As I watched this video of Ronald Reagan in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, tears rolled down my cheeks.
See if it has the same effect on you.
I wasn’t in Berlin, but I watched it as a young adult.
I was happy when I heard it then.
Now it makes me weep.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
President Reagan wanted to tear walls down. I was no fan of Reagan but now I’d cheer if we brought him back from the grave and elected him to the White House again.
Trump and the current COP is that horrible!
Trump wants to build walls while he rips children away from their parents and sends the children off to for-profit private prisons where they will probably be interned for life unless voters can elect enough people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to fix all the damage caused by serial liars and manipulators like Trump, neo-liberals, neoconservatives and Koch style libertarians.
LikeLike
Foreign affairs is not Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s strong suit.
LikeLike
In her defense, foreign affairs is not the strong suit of the congressional majority. What gives me optimism about Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is her capacity to learn. That ship sailed a long time ago for the congressional majority.
LikeLike
Her only flaw is not being confident enough to say what she means, which is that Israel is brutally and illegally occupying Palestinian territories, which is causing a humanitarian crisis for the Palestinians. The rest of the world recognizes this. I’ll give her credit for being one of the few Americans willing to say it, especially in a mainstream setting.
LikeLike
Alexandria has a brain and even that young and not being an expert on foreign affairs, she would do a 1000-percent better job than the Kremlin’s Toxic Orange Cream Puff.
Alexandria, at 28, is a critical thinker, a problem solver, and a lifelong learner.
Trump is a serial lying, book-hating, bully, troll and ignorant idiot.
LikeLike
What I liked was that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recognized she was not an expert on the issues. While she first used some loaded terms (“occupation of Palestine”), when the interviewer pressed her (I thought the interviewer was looking for a “gotcha”), it appeared from Ocasio-Cortez’ follow up remarks that she was referring to Gaza and some of the West Bank areas and not the entire state of Israel. And then she acknowledged she was lacking in knowledge on that issue.
I agree with the progressive New Israel Fund view of the difficult Israel-Palestine debate — I suspect some on the left would call that far too conservative since it recognizes Israel’s right to exist. But I did not have a problem with Ocasio-Cortez’ response in this piece.
If I lived in her district, I would be glad to give her a chance. And I would hope if she was involved in a committee that dealt with foreign policy, she would educate herself more on the complexities of the issue.
LikeLike
FLERP,
Who cares. No one seems to have assumen in domestic affairs either. Ms. Cortez does. One can’t be a single issue voter any more.
LikeLike
As a relatively devout Jew, I also say, So what? The settlements are illegal and essentially an occupation. Progressive Jews know it. Ocasio knows more about foreign affairs than her humility will allow her to admit. Good for her! “Honesty is the best policy.” Ben Franklin said that, and he was talking about foreign policy when he said it.
LikeLike
He had a code of honor, like him or not. He was a good man, I think. Maybe not the best president, but a good man. Now we have, to quote a congressman from my state of Pennsylvania, a “loofah-faced shitgibbon.” Someone with no moral compass, just greed and thinking of how he can get ahead. A self-centered manchild who lives only to pump up his own ego and bank account.
LikeLike
I could never get past the damage. The trickle down, the racism, and more. I could recognize any good he did, but there was so much more I detested.
LikeLike
I agree. Let’s not get carried away. Reagan and other former presidents masked racism in verbal code. Which I guess is better than unmasked racism(trump)?
LikeLike
You can say whatever you want about Reagan. He was never a traitor.
LikeLike
Iran-contra scandal?
LikeLike
The Iran-contra scandal pales in comparison to the American president groveling before Vladimir Putin and criticizing his own government. His own Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats issued a press release rebuking this weak quisling who is president.
LikeLike
Reagan was a traitor.
He was a traitor to the working, lower, middle, and unionized classes.
Traitor!
Would he have been better than Trump. Of course he would. But let’s not compare oxidized turned, smelly apples to rotten ones with worms. I would not eat either.
LikeLike
dianeravitch
The Iran Contra affair may have been way deeper than the post-election scandal. Perhaps we will find a memo somewhere.
Arguably Bush shutting down the investigation through the use of pardons in the Iran Contra affair; prevented us from finding out whether Regan scuttled the hostage release costing Carter the election. There is also some question as to whether there was information given about a second hostage rescue attempt. So now that we established that he was possibly guilty of treason. Like the Orange ass, he was a demagogue. Welfare queens stealing your hard earned tax dollars.
