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Is Ronald Reagan the best President all time?

Was Ronald Reagan the best President of the all times?

  • I'm a right leaning American, yes

    Votes: 2 2.2%

  • I'm a right leaning American, yes and the United Statss needs a President like him now

    Votes: 9 9.9%

  • I'm a left leaning American, yes

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • I'm a left leaning American, yes and the United States needs a President like him now

    Votes: 1 1.1%

  • I'm a right leaning American, no

    Votes: 23 25.3%

  • I'm a left leaning American, no

    Votes: 41 45.1%

  • I'm not from America, yes

    Votes: 1 1.1%

  • I'm not from America, no

    Votes: 14 15.4%
  • Total voters
    91
Objective Voice said:
I think iguanaman draws a very good distinction at how people with different political leans view things. A Marine base in Lebanon gets bombed and 241 Marines are dead under Reagan's watch and he walks away from it losing no political ground, but four people die in Libya and not only is America reminded of it on a near constant basis over the last 4 years, but a presidential hopeful is raked over the coals both by Congress with multiple Congressional Hearings on the matter and in the media.

The same could be said when comparing Reagan's negotiations with Russia over a nuclear arms reduction deal and President Obama over his on-going negotiations w/Iran to preclude them from producing and/or acquiring a nuclear weapon. People tend to see only what they want to see when they just can't bring themselves to take off their partisan blinders long enough to see things more clearly.
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A part of that is the incredible increase in partisan divisiveness since then.

Plus, no one really felt that Reagan didn't care, just that we were naive and didn't protect ourselves well enough. A horribly tragic mistake, but a naively honest one. Hillary comes off as simply not caring, and her own comments to Congress only exacerbated that feeling. And because of how the world has changed, AND the lessons we should have learned from incidents like Lebanon, we should have known better and planned better.
 
sawdust said:
First, capitalism is the only system mankind has developed which allows people to exchange goods and services without force or fraud.
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On the contrary, people did that for thousands of years without capitalism, or any other "ism". Capitalism is about how some people own things and other people do work. Trade and commerce are not the sole province of capitalism and are part of every social order that has ever existed. Not a single one was based on force or fraud and actually worked. Many, including capitalism, involve one class of people being able to use force or fraud against members of a lower class. Again, including capitalism.

Every socialism has adopted capitalism as an economic system because it's sustainable.
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No, socialism just includes commerce, just like every other system ever.

Do you know why people on the Enterprise on Startreck had no pockets in their uniforms? A few centuries from now they have eliminated the need for money.
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This is absurd both because you're talking about a TV show, and because apparently you think people have no need to carry anything on their person besides money.

You were evidently born a few centuries too early.
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No, we need to start moving away from classes and entrenched wealth now. Space travel is in the future, egalitarian economics are needed today.

Finally, I don't think many people hate Obama. I don't hate him. I just think that his policies are destructive and his presidency has made the country worse.
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You clearly don't listen to the majority of your political allies, then. And you apparently aren't paying attention to basically every metric besides the comfort and enthusiasm of conservatives that says the country has been improving or staying steady for the last six years.

Objective Voice said:
I think if more Conservatives read the Federalist Papers (1-10 in this case), they'd think differently of some of their deeply held views. Because to be perfectly honest, much of what they ushered in would be viewed as tyrannical by many of the Founding Fathers they claim to support and emulate.
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Honestly, I don't know why we care so much about what the founders had to say. They've been dead for nearly two hundred years, and we should be a whole lot better than they could ever dream of being. And people two hundred years from now should be a whole lot better than we could ever dream of being. These guys were merely progressive for their time, not progressive for all time.
 
Objective Voice said:
I think iguanaman draws a very good distinction at how people with different political leans view things. A Marine base in Lebanon gets bombed and 241 Marines are dead under Reagan's watch and he walks away from it losing no political ground, but four people die in Libya and not only is America reminded of it on a near constant basis over the last 4 years, but a presidential hopeful is raked over the coals both by Congress with multiple Congressional Hearings on the matter and in the media.

