Would you vote for Reagan?
- Thread starter bungrider
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I have almost 2000 or so posts....here is my first full fledged "cut and paste"...worthy of even Traderfut or Wild, or any of the other c&p artists. Enjoy:
Ronald Reagan and the quest for an ultimate defence
by Tim Creery
On March 8, 1983, President Ronald Reagan addressed the National Association of Evangelicals and called the Soviet Union "the evil empire". A couple of weeks later, on March 23, he delivered a national security speech and called upon "the scientific community in this country, who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents to the cause of mankind and world peace; to give us the means of rendering these weapons impotent and obsolete."
That was the Star Wars speech, in which the president called for the development of a forward strategic defence against intercontinental ballistic missiles. Two years later, the proposal became a program, the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), placed in the hands of a Strategic Defence Initiative Organization (SDIO), to develop interceptor missiles, battle stations in space, laser beam weapons, particle beam weapons and all the rest of it.
The balance of terror, known as mutual assured deterrence, between the evil empire and the shining city on a hill was to be replaced by an assured defence for the shining city, which, Reagan promised, would then magnanimously share it with the enemy.
Five years later, at Reagan's palsy-walsy Moscow summit with Mikhail Gorbachev, a reporter asked Reagan what had become of the evil empire. "I was talking about another time, another era," the president replied.
These extraordinary turns of events are recounted with a wealth of background information and explanation in Frances FitzGerald's Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War (Simon & Schuster, New York, 2000), a remarkable combination of intellectual history and lucid reportage that brilliantly limns Reagan and exposes the sham of Star Wars.
The author takes her title from the little eulogy that Uncle Charley - he who was "liked, but not well liked" - delivered at the end of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman: "Nobody dast blame this man. You don't understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine ... A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory."
For Reagan, who once told his staff that making policy was their business - "I'm out here selling it. You tell me" - there had to be a defence against ballistic missiles. This book leads us through debate after debate, expert report after expert report, meeting after meeting in which the balance of evidence was that Reagan's SDI was not practical. But the dreamer president, bolstered by ambitious scientists, military men, and right wingers, would only concede that SDI might take "twenty years or more" to develop and that it would not be an absolute defence.
At first Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, anxious though he was to reverse the arms race, insisted that SDI be dropped in return for strategic arms reduction. It was Andrei Sakharov, the physicist and human rights activist who, released from internal exile by Gorbachev in 1986 and returned to Moscow, persuaded top Soviet scientists and Gorbachev himself that SDI was not a present danger. For some time it would not be technically feasible, he said, and even if it did become feasible, it would be vulnerable to fairly cheap countermeasures and could not give full protection against massive attack.
With that, Gorbachev dropped the linkage of arms reduction to SDI and proceeded to sign agreements and also to reduce USSR forces unilaterally. Reagan had not been long out of office before the continuing Gorbachev revolution ended the Cold War for good.
Salesmen come and salesmen go, but ballistic missile defence projects, it seems, go on forever. Frances FitzGerald recounts in an Afterword that under President George Bush, the SDIO became the BMDO (Ballistic Missile Defence Organization) and spending stayed at the same level of $3 to $4 billion a year. For a while, promise was seen in a new concept, Brilliant Pebbles, consisting of several thousand tiny interceptors floating around the earth in low orbits waiting for the signal to attack enemy rockets rising out of the atmosphere. Before being abandoned, the pebbles had become rather large boulders (100 lbs, three feet long) and, "Apparently the Pentagon was uneasy about the idea of unleashing thousands of robots into space without any human controls."
In 1990 Bush and his aides started recasting BMD in the context of defending against ICBMs launched by renegade states - "rogue states" soon became the favoured term - or by accident. Space-based battle stations were shelved in favour of ground-based interceptors. The BMDers soldiered on. They may not have had the smile, the shoe-shine and the dream, but they knew how to spend taxpayers' money on the military-industrial-scientific complex. FitzGerald reports that: "Between 1983 and the fall of 1999 the U.S. had spent sixty billion dollars on anti-missile research, and though technical progress had been made in a number of areas, there was still no capable interceptor on the horizon."
"(B)ig military programs are rarely cancelled once Congress and the contractors are on board," she dryly observes. As for the Republican right, "the goal was weapons in space - that is, weapons which, if they materialized, could contribute to an offence, as well as provide a defence for the United States".
Once at a meeting in Moscow during the Reagan presidency, Gorbachev asked U.S. General Colin Powell, "What are you going to do now that you've lost your best enemy?"
A dozen years later, this book indicates the answer should have been: "Find surrogates."
This is a joke right? Explain where any of these individuals have been fiscally responsible. And for the record, not the party but the individual in his own daily operating sphere. I don't think you'll be able to. But I'll wait to hear you try. Budget surpluses are possible with either party. A big piece in the equasion is what is going on at the time that determines what happens with the economy. War, terror, truth, they all take their toll on the budget. So let's not wave the "this guy is responsible in his budget outlook" card. For every ten experts who say he's right, there are ten who say he's wrong.