Then, of course, we had the good Nazi’s at Bitburg and stopping at a concentration camp was an afterthought.
Gorbachev announced glasnost & perestroika 2 years before the tear down the speech. Gorbachev brought down the Soviet Union. And if any Americans deserve credit for it. It was Brezinski and Carter who flamed the Afgan war.
I shed no tears.
LikeLike
the wall speech
LikeLike
https://imgur.com/gallery/7FS0o2t
LikeLike
Thanks for sharing! Sent screenshot to many friends and they love it.
LikeLike
Trump makes Attila the Hun look good, unfortunately, so Reagan and Obama as well as Biden are going to rise in yearning and estimation. Reagan Admin declared that ketchup was a vegetable so as to economise on school lunches. Reagan should have been impeached for violating Congress’ Boland Amendment prohibiting aid to the Contras. He lied about Nicaragua being taken over by communists and the contras being freedom fighters. The film now on HBO “Barry Seal” dramatizes some of that nefarious period. Reagan ignored the spiraling AIDS crisis at that time. He also refused to impose sanctions on apartheid South Africa when it was shooting unarmed protesters as Nelson Mandela rotted in jail. Trump is a beast but pls forgive me if I propose we maintain higher standards than what Reagan offered as leader.
LikeLike
As much as I detested Reagan, he is nowhere as vile and disgusting as Donald Trump. I’d take Reagan back today if we could replace Trump with him, even though I never could stand Reagan, just watching him make a speech made me want to throw up.
But Trump is 1000 times worse than Reagan at his worst. I never thought of suicide when Reagan was president. Now, every morning, I have to mediate to combat those dark thoughts from spreading like terminal cancer.
Trump is a walking, talking, tweeting, blubbery, malaria-infested swamp.
LikeLike
Thought experiment: You have two magical buttons. If you press button number one, Trump’s personality will change. No more tweeting, bloviating, p*ssy-grabbing. He’ll be eloquent, diplomatic, statesmanlike. However, his policies won’t change.
If you press button number two, his personality will remain the same obnoxious, boorish, buffoonish, crass, crude lying mess we know and loathe, but his policies will change. He will actually do the good things he promised to do, like bring good jobs to the country, drain the swamp, stay out of foreign entanglements.
You may only press one button. Which one would you press?
To me the answer is obvious. I don’t give a rat’s patoot about his crassness. We’ve had crass before. If a president is doing good things, who cares? Button two is the obvious button.
But it seems like most of you only care about button number one, because that’s essentially what Reagan was. Odious, atrocious policies like the Iran-contra affair and busing the air traffic controllers union and ignoring the AIDS crisis, but all dressed up in a nice, “statesmanlike” package. For that matter, that’s exactly what Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43 and Obama were too. You don’t care about the policies, you only care about the packaging.
LikeLike
cx: busting, not busing the air traffic controllers union.
LikeLike
“He will actually do the good things he promised to do, like bring good jobs to the country, drain the swamp, stay out of foreign entanglements.”
Those aren’t “good things he promised to do”. Those were lies he said to his marks to con them. Sure, he was good at the con, but you had to be very gullible to believe anyone claiming they can “bring good jobs to the country, drain the swamp, stay out of foreign entanglements” because someone tells you they know exactly how to do it without actually telling you how.
But then again, Trump did tell people they could get rich if they just paid him to go to Trump U. to learn the secret. So I guess the same people who believe that would believe ANY politician who promises to bring good jobs to the country and stay out of foreign entanglements as if the two of them are not directly connected.
Whenever I hear politicians making promises like that – on the left or the right – I think they are lying and don’t have a clue as to how to accomplish it but figure it sounds good so someone will buy it.
LikeLike
Yes….I’d say the last real gentleman of a President was Jimmy Carter. He was criticized as being meek and ineffective, but at least he was thoughtful and cared about the country as a whole. Maybe I was too young to remember anything bad about President Carter, but it seems like those were nicer and less turbulent times for America. Things really started spiraling out of control during the Clinton administration and have been on a downward trajectory since then.
