Tear Down This Myth

[bridgit]

Last week didn't only mark the inauguration of Barack Obama. January 20, 2009, was also a less noticed anniversary - marking 20 years to the day that the 40th president, Ronald Reagan, said his final goodbye to the Oval Office. During those two decades since, the world evolved, and the man who some called a Great Communicator and others called a "Teflon president" passed away - yet, watching last year's presidential race unfold, you might have been excused if you'd thought Reagan was somehow on the ballot. In debates and in countless TV ads - mainly but not exclusively on the GOP side - a return to Reagan-era orthodoxy in tax cuts or building up the military remained on the front burner of US politics. This, even as the American economy was collapsing from the weight of rising debt, unfettered greed on Wall Street and shortsighted energy policies - all of which trace back to the 1980s and Reagan's toxic legacy.

http://www.truthout.org/012809L

Tear Down That Myth

DURING the spring of 1987, American conservatives were becoming disenchanted with Ronald Reagan’s increasingly conciliatory approach to Mikhail Gorbachev. Inside the White House, Mr. Reagan’s aides began to bicker over a speech the president was planning to give on a trip overseas. That June, the president would travel to Venice for the annual summit meeting of the seven largest industrialized nations. From there, plans called for him to stop briefly in Berlin, which was still divided between East and West. The question was what he should say while there.

The speech Mr. Reagan delivered 20 years ago this week is now remembered as one of the highlights of his presidency. The video images of that speech have been played and replayed. On June 12, 1987, Mr. Reagan, standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin Wall, issued his famous exhortation to Mikhail Gorbachev: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

In the historical disputes over Ronald Reagan and his presidency, the Berlin Wall speech lies at the center. In the ensuing years, two fundamentally different perspectives have emerged. In one, the speech was the event that led to the end of the cold war. In the other, the speech was mere showmanship, without substance.

Both perspectives are wrong. Neither deals adequately with the underlying significance of the speech, which encapsulated Mr. Reagan’s successful but complex approach to dealing with the Soviet Union.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/opinion/10mann.html

Alternet ~ Tear Down This Myth: How Reagan's Legacy Haunts Our Future

The Great Communicator still speaks from the Great Beyond. But he leaves out some very important details about his time in office.

It's always sunny at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum in Simi Valley -- or at least it seemed that way to a lifelong East Coaster who visited the imposing hilltop edifice in the desert-dry heat of an August morning, ninety-six days before the 2008 election. On this particular morning in America, the soft whistle of mountain winds was interrupted every minute or two by the hum of minivans carrying families making pit stops on cross-country caravans, rental cars emerging from the LAX sprawl, even the occasional tour bus. Fittingly, there's really no way to reach the remote Reagan Library that doesn't involve the burning of a lot of fossil fuels. The last half mile or so of Presidential Drive climbs steeply past banners of the other forty-one men who served as president; coincidentally or not, the failed chief executives who bracketed Reagan and then finally the divisive Clinton and Bush 43 are clustered near the entrance to the Gipper's glimmering red-tile shrine. A couple of the families I met this day had spent the previous afternoon on the wild and wet Hollywood razzle-dazzle of the rides and studio tour at Universal Studios, and now they were working their way up to a different type of stagecraft, the more serious kind, the stagecraft that made world history.

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/124855/tear_down_this_myth:_how_reagan's_legacy_haunts_our_future

"Hi, and welcome to the homepage for "Tear Down This Myth: How The Reagan Legacy Gas Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future," published in February 2009 by Free Press, an imprint of Simon And Schuster."

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/Tear_Down_Thiis_Myth.html

[OwnedByFerrets]

1. I will k and r it even if no one else thinks its important enough.

[bridgit]

2. heh-heh, I Pogo too!

:bounce:

[OwnedByFerrets]

6. If you bowl, you may have heard of me.....I'm Pip....yes, the Pip

:rofl:
I always laugh when I go into a new bowling room and am asked "Are you THE Pip?" Wifey is the real pogo addict though. We kid about her being a Badge Ho.:evilgrin:

[bridgit]

7. I think I bowled once or twice, but have played the golf game. Like the mystery programs...

Dr. Lynch Grave Secrets, Women's Murder Club, Ghost Hunters stuff like that. We do allot of driving sometimes and they help me unwind and go a bit numb :hi:

[Baikonour]

3. That gif rules, and pretty much sums up the Reagan presidency.

[asteroid2003QQ47]

4. Myths never die, REAL change (almost) never lives!

One of the world’s most controversial politicians, Henry Kissinger is again spearheading American foreign policy.

