THE CONTINUING CRISIS
THE CONTINUING CRISIS R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR. Ever the showman, Ronald Reagan, the 40th President of the United States, bid his earthly confines adieu on the weekend of the 20th anniversary...
...With the economy prospering, democracy spreading, and international tensions relaxing, the contributors to the Kultursmog made but slight revisions in their case against Reagan and none to his credit...
...Equally breathless was John Kenneth Galbraith in Newsweek, "This debacle marks the last chapter of Reaganomics...
...What was the Iran-contra thing...
...superstitious...
...Also he was a boob...
...a poor manager (Iran-contra...
...Robert Reich agreed, "The binge is over...
...The oldest man ever to be elected president and the oldest former president to die, President Reagan brought to Washington an administration of old men (Bill Casey, Caspar Weinberger, George Shultz) and old ideas that made America young again...and vibrant and can-do...
...Hypothesized historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "A few years from now, I believe, Reaganism will seem a weird and improbable memory, a strange interlude of national hallucination, rather as the McCarthyism of the early 1950s and the youth rebellion of the late 1960s appear today...
...It was the only time in American history that a president figured out how to run foreign policy at a profit...
...Only two events gave the inhabitants of the Kultursmog a break from their gloom, that thing they called Iran-contra and a stock market slump in October 1987 that invited more imbecility from them...
...The Kultursmog has petrified more inaccurate ideas and stupid prejudices than any moron religion or idiot cult ever heard of...
...Smog generally corrodes, but the liberal Kultursmog acts as a preservative, in fact an agent of petrifaction...
...He was 93...
...Concluded John B. Oakes on the op-ed page, the Reagan administration was "a harshly reactionary revolution....President Reagan has substituted a mindless militarism for a foreign policy....Much of it will be dissipated in the self-defeating spiral of an open-ended nuclear-arms race that poses a greater threat to our own internal and external security than all the Communist propaganda that ever emanated from Moscow...
...The doleful concerto grosso was to groan on until the very end when the 40th president tipped his hat to the country and danced off to California, beloved by an electorate made prosperous and secure...
...Then a different image emerged: that of a passive president who reigned but did not rule...
...On September 7 his colleague Tom Wicker, doubtless another Pulitzer-Prize dud, added the next durable charge...
...It affects the health, the safety, and the well-being of every American...
...Reagan, he wrote, "seems likely to accelerate the nuclear arms race...
...Also he was STILL a boob...
...Following President Jimmy Carter's groan of "national malaise," the Old Cowboy created growth and ensured national security¡ªall accomplished in the style of the post-World War II conservative movement, that is to say, allegro con brio...
...In early June, as the nation embarked on a week spent revering the man who gave them peace, prosperity, and a renewed confidence in America, here is how the amnesiacs at the Times remembered Ronald Reagan in their obituary: "Gliding gracefully across the national stage with his boy-next-door good looks and his lopsided grin, he managed to escape blame for political disasters for which any other president would have been excoriated...
...It has taken a decade and a half, but only now with the expiry of the conservative movement's first president has the Kultursmog's gloom opened to a few rays of light...
...THE CONTINUING CRISIS R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR...
...We will have to acknowledge the waning of our economic power, as the true engine of the world shifts to Tokyo...
...A year later the polluters at the Times were flowing grimly...
...That the Russians were not "begging" when they clambered to Reagan's "bargaining table" is the Times's only escape...
...Said Lewis in the Times, "The Age of Reagan is over now, no matter what happens...
...Their early indictment was framed by the most influential polluters of the Kultursmog, savants pumping vapors from the smog's most noxious environmental hazard, the New York Times...
...The liberals' case against AmSpec's favorite president was set in stone early in the 1980 presidential campaign and remained essentially unchanged through all the days of the Reagan presidency, proving once again that for fatuous minds facts do not matter as much as bile...
...Ever the showman, Ronald Reagan, the 40th President of the United States, bid his earthly confines adieu on the weekend of the 20th anniversary of one of his most memorable public orations, his Normandy memorial to "the boys of Pointe du Hoc...
...Did Reston say "convenient forgetfulness...
...By the mid 1980s, as relations with the Soviet Union became more amicable than at any time since World War II, and as a period of thitherto unparalleled economic growth dragged on, these earlier complaints melded into a continuo of dark murmurings that composed the concerto grosso of politically correct commentary throughout the Reagan years: he was a liar (Iran-contra...
...The Old Cowboy's critics never smartened up...
...A Reagan administration "threatens a heightened arms race and a retreat from hard-won liberal achievements...
...Combined with the skewed tax reductions favoring the rich, it has turned the war against poverty into a war against the poor...
...Already the cost of Reagan's policies is devastating to our country in economic strength....On the domestic front, needed budget-cutting has developed into a shameful budget-gutting...
...The Reagan Revolution was not for the dour...
...That is when his reluctance to deal with governmental processes, his habit of delegating authority and his failure to concern himself with facts, figures and details first became known to people outside his official family...
...He might strain the relationship with Peking to the point to where the Chinese would reconsider their attitudes towards the Soviets...
...0+4...
...Now we will have to pay for Reagan's party, learning to live as the world's leading debtor nation," repined Pete Hamill...
...Today, in the cool, clear air of post-Reagan America, a review of all these complaints reveals an unpleasant truth about the obdurate Reagan critics: they were uneducable bigots, resistant to the rules of evidence, to empirical observation, and to logical deduction...
...As with the Bourbons, they never learned and never forgot...
...To review their indictment, begin with August 25,1980, when Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist Anthony Lewis began collecting his charges...
...The Old Cowboy's death occasioned a week of national eulogizing despite over two decades of abomination from the so-called cultural elites...
...During the 1980 campaign the liberals' complaints were essentially alarums that Ronald Reagan was warlike and a sworn enemy of anyone beneath the tax brackets prevalent in Beverly Hills...
...Then, prefatory to the November vote, a Times editorial summarized the Kultursmog's lengthening case against the Republican menace: "Ronald Reagan is easily caricatured as a bellicose ideologue, ready to roll back the clock on all social welfare....He seems genuinely to believe that the vain pursuit of arms superiority will bring the Russians begging to the bargaining table....Too often, Ronald Reagan's clarity and robustness sound more like bluster, bravado and refusal to recognize that America is no longer, if it ever was, king of the world...
...Another of the Times' columnists summed it all up in late 1988: "Reagan's easy optimism, his amiable incompetence, his tolerance of dubs and sleaze, his cronyism, his preoccupation with stars, his indifference to facts and convenient forgetfulness...
...Oh yes, and on that thing they called Iran-contra: "His extraordinary ability to communicate served him well until the Iran-contra affair...
Vol. 37 • July 2004 • No. 6