LikeLike
The left was calling Jimmy Carter a right wing apologist who destroyed liberalism. I remember because I was one of those people who sounded like dienne77 and you could not convince me that Jimmy Carter was anything but evil. I made a point of not voting for Carter and telling everyone I knew not to vote for the evil Carter because I absolutely knew that Ronald Reagan could not be any worse than the evil Jimmy Carter. Does that sound familiar? Substitute Hillary Clinton and Trump for Carter and Reagan and I sound like some people on here. My only excuse was I was still a teenager and thought I knew everything. I grew up.
So I find it odd that Jimmy Carter was left out and Barack Obama was left in. But then again there have always been elements on the left who are hypocrites as we see here. What about LBJ? How many kids did he kill today? Good thing Nixon defeated him, right?
The posters who say there is no difference between Trump and Obama and Clinton except “style” sound just like me as a teenager insisting there is no difference between the evil Carter and Reagan. There was. I was wrong. So are they. And I don’t think they have the excuse of still being teens.
LikeLike
I always felt that Carter was the victim not only of conservative hostility to the New Deal approach to government, but also of leftists who never understood the southern religiosity of the man. Many of those who preach separation of church and state today did not like the fact that he was a Sunday school teacher.
LikeLike
NYC public school parent
Crass and nasty LBJ was probably the best of the lot. Tortured by the War that he felt sucked into. Remember 30 thousand deaths after Johnson left office. Nixon got elected for a second term.
Civil Rights Voting Rights Medicare Medicaid and a War on Poverty put him at the top of my list.
LikeLike
Joel Herman,
I agree about LBJ. One reason I liked Hillary Clinton is that she had many similar qualities — that is, she knew how to get things done. I thought Van Jones got it when he called her a “workaholic do-gooder chick”. I’m all for a Democrat who knows how to get things done, which may mean compromising a little but not so much that you have gained nothing.
The Child Health Plus program was probably the best overall program since Medicare. It worked. The “do-ers” don’t come along in politics very often — much easier to tear things down. I know de Blasio gets a lot of flak on here, but he got full day universal pre-k for over 60,000 4 year olds in a year. We need more of those kinds of Democrats.
LikeLike
Very moving. Thank you for sharing this.
We are in dark times with this person in the position of president of the United States. Please God the darkness will end in 2 years.
LikeLike
P.S.: Ronald Raygun was an ACTOR!
LikeLike
“Cruelty with a Smile
“With his superficially sunny disposition – and a ruthless political strategy of exploiting white-male resentments – Reagan convinced millions of Americans that the threats they faced were: African-American welfare queens, Central American leftists, a rapidly expanding Evil Empire based in Moscow, and the do-good federal government.
“In his First Inaugural Address in 1981, Reagan declared that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
“When it came to cutting back on America’s energy use, Reagan’s message could be boiled down to the old reggae lyric, “Don’t worry, be happy.” Rather than pressing Detroit to build smaller, fuel-efficient cars, Reagan made clear that the auto industry could manufacture gas-guzzlers without much nagging from Washington.
“The same with the environment. Reagan intentionally staffed the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department with officials who were hostile toward regulation aimed at protecting the environment. George W. Bush didn’t invent Republican hostility toward scientific warnings of environmental calamities; he was just picking up where Reagan left off.
“Reagan pushed for deregulation of industries, including banking; he slashed income taxes for the wealthiest Americans in an experiment known as “supply side” economics, which held falsely that cutting rates for the rich would increase revenues and eliminate the federal deficit.
“Over the years, “supply side” would evolve into a secular religion for many on the Right, but Reagan’s budget director David Stockman once blurted out the truth, that it would lead to red ink “as far as the eye could see.””
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2009/06/03/ronald-reagan-worst-president-ever
LikeLike
Compared to the traitor Trump, Reagan looks good. But so does Benedict Arnold.
LikeLike
Raygun is where Trump originated. Read the Common Dreams article. Way more than I can quote here, all well worth reading.
LikeLike
Benedict Arnold betrayed a cause to which he was a party. Trump betrays a 200 plus tradition of attempting to create an equitable society. There is no comparison. Trump wins over Arnold by the landslide he perceives himself to have been elected.
LikeLike
Roy,
I was going to title the post, “Trump, Traitor,” but softened it and thereby smeared Benedict Arnold.
Back when I was a kid, everyone knew who BA was, and it was an insult to say, “You are a Benedict Arnold.”