In December, Kissinger - now 85-years-old - secretly flew into the Russian capital at the request of then President-elect Barack Obama. Kissinger was there to sound out the Kremlin on a bilateral reduction of nuclear weapons, the paper says.

For two days he held talks with the Russian leadership. He put forward Obama’s desire to cut the number of warheads to 1,000 pieces on each side.

It is believed Obama chose Kissinger for the task to neutralize Republican opposition to the plan. Kissinger worked in the administrations of two Republican presidents - Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

Read more: http://www.russiatoday.com/features/news/36969

You didn't know that every new President must kiss Henry's ring?

[bridgit]

5. You do know that is it not Henry's ring, right?

If I were 'a myth', I would discourage my proximity to, or associations with any such 'ring legends', perhaps especially in a world where some they go do, while other bounce chimps on their knees feeding them from baby bottles provided by Monsanto

From 1943 to 1946 Dr. Kissinger served in the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps and from 1946 to 1949 was a captain in the Military Intelligence Reserve.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1973/kissinger-bio.html

Marshall Plan Commemorative Section: The Marshall Plan Reconsidered: A Complex of Motives

Three speeches had a decisive impact on the economic and political rehabilitation of Europe after World War II: Winston Churchill's in Zurich in 1946 about a United States of Europe; George Marshall's at Harvard in 1947, offering American aid to Europeans struggling to escape their postwar predicament; and Robert Schuman's in Paris in 1950, proposing communal control of Europe's coal and steel resources. It would, of course, be unfair and historically inaccurate to credit these three men alone with Europe's successful revival. Many other leaders were instrumental in rebuilding the continent, and if not for Stalin's imperialism, many courageous acts in the United States and Western Europe, among them Secretary of State Marshall's plan, would have gone undone.

To understand the effects of the Marshall Plan, one must first comprehend what life was like for ordinary Germans, like me, toward the end of World War II and in those first turbulent years afterward. We had lost. I had been convinced for several years that we would, and many of my comrades in Germany's armed forces had reached a similar conclusion. During the day, we fulfilled our missions on the battlefield; at night, we hoped for a quick defeat of our own country. After the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944, when my division was driven out of Belgium and Luxembourg, I complained to my commander about Germany's war strategy: prudence dictated that we concentrate our energies on the Soviets in the east, and in the west let the Americans occupy as much German soil as they wanted. Although he angrily rejected my suggestion, he did not report me.

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19970501faessay3825/helmut-schmidt/marshall-plan-commemorative-section-miles-to-go-from-american-plan-to-european-union.html

Tear Down This Myth

[camera obscura]

8. Ordered this from Amazon after seeing it on Eschaton. Can't wait to read.

[bridgit]

10. I'm barrowing it after my friend is done reading

:bounce:

[jonnyblitz]

9. I am currently reading this book which i checked out of my

local library. It's a good read so far, I am not quite half way finished with it.

[bridgit]

12. Good to hear it, jonny, good to see'ya

Gotta love that library :hi:

[Blue_Tires]

11. ttt

to late for me to rec, sadly

[baldguy]

13. Reagan saw which way the parade was headed & put himself in front of it.

The USSR was crumbling long before Reagan came onto the scene. Afghanistan & the trillion dollar arms race just hastened it's demise.

[JuniperLea]

14. An actor always knows when, where, and how...

To make an entrance;)

[Sebastian Doyle]

15. Yeah, the REAL Cold War was essentially over by 1975.

The USSR was already financially drained and headed for a collapse by that point. A team of assholes in the Ford administration made the decision to exaggerate the Soviet threat in order to keep the "defense" industry going.

Sounds familiar? Like what was done with Iraq? Well it should, because the assholes who did it in 1975 were the same guys...... Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle.