Pat J:
Where did you get that deplorable opinion of Reagan?
Reagan was a very sharp guy. But he wasn’t pretentious, had a terrific grasp of historical fundamentals and rejected fashionable ideas for sound ones. So, like any visionary , he was naturally dismissed by people that held fashionable opinions–who “just knew” the USSR was here to stay, that a communist government in Nicuragura was no big deal and who laughed hysterically then (perhaps not now, with North Korea) at the “silly” idea that we should have a missle defense system. Reagan saw beyond them and a good thing too.
The opinions of those psuedo intellectuals make for strange reading today. His views on the environment were sound than and now: he recognized what most people knew–and are discovering again today–that tradeoffs have to be made and banning drilling in Alaska means greater energy dependence tomorrow, along with huge deficits. Most Americans are not hysterical environmentalists and insist on their welfare being considered along with that of the snail darter. That does not please the “humans are “intruding on the earth” crowd, but Reagan re-set the baseline for such decisions and was 100% right in doing so.
Deficits? The original bad guy remains Lyndon Johnson who started them in 1966, the Democrats who lambasted Nixon for trying to control them, and George Bush who showed little rstraint in 2000-2008. Obama is now making that even worse. But Reagan had the remnants of the Cold War and Jimmy Carter’s dismal rundown military to fix; his deficits were mild compared to Bush’s and Obama’s (and were happily voted into law by the Democratically controlled Congress). And he ahd tried to lower spending in 80-82 and was predictably lambasted by the Democrats for his “unfeeling” policies.