Now a bigger insult would be, “You are a Donald Trump,” meaning stupid, arrogant, narcissistic, greedy, and a traitor.
LikeLike
More from the link above:
“In the early 1980s, Reagan also credentialed a young generation of neocon intellectuals, who pioneered a concept called “perception management,” the shaping of how Americans saw, understood and were frightened by threats from abroad.
“Many honest reporters saw their careers damaged when they resisted the lies and distortions of the Reagan administration. Likewise, U.S. intelligence analysts were purged when they refused to bend to the propaganda demands from above.
“To marginalize dissent, Reagan and his subordinates stoked anger toward anyone who challenged the era’s feel-good optimism. Skeptics were not just honorable critics, they were un-American defeatists or – in Jeane Kirkpatrick’s memorable attack line – they would “blame America first.”
“Under Reagan, a right-wing infrastructure also took shape, linking media outlets (magazines, newspapers, books, etc.) with well-financed think tanks that churned out endless op-eds and research papers. Plus, there were attack groups that went after mainstream journalists who dared disclose information that poked holes in Reagan’s propaganda themes.
“In effect, Reagan’s team created a faux reality for the American public. Civil wars in Central America between impoverished peasants and wealthy oligarchs became East-West showdowns. U.S.-backed insurgents in Nicaragua, Angola and Afghanistan were transformed from corrupt, brutal (often drug-tainted) thugs into noble “freedom-fighters.””
LikeLike
This is what happens when the left insists that there is no difference between a normal moderate to progressive Democrat and a right wing demagogue.
Suddenly the right wingers of old look okay next to that right wing demagogue you insisted was absolutely no different than the moderate but evil and corrupt Democrats.
As someone who believed with all my heart that Jimmy Carter was as evil as Reagan, I understand why you might have been fooled. I just don’t understand why you are still sticking to your guns and not recognizing that you were wrong.
LikeLike
Under Reagan, disdain for intellectualism & education also took shape. As governor of CA, to justify his tax cuts he said he was not going to “subsidize intellectual curiosity”. He followed that by ending free university tuition at all CA state universities and shifting downward the percentage of state finance for public systems to local govts. CA had the best public school system in the world and Reagan ruined it.
As president, he proceeded to systematically dismantle New Deal direct federal financing of the arts, public health, mental health, public education, and social welfare programs. He fabricated an image of Cadillac driving welfare queens who were stealing white people’s hard earned money, an image that persists to this day. His anti-government rhetoric and disdain for government workers as lazy & ineffective gave us today’s hollowed out public institutions.
The Christian, evangelical right grew exponentially under Reagan. He gave a national platform to Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell, and numbers of evangelical charlatans who convinced their congregations that they would go to hell if they voted for a Democrat. Republicanism is inextricably linked to Christianity thanks to Reagan. He fractured many of the Civil Rights gains by tying Christianity to tax cuts & welfare reform- as if throwing poor people into the streets was God’s will.
Financial deregulation that started under Carter accelerated under Reagan.The Savings & Loan scandals were the first of a series of bubbles, booms, busts & fraud in the financial industry that we are living with to this day. Millions of people today suffer from job losses, financial ruin & no health care because Reagan’s rhetorical gifts convinced them that greed of a few would trickle down to the rest of us.
I cannot elevate this intellectual light weight into a hero. Trump & Trumpism did not come out of a vacuum. The seeds were planted by Reagan & his henchmen in the Republican party. Until Regan & his noxious influence is banished from the culture, we’ll have more Trumps.
LikeLike
I agree with everything you say except that the seeds were planted by Nixon and his administration. The Vietnam debacle was raging, the civil rights movement was in full swing. Nixon (and his admin) didn’t want to deal with the either. The Black Panthers (and black folks in general) were depicted as heroin addicts and the hippies were depicted as pot smoking maniacs so that the administration could convince the public that we needed a war on drugs to jail the people who were doing the most protesting and rabble rousing within the country. Can’t have that kind of thing if your only goal is to get reelected so that your party base can continue on with their greedy agenda.
LikeLike
Lisa M,
We have had many bad presidents. Until now, Nixon was the quintessence of bad, with W the quintessence of bumbling.
