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RG, I apologize for my last thoughtless comment. I welcome any thoughts, comments and guesses (as long as they are respectful and yours always are).
He was more fiscally irresponsible and warmonger as any of the one's you labeled. If anything he was the one that started the trend of cut taxes and increase defense spending to warmonger.
RG, I apologize for my last thoughtless comment. I welcome any thoughts, comments and guesses (as long as they are respectful and yours always are).
The bolded is what I want too - the country is too far left to waste political capital on social issues. Even though I am from the religious right, I am content with a standstill on social issues and hope for fixing the economy. It is insane to carry on as fiscally irresponsible as we have - and the infrastructure, SS and Medicare problems are looming.
that's a good sum-up of the email issue leading to the investigation, but it doesn't go into the deliberate deletion of the emails, which imo is the more damning aspect anyway
lol Reagan raised taxes as has been pointed out by liberals on this forum many times.
Reagan increased military deficit spending in the face of the Cold War. I think it was a wise move and you're too young to to know better. Hillary is doing her best to restart the Cold War...or worse.
What war did Reagan start?
Name a President post Reagan who dropped fewer freedom bombs than Reagan.
Uh no he lowered the out of taxes and then repealed some of them when the growth he promised never happened and the deficit exploded. Meanwhile he raised defense spending and cut food stamps to appease right wing morons.
To pretend that he was not the first champion of Bork style supply side and deregulation is horse .
Comparing the 9/11 era with Reagans is disingenuous. The difference is that while Reagan went after tiny countries like Grenada and Panama unilaterally. Bush the Greater and Clinton actually worked with our allies to build a coalition for Kuwait and Yugoslavia.
Then why are you bringing up Reagans era?
You want a re-shuffle and start again, but that can take a while...
I meant in terms of war activity. Once the towers were brought down and Bush the lesser blew up Baathist Iraq everything changed in terms of US military involvement. If you are going to compare you have to take that into consideration. Supply side deregulatory Hooveresque neocon economics is a different thing.
You're not making any sense. You already said there is no comparison...and neoconservatism doesn't have anything to do with economic/regulatory/tax policies
Bull . Laissez faire economics is a tenant of neocons.
I meant there was no comparison in foreign policy during the cold war and the 9/11 era in terms of relative involvement. Don't tell me what I meant.
So when you (for whatever reason) asked if Reagan was a neocon you say you meant "in terms of war activity" but you say there's no comparison and you were really talking about economic policy? You're not making sense to me...and what does any of it have to do with what you originally quoted me on?
Neoconservatives are about unilateral US military intervention and significant military spending paired with laissez faire economics. From Regan to Gingrich/Gramm to Bush to Graham today.
I'm saying you cannot compare 'bombs dropped' between the end of the cold war when any military action risked thermonuclear annihilation and the era of Bush the lessers dismantling of Baathist Iraq. Reagan toppled two banana republics while modern presidents have to deal with Iraq, Afghanistan, and the like.
whippits?
That's really a bad definition of neoconservatism
You still haven't answered why you even brought this up when you first quoted me and asked if Reagan was a neocon. Maybe this will help you Fuzzy...
How Reagan Beat the Neocons
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/11/op...cons.html?_r=0
Ronald Reagan was no hawk – and certainly no neocon
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...hawk-no-neocon
Reagan Was No Neocon
http://www.cato.org/publications/com...-was-no-neocon
Was Reagan the First Neoconservative?
http://theamericancause.org/patreaga...nservative.htm
It is a bogus claim. Reagan was no neocon. Unchallenged by progressives, rightwing hawks have rewritten history, leaving neocons like Kristol and Gove free to appropriate his name for their own belligerent ends.
Don't get me wrong. Reagan was no peacenik, either. A card-carrying cold warrior, he secretly sold weapons to Iran and Iraq, illegally funded the Nicaraguan Contras, provided aid to a Guatemalan army later accused by a UN-backed truth commission of carrying out "acts of genocide", and supported Osama bin Laden's mujahideen in Afghanistan, and Jonas Savimbi's Unita in Angola.
Nonetheless, he succeeded in avoiding a direct military confrontation. As the liberal US writer Peter Beinart argues in his book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris: "On the ultimate test of hawkdom – the willingness to send US troops into harm's way – Reagan was no bird of prey. He launched exactly one land war, against Grenada, whose army totalled 600 men. It lasted two days. And his only air war – the 1986 bombing of Libya – was even briefer."
In contrast, consider the blood-spattered record of his successors. George Bush launched Gulf war I and sent troops into Panama and Somalia; Bill Clinton bombed Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia; George W Bush invaded Afghanistan and gave us Gulf war II and the war on terror. And the Nobel peace prize winner Obama had troops surging in Afghanistan, launched a war on Libya and sent drones into Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan.
Lest we forget, after America's first encounter with jihadist violence in 1983 – when 241 US military personnel were killed – Reagan, to use the disparaging lingo of the neocons, chose to "cut and run". Every single soldier was pulled out of Lebanon within four months. "Perhaps we didn't appreciate fully enough the depth of the hatred and the complexity of the problems that made the Middle East such a jungle," Reagan later wrote in his memoir, adding: "The irrationality of Middle Eastern politics forced us to rethink our policy there … If that policy had changed towards more of a neutral position ... those 241 marines would be alive today."
These are the words not of a hawk but of a dove; of a leader who did not share the neocons' blind faith in the use of military force to spread freedom.
Merely trying to be helpful.
Last edited by RandomGuy; 10-12-2016 at 11:45 AM. Reason: civility.
Crap, I actually agree with that. I really do hope the GOP improves because of this.
A one-party country does no one good.
S'all good.
Not like I am any paragon of virtue when it comes to the occasional short comment.
People have called me on it, and they are right. The greatest war is the war against one's lower self, at the risk of borrowing the wisdom of others.
Hmm.
People say "neocons", but I have yet to see a coherent definition of the term.
Might be helpful to introduce one. ?
There isn't a clean definition for the modern use of the term. In the context of the 1980's and the Cold War neocons could be specifically defined as those who believed we could defeat the Soviet Union by using military action to spread freedom and democracy around the globe. As all of the articles I linked point out, Reagan wasn't one of them. It wasn't about economic policy.
Now today if you ask Bill Kristol or pretty much anyone at the Weekly Standard I guess they would include economic policy, free trade, etc. and claim that Reagan was one of them. After all they were very successful in redefining Reagan as one of them even though he wasn't a hawk and he wasn't a free trader. Alzheimer's was the best thing that ever happened to the neocons.
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