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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums"If I was still president, ISIS would be WASWAS!!"
Uh, really?
If Reagan was President, ISIS would be given Missiles and the profits would be funnelled to Al Shabaab or something. Why do conservatives laud a guy whose administration essentially committed high treason?
Some conservatives hilariously attribute this meme to Bewsh, who essentially gave BIRTH to ISIS thanks to his folly wars. Now we're a mile past denialism and headlong into "Not Even Wrong".
Republicans aren't rootin-tootin shoot-em-up cowboys. They're traitors who take the shortcut to thinking and legality every time.
lonestarnot
(77,097 posts)Blus4u
(608 posts).....BUT they sure as hell think they are. AND they think it is the rest of us who are the traitors.
Peace
Thinkingabout
(30,058 posts)I was at a Benihana in November 1980, right after the election and was seated with two older guys from South America and their young escorts talking about how happy they were because Reagan had been elected. A deal had already been made with Iran not to release the hostages until Reagan was sworn into office. He thought it was because everyone was afraid of Reagan, the Iran/Contra affair was not revealed until later. Reagan/Bush were snakes in the grass. Reagan was the start of the downfall of our middle class, with 20 years of rule in the last 30 years has not been good for the USA. The need to go back to Democratic rule is getting desperate, we have to unite to get the Democrats into office.
CrispyQ
(36,702 posts)If you were born after 1980, all you've ever heard is that unions are bad & that trickle-down is good. He demonized the word liberal to the point that democrats, cowards that they were, ran from it, from fear of the media. Then the dems hopped on the big business gravy train & next thing you know we have two parties that represent the 1% economically, while they divide & conquer us on social issues. The dems do throw a few more crumbs off the train, but anyone who talks about changing the train's direction is marginalized.
It's a sad state of affairs & here's more bad news to make your day: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027349377
THE SYSTEM ISN'T BROKEN, THE SYSTEM IS FIXED.
niyad
(114,577 posts)trouble. I wore a mourning band for six months, not to mention, a button that read, "jane wyman was right".
wish I had been wrong about how bad it was going to get, and I didn't even know the half of it.
HughBeaumont
(24,461 posts)Runaway income inequality, runaway CEO pay, middle/working/poor wage stagnation, job offshoring, union defanging, corporate malfeasance, Wall Street as a law unto themselves, defunding of colleges, defunding of HUD (which led to the giant homelessness problem we have today), ravaging of military benefits and VA hospitals, widespread loss of job security, news reporting traded for opinion and constructed narrative, demonization of everything progressive, merging of church and state, demonization of poor people, racism made fashionable, demonization of the LGBTQI community, rampant military spending, reliance on fossil fuels, destruction of the environment, making ignorance fashionable, etc, etc, etc . . .
niyad
(114,577 posts)I wish I believed in hell, because that is certainly where he, his adherents, puppet-masters, and sycophants deserve to be.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Some blame it on mental illness:
Like I Wasnt President at All
By Robert Parry
May 26, 1999
In 1992, less than four years after leaving the White House, Ronald Reagan claimed to have forgotten virtually every fact about the Iran-contra scandal, according to a newly released transcript of a formal deposition.
"It's like I wasn't president at all," Reagan said in response to one inquiry.
Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh accepted that Reagan's memory loss was a consequence of the ex-president's Alzheimer's disease. But the deposition also reveals that Reagan answered in rich detail when questioned about coincidental events not connected to alleged Iran-contra crimes.
Despite Reagan's unresponsive answers, the deposition offered a look at unreleased Reagan diary entries that were read into the record. The diary demonstrated that Reagan was intimately involved with the Iran-contra operations and fully aware that some of his actions violated the law.
Yet, when Walsh and his prosecutors questioned Reagan about even basic facts that connected to the scandal, the ex-president asserted a near-total lack of memory.
SNIP...
At another point, Reagan was reminded that "you had a task force on counter-terrorism. Do you remember? I think Vice President Bush headed it."
CONTINUED...
https://consortiumnews.com/1999/052699c.html
Perhaps blame belongs to the Military Industrial Complex and its frontman, Poppy:
George Bush Takes Charge
The Uses of "Counter-Terrorism"
By Christopher Simpson
Covert Action Quarterly 58
A paper trail of declassified documents from the Reagan‑Bush era yields valuable information on how counter‑terrorism provided a powerful mechanism for solidifying Bush's power base and launching a broad range of national security initiatives.
During the Reagan years, George Bush used "crisis management" and "counter‑terrorism" as vehicles for running key parts of the clandestine side of the US government.
Bush proved especially adept at plausible denial. Some measure of his skill in avoiding responsibility can be taken from the fact that even after the Iran‑Contra affair blew the Reagan administration apart, Bush went on to become the "foreign policy president," while CIA Director William Casey, by then conveniently dead, took most of the blame for a number of covert foreign policy debacles that Bush had set in motion.