The same could be said when comparing Reagan's negotiations with Russia over a nuclear arms reduction deal and President Obama over his on-going negotiations w/Iran to preclude them from producing and/or acquiring a nuclear weapon. People tend to see only what they want to see when they just can't bring themselves to take off their partisan blinders long enough to see things more clearly.
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You've proven your own point. Your comparisons are not comparisons at all.

The Marines were sent to Lebanon in an attempt to bring peace. When the barracks were bombed, it became clear the mission could not be achieved. It took leadership to make the hard decision to realize that and pull out. In Libya, the story is not that 4 people died, it's the PR spin that flowed out after they were killed.

Reagan's negotiations with the USSR, not Russia, have been well documented, as has Gorbachev's thoughts about them and the man he sat across from. Somehow I don't see Ali Khamenei paying his respects at President Obama's funeral.

I will agree that people only see what they want to see. For the majority of Reagans detractors, unless they are older that 50, they only see what they have been told, and taught, to see.
 
ConsvLiberal said:
In 1984 Ronald Reagan got the best result in history of the United Staates Of America. The Reaganomics were popular all around the world. Do you think that he was the greatest President of the United States?
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It's say Jefferson, Lincoln, Eisenhower, and teddy Roosevelt rank above him, though I consider him in that company.
 
Andalublue said:
I think there are only two post-war POTUS (plural: POTII?) that left the country stronger when they left office than when they took it: Eisenhower and Clinton.
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Other than the deficit, do you think people will eventually see Obama this way?

Other than Reagan, I can't think of another President who had so much to deal with from Day-1 of assuming office and (so far) has turned things around (modestly anyway).
 
"The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was a proposed missile defence system intended to protect the United States from attack by ballistic strategic nuclear weapons (Intercontinental ballistic missiles and Submarine-launched ballistic missiles). The system, which was to combine ground-based units and orbital deployment platforms, was first publicly announced by President Ronald Reagan on 23 March 1983......The ambitious initiative was widely criticized as being unrealistic, even unscientific, as well as for threatening to destabilize MAD and re-ignite "an offensive arms race"...the concept for the space-based portion was to use lasers to shoot down incoming Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) armed with nuclear warheads. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hans Bethe went to Livermore in February 1983 for a two-day briefing on the X-ray laser, and "Although impressed with its scientific novelty, Bethe went away highly skeptical it would contribute anything to the nation's defense."[14] Frances Fitzgerald claimed that Reagan may also have been inspired to create SDI by a fictional secret weapon, a ray that can paralyze electrical currents, in Murder in the Air, a movie he made in 1940...Physicist Hans Bethe, who worked with Edward Teller on both the atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos, claimed a laser defense shield was unfeasible. He said that a defensive system was costly and difficult to build yet simple to destroy, and claimed that the Soviets could easily use thousands of decoys to overwhelm it during a nuclear attack....On June 28, 1985, David Lorge Parnas resigned from SDIO's Panel on Computing in Support of Battle Management, arguing in eight short papers that the software required by the Strategic Defense Initiative could never be made to be trustworthy and that such a system would inevitably be unreliable and constitute a menace to humanity in its own right.[78] Parnas said he joined the panel with the desire to make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete" but soon concluded that the concept was "a fraud"....In his 1991 State of the Union Address George H. W. Bush shifted the focus of SDI from defense of North America against large scale strikes to a system focusing on theater missile defense called Global Protection Against Limited Strikes (GPALS)"
Strategic Defense Initiative - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Reagan wasted billions of dollars and great effort on his unrealistic vision of using defense technology that was clearly not ready for prime time and would have created great political instability internationally if it had worked.
 
iguanaman said:
An appropriate response would to not be blindsided by Hezbollah. It was a stupid move all around. One of many, here's another.



The Irony is that Reagan was also arming Iran in his deal for the hostages.
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Response is an english word meaning to respond or in other words after being attacked at Khobar Towers, what would have been the appropriate action, with the emphasis on after.

Your answer twice now to the question about a response to Khobar was to prepare prior to the attack. Well, that's not a response, that's hindsight. So, let me try this once more.

Imagine you are president and despite your best forethought, an attack against our sleeping military happened in Lebanon. You are notified. It's a terrible tragedy. What do you do next. Please understand, playing golf is not a response.
 
Objective Voice said:
Other than the deficit, do you think people will eventually see Obama this way?

