because he had ... raised taxes.
Reagan's hagiographers, having their cake, eating their cake and smearing their cake all over the historical record, have a word for the occasions when this supposedly principled man violated his principles: They call them "pragmatism." But liberals have to give the man credit for his ability, unlike President Bush, to shift course when he was walking into a wall.
Still, it's too easy to convert the image of Reagan the pragmatist into a Reagan who wasn't really right wing. And from that it is but a short step to the most irritating Reagan myth of all: that he was nothing but a sunny optimist. Do not forget that he also frightened people with talk of apocalypse.
Reagan first came to public prominence as a political figure in the early '60s. The movie actor, hard on his luck, had become a kind of roving motivational speaker for General Electric. More and more, however, as he became more and more conservative, his talks focused on politics. Much of Reagan's stomping ground of Southern California had converted itself into a kind of McCarthyite petri dish, breeding paranoid patio dads and housewives by the thousands, each one eager and ready to find Reds beneath, beside and on top of every bed.
On any given weekend, interested citizens in Orange County could watch showings of films like "Communism on the Map" -- a geopolitical melodrama in which blood- or pink-colored ink leached over country after country, sparing only Spain, Switzerland and the United States (which was covered by a giant question mark) -- or find a study group assiduously poring over the organizational structure of what J. Edgar Hoover laughably called a "state within a state" -- the almost nonexistent Communist Party.
Reagan soon became one of the hottest tickets on the anti-Communist lecture circuit -- where sunny optimism was not the order of the day. "We have 10 years," he would say in just about every speech. "Not 10 years to make up our mind." (He was referring to the choice as to whether to embrace the Republican right or the march of communism, among whose avatars he numbered, in a famous 1960 letter to Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy.) But "10 years to win or lose -- by 1970 the world will be all slave or all free."
Remember this: The hellfire never left him, and the hellfire ended up making the world a more dangerous place. As a candidate for elective office, even as president, his handlers always cleaned him up for popular consumption, but the same strange holdovers from the McCarthyite fever dreams continued to pop up in his discourse. One of his favorites was an invented quote of Lenin, popularized by the founder of the John Birch Society, to the effect that after the Reds took over Eastern Europe, they would "organize the hordes of Asia," as Reagan said in a 1975 interview, they would move on to Latin America and "then the United States, the last bastion of capitalism, [would] fall into their outstretched hands like overripe fruit."
Overripe words, yes, but also very characteristic of Reagan. It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly. In 1964, observers horrified by Barry Goldwater pined for the sensible Robert Taft, the conservative leader of the 1950s. When Reagan was president, liberals spoke fondly of sweet old Goldwater.
Nowadays, as we grapple with the malevolence of President Bush, it's Reagan we remember as the sensible one. At the risk of speaking ill of the dead, let memory at least acknowledge that there was much about Reagan that was not so sensible.
Again and again as president, Reagan let it slip that he concurred with fundamentalists' belief that the world would end in a fiery Armageddon. This did not hurt him politically. The kind of people offended by such talk had already largely abandoned the Republican Party. Those attracted by it -- evangelicals who had gone overwhelmingly for fellow evangelical Jimmy Carter in 1976 -- adopted Reagan, and his conservative Republicanism, as their own, and they never looked back. And in the eschatology of Cold War America, Christian apocalyptic thinking had everything to do with the assumption that the Armageddon would be a nuclear one, a confrontation with the anti-Christ bailiwick Russia, which Reagan identified in a March 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals as the "Evil Empire."
No wonder that when, in November 1983, NATO launched a war games exercise code-named Able Archer, the Soviet Union misread its intentions as offensive and put its nuclear forces on alert, and the world came closer to ending than it ever had before.
It took this near miss -- and not, certainly, the largest mass demonstration in American history, the million people who gathered in Central Park in 1982 to demonstrate for a nuclear freeze (another moment you probably won't read about in all the Reagan eulogies) -- to get Reagan thinking seriously about negotiating an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union. To his enormous credit.
But he never did make a similar peace with the "welfare queens" he fabricated out of whole cloth to push his anti-compassionate conservatism. Nor with the African Americans he insulted by launching his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were slaughtered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964. Nor with the Berkeley students demonstrating in a closed-off plaza whom he ordered tear-gassed by helicopter in 1969.
Nor, last but not least, with the tens of thousands of AIDS corpses whose disease he did not even deign to publicly acknowledge until 1987.
As the eulogies come down the pike, don't let conservatives, once again, win the ideological struggle to determine mainstream discourse. Remember Reagan; respect him. But don't let them make you revere him. He was a divider, not a uniter.
I just saw this thread and the problem with the insulting language (which violates two board rules) has been addressed.
Totally agree, Rosie Red. No one deserves this awful disease regardless of their behavior. Didn't mean to imply that I agreed with that.
And you are absolutely right LF. And there have been alot of subsequent "victims" from the AIDS epidemic. But overall, what was the initial cause and effect that spread the virus like "wildfire" to the point where it was affecting those within certain segments of our society, as you mentioned above? Who/what created the circumstances that placed those healthcare workers, fireman, paramedics, etc. at risk? What really was the root cause that helped this disease become the epidemic that it is?
And I absolutely agree with Rosie when she says that no one deserves this disease. And I sincerely hope that no one interprets what I stated above as meaning that. It carries a "death sentence". My point was that each of us has a responsibility, now that the threat is even greater, to examine ourselves and look at the choices/decisions we make when it comes to sexual practices/lifestyles. It's all about personal accountability IMO.
Last edited by GAC; 06-07-2004 at 08:15 AM.
"In my day you had musicians who experimented with drugs. Now it's druggies experimenting with music" - Alfred G Clark (circa 1972)
A representative of the Gallup polling organization was on one the cable newschannels this morning, I think it was CNN Headline News. Of recent presidents, while Reagan's average approval rating while in office of 53% exceeded Jimmy Carter's average of 45%, it slightly trailed Bill Clinton's average of 55%. George H. W. Bush had an average of 61%.
I find that interesting but of little real importance. While the representative didn't discuss the approval ratings of less recent presidents, I can recall that Harry Truman's approval rating sank to something like 23% by the early 1950s, even lower than Richard Nixon's was during Watergate, yet most people, including me, now highly regard Truman's overall performance as president. Despite the biases among historians, I expect that Reagan will eventually be more highly ranked among U.S. presidents than will any of his immediate predecessors and successors.
"Hey...Dad. Wanna Have A Catch?" Kevin Costner in "Field Of Dreams."
And when information about the disease was FINALLY given to the public, homosexual males were the proactive ones that took the precautions needed....but by then the disease was in the blood supply and many non homosexual persons had contracted it.
Had info been given out 5 years earlier none of us know how the death totals and spreading of the disease would have gone.
And someone on another board used Elizabeth Glaser & the Pediatric Aids Foundation and how he was there for them!!!! Of course he was, because those people got it *the respectable* way. Most during blood transfusions where the blood was not tested because of the expense.
He may have done a hundred things right, but he was completely wrong in how he handled this matter. To his defense I guess any President (especially at that time) that did not want to commit political suicide would have done the same thing, that is what is really sad. Have we learned from our mistake? If another deadly disease comes along and is first spread between a minority group of some sort, will future leaders just let it go until it attacks the general population?
While no cure has been found people are living longer, productive lives when diagnosed with it. Maybe that will be enough for some of them to survive until there is a cure found.
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