Trump has surpassed all of the others in his utter ignorance, greed, arrogance, and, yes, treason. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency. Nixon established affirmative action. Nixon was insightful and knowledgeable about foreign affairs and established relations with “Red China,” something no Democrat could do without being roasted by the GOP. Because of his insecurities, he sent a crew of bumblers to burgle the Democratic Office’s at the Watergate, and was forced to resign after winning re-election.
There are no possible excuses for Trump’s fawning over Putin and embracing Kim. Russia is a pariah in the world because of its invasions of Crimea and Ukraine, its attempted murder of a defector and his daughter in England, its targeted assassinations of Putin critics, and the general recognition that Russia is a Mob state run by one man and his pack of oligarchs. If any oligarch dares to challenge Putin, he is stripped of his billions and thrown into prison.
Trump’s love for Kim is puzzling. He just likes tyrants, I guess.
Our allies should learn this lesson. Never criticize Trump. Tell him how wonderful he is. Smother him with flattery, and he will be your friend forever.
My guess is that if Mueller has Trump’s tax returns, this whole mess will be explained. Follow the money always works.
LikeLike
Reagan had many faults but he was never subordinated the interests of his country to the So iets.
Frankly I miss Gorbachev. He was reasonable. Putin is a KGB thug whose greatest ambition is to restore the Soviet Union.
LikeLike
“Nixon … established relations with “Red China” is good, but “Trump’s fawning over Putin and embracing Kim” is bad. Ok, then.
BTW, it is well-known that Nixon decided for rapprochement with China after finding out about possible rapprochement between China and the USSR. It was a counter-act in the Cold War. If things turned differently, we could have all our good manufactured in Russia instead of China.
LikeLike
Nixon opened relations with China. He did not fawn over Mao nor was he obsequious to Mao, as Trump was to his hero Putin.
LikeLike
I weep all the time, Diane, for an America that I believed existed.
The loss of that idea, that ideal is hard to bear for anyone who was born when we were. I think!
LikeLike
Oh Diane, I thought of President Regan today, too, after watching our president shame this country. Yes, Trump “accepts” Putin’s denial, and all the people on death row swear they are innocent, too.
LikeLike
I have lived a long time, seen a lot, been very engaged in political issues since 1956, when I started college.
There were many terrible days. JFK’s assassination. Dr. King’s assassination. Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. 9/11.
But today was the most humiliating day I have ever seen. To see this ignorant buffoon groveling to win Putin’s approval while denouncing our own government was the most humiliating day ever. He ridiculed all of us. He might as well been sitting at a state dinner with his food dribbling out of his mouth. This was worse. He is a traitor.
LikeLike
This has to be a turning point from which Trump can never recover?! This is the ultimate sin, a betrayal of his country on foreign soil and in front of an approving authoritarian oligarch. This is what I am telling myself.
LikeLike
Me as well. If not, we may be lost and never recover.
LikeLike
I hope you are right. How many times have we said, “this has got to be it”? Yet he gets elected and approval ratings go up. If he remains in office it’s because more people than we’d like to admit want him to remain in office.
LikeLike
Little known fact: Ronald Reagan was not only an actor, but he was a whiz at the technical aspects of film. When he worked for the US Army during and after WW2, he was tasked with editing most of the color films, taken at the liberation of some of the concentration camps.
He gave a speech at Bergen-Belsen, which many people consider to be one of his finest. See this, and see if you do not weep:
LikeLike
We should note that his constituents do not consider Russia an adversary any more. Once the sainted Reagan had destroyed communism by himself, Russia ceased to reside in the house of enemies and moved over to the light. Trump gave the right Gorsuch and promises K. Trump had removed regulations that protect the environment. He has recognized the right of the extremists to hate. His supporters will say: I do not agree with these Nazis but they have a right to,say what they think. This is code for their agreement with the belief in racial superiority or at least cultural superiority.
The left will not react either, for there is no left in American politics today. We lack a vision on the left that motivates the people to go to the polls. None of this will hurt Trump politically.
LikeLike
Roy,
I hope you are wrong. I saw the most recent poll, comparing the attitude of Democrats and Republicans to Russia.
Democrats with a favorable view: 6%.
Republicans with a favorable view: 11%.
Trump is not getting any open support from Republican elected, other than Ron Paul.
Most are distancing themselves.
LikeLike
The sight of Republicans distancing themselves from Trump is no consolation. We’ve seen that over and over. The only satisfactory response to what happened yesterday is for Congress to censure the President. And there won’t even be a serious conversation in Congress about that.