Other than Reagan, I can't think of another President who had so much to deal with from Day-1 of assuming office and (so far) has turned things around (modestly anyway).
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I'd say the deficit that Obama was left with was arguably as difficult an issue to deal as those which faced Reagan. His were diplomatic, Obama's economic so admittedly difficult to compare. Obama has not handled his diplomatic issues well, I'll give you that.
 
ConsvLiberal said:
That is interesting. When you speak with the conservative Republicans, a lot of them find Ronald Reagan was the best President in the 20th and 21t century.
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Well, of course they do! Reagan was their hero. That's the same as asking many far-left leaning liberal Democrat who their favorite president was and they'd all say FDR!!

Neither choice can be taken seriously when the majority of the respondents are like-minded in their guiding political theology towards "their guy". But if you asked them about Hitler, I'm sure everyone would agree he was a bad man. The common factor being give us someone we all can hate equally. :lamo
 
Objective Voice said:
You better be careful. Otherwise, some folks might start claiming "revisionist history".
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No need to be careful when the facts speak for themselves. They can cry "revisionist history" all they want....just like Reagan says "The facts say otherwise".
 
Paschendale said:
On the contrary, people did that for thousands of years without capitalism, or any other "ism". Capitalism is about how some people own things and other people do work. Trade and commerce are not the sole province of capitalism and are part of every social order that has ever existed. Not a single one was based on force or fraud and actually worked. Many, including capitalism, involve one class of people being able to use force or fraud against members of a lower class. Again, including capitalism.



No, socialism just includes commerce, just like every other system ever.



This is absurd both because you're talking about a TV show, and because apparently you think people have no need to carry anything on their person besides money.



No, we need to start moving away from classes and entrenched wealth now. Space travel is in the future, egalitarian economics are needed today.



You clearly don't listen to the majority of your political allies, then. And you apparently aren't paying attention to basically every metric besides the comfort and enthusiasm of conservatives that says the country has been improving or staying steady for the last six years.



Honestly, I don't know why we care so much about what the founders had to say. They've been dead for nearly two hundred years, and we should be a whole lot better than they could ever dream of being. And people two hundred years from now should be a whole lot better than we could ever dream of being. These guys were merely progressive for their time, not progressive for all time.
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What do you call the system where individuals were able to trade for goods and services for thousands of years? Capitalism is not a feudal system made up of owners and workers. It's an economic system where people can monetize their labor and trade that money for goods and services which the individual believes improves or sustains their lives. All socialist societies rely on capitalism. All communist societies have failed and now rely on capitalism to supplant their governments economically.

Your comment about socialism and commerce makes no sense.

My point about Startrek was to point out that you are living in somewhat of a fantasy land.

I personally only know a couple of people who have actually met Obama. While one of them had no use for his politics, neither expressed any hatred of the man. The fact is that I don't know anyone personally who hates him. I do know lots of people who believe as I do that his policies are destructive to the fabric of the country and have delayed the economic recovery of the nation. He's a poor administrator, has no foreign policy and wants to turn the nation into a huge welfare state.
 
sawdust said:
What do you call the system where individuals were able to trade for goods and services for thousands of years? Capitalism is not a feudal system made up of owners and workers. It's an economic system where people can monetize their labor and trade that money for goods and services which the individual believes improves or sustains their lives. All socialist societies rely on capitalism. All communist societies have failed and now rely on capitalism to supplant their governments economically.

Your comment about socialism and commerce makes no sense.

My point about Startrek was to point out that you are living in somewhat of a fantasy land.

I personally only know a couple of people who have actually met Obama. While one of them had no use for his politics, neither expressed any hatred of the man. The fact is that I don't know anyone personally who hates him. I do know lots of people who believe as I do that his policies are destructive to the fabric of the country and have delayed the economic recovery of the nation. He's a poor administrator, has no foreign policy and wants to turn the nation into a huge welfare state.
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I agree with you in principle per the highlights above, but the reality over the last 35 or so years is quite different.