The trail of National Security Decision Directives (NSDDS) left by the Reagan administration begins to tell the story. True, much remains classified, and still more was never committed to paper in the first place. Even so, the main picture is clear: As vice president, George Bush was at the center of secret wars, political murders, and America's convoluted oil politics in the Middle East.
SNIP...
Reagan and the NSC also used NSDDs to settle conflicts among security agencies over bureaucratic turf and lines of command. It is through that prism that we see the first glimmers of Vice President Bush's role in clandestine operations during the 1980s.
CONTINUED...
More details from the good professor:
EXCERPT...
NSDD 159. MANAGEMENT OF U.S. COVERT OPERATIONS, (TOP SECRET/VEIL‑SENSITIVE), JAN. 18,1985
The Reagan administration's commitment to significantly expand covert operations had been clear since before the 1980 election. How such operations were actually to be managed from day to day, however, was considerably less certain. The management problem became particularly knotty owing to legal requirements to notify congressional intelligence oversight committees of covert operations, on the one hand, and the tacitly accepted presidential mandate to deceive those same committees concerning sensitive operations such as the Contra war in Nicaragua, on the other.
The solution attempted in NSDD 159 was to establish a small coordinating committee headed by Vice President George Bush through which all information concerning US covert operations was to be funneled. The order also established a category of top secret information known as Veil, to be used exclusively for managing records pertaining to covert operations.
[font color="green"]The system was designed to keep circulation of written records to an absolute minimum while at the same time ensuring that the vice president retained the ability to coordinate US covert operations with the administration's overt diplomacy and propaganda.
Only eight copies of NSDD 159 were created. The existence of the vice president's committee was itself highly classified.[/font color] The directive became public as a result of the criminal prosecutions of Oliver North, John Poindexter, and others involved in the Iran‑Contra affair, hence the designation "Exhibit A" running up the left side of the document.
CONTINUED...
CovertAction Quarterly no 58 Fall 1996 pp31-40.
This all matters because there's a steady bloody red line from 1981 to the present day few write about. More would, were the nation's news media honest and lived up to their constitutional mandate.
Great OP, links and thread, HughBeaumont. SpotonSpoton.
HughBeaumont
(24,461 posts)"Speed it up, Dutch! We have a donor gala to prop you up at!"
And the feeble amnesiac complied.
The Merrill Lynch/Exxon White House conned labor into loving them for life while he defanged unions, wages, security and progress. GOD I just don't get how this nation could be THIS stupid.
brush
(54,301 posts)Reagan's mind must have been just about gone for someone to talk to the President of the United States in such a disrespectful and controlling manner.
There's your "hero", repugs.
Why, you can almost see the strings coming out of his sleeves.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)EXCERPT...
Reagans story at GE is, to a startling degree, the story of labor relations executive Lemuel Boulware. When Boulware hired Ronald Reagan he was a conventional, patriotic, anti-communist liberal Democrat. He was not thought to be particularly well-informed or articulate. Under Boulwares guidance, Reagan sparred with GEs unionized employees and received what he termed his post-graduate education in political science from 1954 to 1962. He became thoroughly familiar with basic economics, and came to share Boulwares strong conviction that business performs an essential public service. He also thought about a wide range of other public policy matters stretching even to the core concept of what was to become the Strategic Defense Initiative.
SOURCE: The American Enterprise Institute
Original link long gone, from the Wayback Internet Archive:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070210065520/http://www.american.com/archive/2007/february-0207/how-reagan-became-conservative/
Thank you for the video, HughBeaumont! Like they say in the NFL, the tape doesn't lie.
randome
(34,845 posts)It's funny, I listened to this song for the first time the day after the 9/11 attack. I was playing it in my car and I surmised that I should probably turn it down a bit because this was St. Louis and, well, you know how Midwesterners can be.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font][hr]
napkinz
(17,199 posts)CrispyQ
(36,702 posts)It sums up their foreign policy perfectly.
hifiguy
(33,688 posts)Arkana
(24,347 posts)If you were still President, ISIS would be *drools on self, mutters something about Korea and black people*.
Jester Messiah
(4,711 posts)MisterP
(23,730 posts)1987-92 he was RADIOACTIVE to the GOP and they dumped his policies for Bush's
they only started putting up shrines (no, literally) once he was safely senescent
Guy Whitey Corngood
(26,529 posts)of the barracks........ Oh wait...... he didn't. He also really gave it to the Iranians.... by giving them a good deal on tons of weaponry. Yeah that's one guy you really don't fuck with.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Zing Zing Zingbah
(6,496 posts)HughBeaumont
(24,461 posts)Zing Zing Zingbah
(6,496 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)Zing Zing Zingbah
(6,496 posts)DFW
(54,755 posts)But I guess if you don't know any German, it's better than nothing. Still pretty funny.
The_Casual_Observer
(27,742 posts)This is a well known fact.
DFW
(54,755 posts)As in "If I was still president, I'd loose my patience with them terrorist's, and their wood be some wreckoning."
I'd need Windows Foxese to see if I got the Republican spelling of everything right.