LikeLike
Afraid you are right. That would take a backbone and they already lost that.
LikeLike
The president is getting more support for his foreign policy initiatives, is getting more support than you realize, See:
https://townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/2018/07/17/trump-calls-off-cold-war-ii-n2500959
I am former employee of the US State Department. I am certain that many career diplomats are having a collective “hizzy fit”. I confess, that I am enjoying their discomfort. Most of the career diplomats that I knew were pinko, commie-lovers, anyway.
LikeLike
Charles,
I wondered how you as a certified Trump lover would explain Trump’s preference for Putin over his own government.
LikeLike
Diane:
Nothing would fill me with joy more than being wrong. When Reagan first won in 1980, I had predicted that no one so far to the right could ever get elected. I was wrong about that. Considering the subsequent years of Jerry Falwell, the denial of science as contributing to the truth, and the presence of former members of the John Birch Society in the mainstream of political thought today, I was way off.
Maybe it will happen again. I have a very poor track record.
LikeLike
Q I wondered how you as a certified Trump lover would explain Trump’s preference for Putin over his own government. END Q
I do not get your comment. I am not a certified Trump lover. I support some (NOT ALL) of the policies of our current president. The NASDAQ hit an all time high yesterday:
http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/nasdaq-hits-an-all-time-high-after-upbeat-powell-testimony-2018-7-1027375667
My wife is a Russian-born, naturalized US citizen, and I speak basic Russian, and I watch Russian news. Larisa knows that Putin is a KGB thug, and a scumbag. I agree. She cannot understand how Pres Trump can cozy up to a murderous monster. Neither can I.
I do find myself, in support of most (NOT ALL) of Pres Trump’s foreign policy initiatives.
LikeLike
Reagan was a bad president. Don’t glorify him. He doesn’t deserve it.
Much of what now afflicts our nation is directly traceable to the supply-side economic nonsense that was put into place by the Reagan administration. Tax cuts for corporations and the rich were its essential component. Immediately, big budget deficits developed. Meanwhile, as Kevin Phillips noted in ‘The Politics of Rich and Poor,’ “Under Reagan…the clear evidence is that the net tax burden on rich Americans…shrank substantially.” Simultaneously, the Social Security tax (FICA) on ordinary working citizens doubled. And, by placing Social Security “off-budget,” Reagan borrowed heavily from its trust fund surplus while those “surpluses were still being used to reduce the size of the budget deficit.”
Meanwhile, Reagan gave us ‘A Nation at Risk, the education manifesto that claimed (falsely) that a “rising tide of mediocrity” in the nation’s public schools threatened American national security. Goals 2000 and No Child Left Behind ensued. As the late Gerry Bracey put it, ‘A Nation at Risk’ “yoked the nation’s global competitiveness to how well our 13-year-olds bubbled in test answer sheets.” In essence, pubic treasuries were plundered while public schools got blamed.
The great education historian Lawrence Cremin described it this way in Popular Education and Its Discontents (1990):
“American economic competitiveness… is to a considerable degree a function of monetary, trade, and industrial policy, and of decisions made by the President and Congress, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Federal Departments of the Treasury, Commerce, and Labor. Therefore, to conclude that problems of international competitiveness can be solved by educational reform, especially educational reform defined solely as school reform, is not merely utopian and millennialist, it is at best a foolish and at worst a crass effort to direct attention away from those truly responsible for doing something about competitiveness and to lay the burden instead on the schools. It is a device that has been used repeatedly in the history of American education.”
At best, Reagan was a genial dunce. But he did the nation harm.
W was worse. More big supply-side tax cuts. Dereliction of duty to protect the country. Lies about fake weapons of mass destruction, war based on manufactured “intelligence,” two botched, badly-managed wars and refusal to pay for either one, laissez-faire policies that let Wall Street run wild, and a broken economy that harmed tens of millions of average citizens but bailed out the bankers and hedge-funders who caused it. That W was placed in office through a conservative Court stolen election makes him all the more odious.
But Trump is a special case. First, he wouldn’t be where he is without the way being prepared by incessant Republican lies, by Fox fake news, by voter suppression, and by Russian money, propaganda, and dirty tricks, including the willing subornation of the NRA.