Interesting that Nobel Laureates are the crystal ball of the day. Sadly they too are not always correct. If I take twenty of them and throw them into their own cubicles and tell them to write their outlook and what we should do to achieve success, I'll get twenty different ideas (if they are honest). And that too is ok.
Do I bet against the specialists? Not the correct model for me here. I spend quite a bit of time at the track and yes, I do bet against the specialists. And I have made a nice living for the last seven years doing so. If that is your criterion (for me) then I will go against MOST of your Laureates all day long.
Hmm, I guess I don't count since I am not bitching about the markets. I see no problem with many of the corrections that have been going on in the markets for the past two years. I factor in the fear, the uncertainty and the overconcern that is expressed in the breath of the moves. I think that's why they came up with shorting and puts. You know, so that you can make money when your longs/calls are not the proper play.
The ebb and flow of a world is not a constant factor that is balanced all the time. You have to learn to play them both. Mishandled economy and war? I would not agree with you there. Especially since the general consensus is that he hasn't done anything on either front yet. Of course nothing can seem to even get to the table to be voted on in congress. So I would not give the President credit or blame at this point. But that's just my opinion.
I guess you should ask your Nobels. Start with just twenty. Put them in individual rooms, make them write it out in long hand. Let's see how many of them actually can lead us to the gold. I am glad you understand the government budget process and spending well enough to decipher where the billions/trillions are spent.
I do love reading also. Please detail for me the actual government document that YOU read to find those numbers. Not a citation that you have heard about, but the actual document that YOU read. I will take the actual time to read it if you show it. I like to try to use as many facts as I can in an argument and those numbers would prove extremely valuable.
It's time for us to stop defaulting to some supposed learned individual to do something as simple as read. While we can't/won't read all the stuff/crap that comes out of our government, we are so ready to default to some so-called expert that we only verify because his counterparts say we should. Then we get pissed and want to sue when we find that he fudged the figures JUST A BIT! I'll throw down the gauntlet this time, what document did YOU read this stuff in?
What's more than funny to me is that we all argue the virtues and shortcomings of the office holder of the month (four year cycle) and never pay attention to the fact that they are but one part in the whole wheel of what we call government.
Do any of us honestly think that any of these guys are really the ones crafting policy statements, making fiscal decisions, etc.? Yet we wish to hold up the mantle for our respective candidate and claim he's the best. What we need to do is just say, they are all fairly competent and have done a good job in keeping the image of Commander In Chief intact!
Quote from canyonman00:
What's more than funny to me is that we all argue the virtues and shortcomings of the office holder of the month (four year cycle) and never pay attention to the fact that they are but one part in the whole wheel of what we call government.
Do any of us honestly think that any of these guys are really the ones crafting policy statements, making fiscal decisions, etc.? Yet we wish to hold up the mantle for our respective candidate and claim he's the best. What we need to do is just say, they are all fairly competent and have done a good job in keeping the image of Commander In Chief intact!
Canyonman......let me ask you a question.
Group A: Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton, Carter
Group B: Reagan, Dubya, Nixon, Ford, Papa Bush
In which group do you find the members to have been more aware of world affairs, fiscal policy, domestic social issues, and capable of MAKING DECISIONS?
I don't need your answer. It will be biased, (as is my opinion)
However, is there any doubt at all that if Reagan was in the White House with his cabinet (yes, the President does choose these guys), during the Cuban Missile Crisis, would any of us be here today? Sometimes brains and the ability to make REASONABLE INTELLIGENT DECISIONS matters. Big cowby hats don't.
Peace,
rs7That's what Reagan called George Bush. He was right. And the boy is weak like his father too.
When it comes down to it, the Bushes just aren't achievers. Not the Right Stuff at all.
Would you want either on your team playing for money at anything?
I suggested to some Republicans recently it's time to start distancing themselves from him. He might get back in if the Dems
keep launching fairies AND if the mood of the country stays to the right - either or both of which could change.
Geo.
When it comes down to it, the Bushes just aren't achievers. Not the Right Stuff at all.
Would you want either on your team playing for money at anything?
I suggested to some Republicans recently it's time to start distancing themselves from him. He might get back in if the Dems
keep launching fairies AND if the mood of the country stays to the right - either or both of which could change.
Geo.
Quote from rs7:
Yes, yes, we will now hear how he defeated the USSR. Never in the history of the modern world has one man been credited so much with an event he had so little to do with.
But Reagan? Imagine if he had his finger on the button on 9/11.
Peace,
ROFL!
Let me guess - Gorbachev deserves the lion share of the credit.
And if Reagan was Prez during 9/11, you can bet the our enemies would all be wearing Depends instead of laughing at the debacle known as the UN.