Reagan's Legacy - How will he be remembered?

[Unspeakable Horror]

I´m in 4 and:

Originally posted by Ted Striker


Or you're still bitter about the whole Falklands thing.

That would not change anything

[alva]

I for one, do not miss going to sleep, wondering if tomorrow will be the day the world ends.

Funny that, I just posted something very similar on a other board.

[Bereta_Eder]

i'm five and most people are five.
duh


now dont get me wrong I DONT KNOW enough to be any #. just the overall perseption.

[Drogue]

Paiktis: This thread was started after that was closed. It wasn't the reason why it was closed.

BTW: I'm in group 4, according to GePap's groupings.

[GePap]

To continue my rant about How Reagan DID NOT win the Cold War:

The regular line of arguement goes as HT laid it out: he bankrupted the Soviets. Fine...so what? Right now people in NK are eating grass sometimes-and they spend 50% plus of their GDP on their military-and you know what? The NK remains. Dictatorial regimes do NOT end if bankrupt. Who is going to collect? Foreign states? Internal creditors?

After 20 years of unforseen advances in electronics, we are still far from a program capable of stopping even 20 incoming nuclear warheads. If the soviets wanted to maintain an ability to get everywhere in the world, fine, they were not going to compete for long-but if pure regime survival was their aim, as long as they had 30K nuclear warheads, I would hope no Western leader mad enough to attack them-and even if the Red Army could not keep up with the tech of the western armies, they sure as hell had more than enough firepower to level any uppity rebellions. So if pure regime survival was the chief aim of soviet leaders, then nothing Reagan did or could have done would have ended that regime, simply becuase at the end they still had the ability to turn Western Europe and the US into sheets of glass.

The problem was, beginning in 1968 and after, even as the soviets begun backing more foreign adventures in Africa, culminating in their invasion of Afghanistan, the elites back home no longer really cared aout regime survival-they were too busy looting the country. Corruption was rampant, the elite nmo longer gived a damned-when the few hardliners tried to keep thingsas they were in August '91, it was not only the people who deserted them, but most of the elite was well-they simply did not care about regime survival anymore. They had other, more important things.

And you know what? All those communist party functionaries of the '80s did VERY WELL for themselves, for they were right in line to profit the most from the wholesale sell-off of soviet industry that occured in the early 90's. Many of them re-invented themselves and are back in power in many areas of the SU-remember various of those republics are still not in any way democratic.

So don;t any of you mourn for the soviet managers of the80's. Most of them are much richer than anyone posting here right now, enjoying the fruits of capitalism with more gusto than you.

[alva]

I'm close to 5 too.

[Bereta_Eder]

I was wondering why he had just a bad reputation and now I know why. The contras and such. Thanks to unspeakable horro and che for pointing out the "why" (as I said).

[Ted Striker]

Originally posted by GePap
To continue my rant about How Reagan DID NOT win the Cold War:

The regular line of arguement goes as HT laid it out: he bankrupted the Soviets. Fine...so what? Right now people in NK are eating grass sometimes-and they spend 50% plus of their GDP on their military-and you know what? The NK remains.

More like, "sputtering along on fumes."

[Bereta_Eder]

Originally posted by Drogue
Paiktis: This thread was started after that was closed. It wasn't the reason why it was closed.

Drogue, yeah I didnt mean this thread was the reason mine was closed. I meant about the perseption included in my thread and the reasons for which this existed and that your thread and its answers gave me the why for the existance of that perseption.

[GePap]

More like, "sputtering along on fumes."

Those fumes have already lasted a decade or more. As Kramer showed, you can get a lot of milage even after the indicator shows empty.

[Drogue]

Ah, okies

[OzzyKP]

6. Another group will remember him as the President who talked the talk, but sadly didn't walk the walk. Some of the greatest rhetoric of any President in history, but the reality was different. Government didn't really shrink, taxes weren't really cut, and the nation was saddled with terrible debt. Hopefully he will be remembered as the visionary who inspired a new generation of small government conservatives who put to work the plan Reagan popularized but failed with.

[alva]

Originally posted by GePap

More like, "sputtering along on fumes."

Those fumes have already lasted a decade or more. As Kramer showed, you can get a lot of milage even after the indicator shows empty.

I think Ted was refering to this:

To continue my rant about How Reagan DID NOT win the Cold War:

[GePap]

I know what Ted was refering to.

I think OzzyKP found the discontent at Reagan from his right.

[OzzyKP]

Also all his central american dictator sponsorship and airtraffic controler thingy sucked. But he beat them commies.

Not a critique from the right. From the "top" (of the Nolan chart)