He is – as Muller will clarify soon enough – a Russian agent. But we don’t need to wait for Mueller, because Trump made it clear himself.
As Dan Balz at The Post noted,
“Time and again, in the face of strong and direct questions by two American reporters, [Trump] refused to stand up for the country he was elected to represent and protect.”
The sides are easy to discern. You can be for the Republic, or you can be for Russia and its proxies: Trump, the Republican party, and the NRA.
LikeLike
“The sides are easy to discern. You can be for the Republic, or you can be for Russia and its proxies: Trump, the Republican party, and the NRA.”
You’re with us or you’re with the terrorists.
LikeLike
Democracy, it was the late power broker Clark Clifford who coined the phrase “an amiable dunce” when describing Reagan.
LikeLike
To whoever wrote this, “Reagan was a bad president. Don’t glorify him. He doesn’t deserve it.”
Comparing Reagan to Trump is not glorifying Reagan. In fact, alleging that Reagan was a better president than Trump will-ever-be is an insult to Trump.
In fact, Trump is going to take the crown away from James Buchanan as the worst president ever — at least according to US News.com
https://www.usnews.com/news/special-reports/the-worst-presidents/slideshows/the-10-worst-presidents?onepage
The New York Times even says, “James Buchanan, who was at the helm as the United States careened into civil war, was dislodged from his position as our nation’s worst president by our current president, Trump.”
Of the 20 presidents since 1900, Reagan was ranked #9 by nolandalia.com.
Maybe I should not have written that Reagan was better than Trump. I should have written that the U.S. would be better off with Herbert Hoover as president than Trump since Hoover is ranked last for presidents since 1900 and Trump will easily replace him in that last position.
http://www.nolandalla.com/ranking-presidents-1900-present/
LikeLike
Lloyd,
Unlike Trump, Hoover was a very well-educated man. He was not stupid. His economic policies crashed and burned, but he was not a bad person. Trump is a bad person, who is known for insulting anyone who disagrees with him and for telling thousands of lies. Hoover made serious errors, but he was a man of integrity. Trump is not.
LikeLike
That’s is why I think Trump will replace Hoover for last place — a distant last.
Historical Ratings of US Presidents — Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and George Washington are most often listed as the three highest-rated Presidents among historians.
Lincoln
Roosevelt
Washington …
Hoover
This is the wide gap between Hoover and Trump
Trump
LikeLike
What would Clark Clifford say about Trump?
LikeLike
One of my best friends used to caddy for Clark Clifford at the super exclusive Burning Tree golf club in Potomac. Based on my knowledge of that, I think his characterization of this president* would violate the language standards of your blog.
As for Hoover, I find him to be one of most fascinating figures in American History. He was a self made millionaire who led complex engineering in exotic places around the globe. He led post WWI famine relief projects that literally saved the lives of millions of people. Most of all, he was the embodiment of a now obsolete Republican myth. He truly believed that the rich should contribute to society to make it better, but through engagement and charity, not taxes. That mindset was a leading cause to him being a disastrous president. Although he remained embittered by Roosevelt’s success, beginning with Truman, he always accepted leading roles in special projects to serve his government when asked, culminating with chairing the Hoover Commission that investigated the assassination of JFK.
Horrible president, principled man, loved his country above all.
LikeLike
Greg: nice summary of the Hoover mindset. I grew up with family that participated in that Zeitgeist. The leader of it turned against the Republican Party when Nixon demonstrated his crudeness on tape. She later donated to the Bill Clinton campaign and displayed Clinton/Gore on her window. I asked my aunt, this family intellectual leader, why she changed. Her only response was that Nixon cursed.
LikeLike
Thanks, Roy! A compliment from you might go to my fat head.
LikeLike
I agree with Fred Klonsky. I’m outraged and I want an investigation: https://preaprez.wordpress.com/2018/07/17/im-outraged-and-i-want-an-investigation/
LikeLike
No investigation of any of these things will happen with Trump and the Republican party in control.
Except for the Mueller investigation.
Thank God for Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller.
LikeLike
This morning, I watched (and recorded) HBO’s “Words That Built America”, a 2017 reading of the Declaration of Independence (by Hollywood actors), the Constitution (by U.S. congresspeople, senators, presidents, vice presidents, and secretaries of state), and the Bill of Rights (by young children), and I bawled my eyes out. Broken promises.
LikeLike