If you can barely contain your rage when the likes of Specter or Jeffords get up on their hind legs in front of television camera, imagine a Republican minority that were made up primarily of these obsequious creeps. Thanks primarily to Reagan we can enjoy more articles like this lamenting the vanishing Republican "moderate".
Before Reagan, owning a house was completely out of reach for young couples starting out because of insanely high interest rates that routinely reached 20+%.
Before Reagan, most leaders in the West sucked-up to the morally corrupt and murderous Soviet Union.
Before Reagan, government elites thought the West needed to understand the Soviets rather than confront their evil (because they really didn't believe it was that evil). Reagan understood that we needed to destroy them.
Before Reagan, high taxes crippled liberty and growth. Reagan's commitment to liberty backed by massive tax cuts allowed individuals to take risks, innovate and prosper.
Before Reagan, striking unions squeezed the public and hobbled business with artificially high wages and regulations. Reagan's brilliant response to the air traffic controllers' strike ("Here's your hat, what's your hurry?") essentially ended a long, grim reign of union thuggery in America.
Before Reagan, there was...disco.
Before Reagan, Jimmy Carter was President.
Ronald Reagan's unabashed support of unqualified liberty drove the Left nuts. As citizens cheered on his quips about ending the conflict with the Soviet Union--"Bombing starts in five minutes"--the left stopped smirking long enough to seethe. When he called the Soviet Union "The Evil Empire" he identified two long-standing enemies: the Soviet Union and their domestic bum-boys who protested Reagan's "unfeeling, risky, harsh, undiplomatic" words.
The. Left. Went. Batshit.
He smoked out the Leftist journalists who cowered behind their cover of "objectivity." He shined a big bright light of common sense into the dank corners of government and academia. Best of all...best of all...their gibbering protests went unheeded by America's greatest modern president. Reagan never appeared on Oprah or at Senate Show Trials presided over by drunken, girlfriend-drowning sock puppets. He communicated directly with the citizens of America. He understood that the only power evil had was the power good people gave them.
Meanwhile, deep in the Gulag...Russian dissident Natan Sharansky writes in the Jerusalem Post (registration required): "In 1983, I was confined to an eight-by-ten-foot prison cell on the border of Siberia. My Soviet jailers gave me the privilege of reading the latest copy of Pravda. Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of President Ronald Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an 'evil empire.' Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan's "provocation" quickly spread throughout the prison. We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth – a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us. (Thanks to The Corner for the link.)
Reagan got it. No more accommodation. No more moral equivalence. No more détente. (French for "please don't hit me in the face, ma'am.")
That's enough for now. This really is sad. Now it's time to replay Reagan in His Own Words.
4 comments:
I never connected the dots between Reagan and the death of disco, but I've got to hand it to you. I'll google it to find the exact language of the bill that outlawed disco, so we can draft similar legislation for anything written after 1978.
Patrick
Well said, and damn straight.
The spines he stiffened are sarting to go soft, though. Newt is forced into retirement, Atwater is dead, Buchanan went plumb nuckin futs... how can we replace men like these?
Stoney, don't worry too much - it's a big world we live in, there are always a few to pull out of the bag when we need them. Doesn't make it good when we lose the old ones, of course, but still...
In response to Anonymous,
Ronald "Government-Is-Not-The-Solution-It's-The-Problem" Reagan didn't have to outlaw disco to get rid of it. His mere presence could be likened to that of the crisp British naval officers who rescued the grimy savage boys in William Goldman's Lord of the Flies. (BTW, Knuckles has a signed paperback of that novel and will NOT loan it out.) Once Reagan was elected, masses of citizens who were shaking their booty doing the Hustle and Bump just suddenly stopped and came to their senses. Eyes blinking as if coming out a deep trance, a few wept. "What were we thinking?" was heard a lot before everyone got back to leading productive lives.
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