The "production society" now belongs to China, not the U.S. The "economic system" you speak of largely remains this bridge between Wall Street and the Federal Reserve with all those millions of financial transactions taking place by consumers. Unfortunately, consumers on Main Street who are true "producers" of things aren't sharing in this economic system as lavishly as we should. Moreover, if we're being honest hedge fund managers on Wall Street don't produce anything and yet they are today's Captian's of Industry because they move alot of money throughout this vast economic system.

I don't begrudge anyone of wealth. Far from it; I applaud them! But our economy works in ways that are far different from how many people perceive it to work. I recommend you watch this 30-minute video to gain more insight into how our economy works. It's not all about producing goods and services. It's really about how effective we are at moving money around. The more hands that touch those dollars, the better our economy functions.
 
sawdust said:
Response is an english word meaning to respond or in other words after being attacked at Khobar Towers, what would have been the appropriate action, with the emphasis on after.

Your answer twice now to the question about a response to Khobar was to prepare prior to the attack. Well, that's not a response, that's hindsight. So, let me try this once more.

Imagine you are president and despite your best forethought, an attack against our sleeping military happened in Lebanon. You are notified. It's a terrible tragedy. What do you do next. Please understand, playing golf is not a response.
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What difference does it make? They are all dead regardless of hindsight.
 
sawdust said:
What do you call the system where individuals were able to trade for goods and services for thousands of years? Capitalism is not a feudal system made up of owners and workers. It's an economic system where people can monetize their labor and trade that money for goods and services which the individual believes improves or sustains their lives. All socialist societies rely on capitalism. All communist societies have failed and now rely on capitalism to supplant their governments economically.

Your comment about socialism and commerce makes no sense.

My point about Startrek was to point out that you are living in somewhat of a fantasy land.
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You are intent on mixing capitalism with commerce. They are not the same thing. Capitalism is a kind of commerce, and really more about power than economics.
 
Paschendale said:
You are intent on mixing capitalism with commerce. They are not the same thing. Capitalism is a kind of commerce, and really more about power than economics.
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Capitalism involves commerce, it fact capitalism describes commerce. Please explain how they are separate. I think you need to go to a dictionary. Here's what Websters has to say:
: a way of organizing an economy so that the things that are used to make and transport products (such as land, oil, factories, ships, etc.) are owned by individual people and companies rather than by the government
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I have no Idea what you're talking about.
 
Most of the Reagan greatness is a Myth created by the right. If you really look at his time in office he was nothing more than an actor Pres, not an acting Pres. He should have been impeached like Nixon, & Nixon was a better pres than Reagan. He left office a befuddled, disgraced old man, who never had to face up to his crimes.
 
Objective Voice said:
I agree with you in principle per the highlights above, but the reality over the last 35 or so years is quite different.

The "production society" now belongs to China, not the U.S. The "economic system" you speak of largely remains this bridge between Wall Street and the Federal Reserve with all those millions of financial transactions taking place by consumers. Unfortunately, consumers on Main Street who are true "producers" of things aren't sharing in this economic system as lavishly as we should. Moreover, if we're being honest hedge fund managers on Wall Street don't produce anything and yet they are today's Captian's of Industry because they move alot of money throughout this vast economic system.

I don't begrudge anyone of wealth. Far from it; I applaud them! But our economy works in ways that are far different from how many people perceive it to work. I recommend you watch this 30-minute video to gain more insight into how our economy works. It's not all about producing goods and services. It's really about how effective we are at moving money around. The more hands that touch those dollars, the better our economy functions.
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Capitalism has not changed. Certain governments have applied adaptations of capitalism. China's version allows some private ownership of business but only as a private public partnership. Russia is allowing private property and some individual capitalism but on balance the government still owns a major share of the means of production.

One thing that always makes me wonder. How does the existence of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet affect your ability to live an independent life?

Edit, looked at the vid. It's simplistic but explains the boom and bust of the Keynsians.
 
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Gardener said:
and when you add in his elimination of the fairness doctrine which resulted in the 24/7 domination of the airwaves and his viciously anti-union policies which gutted the ability of working stiffs to a fair shake, I would go so far as to say that this class warfare was quite by design. It may have not been HIS idea, necessarily, as it was the result of Heritage think tank machinations, but it certainly had quite the destructive effect on the notion that America's greatness lied in it being a middle class country.

The great Teddy Roosevelt took on the robber barons. Reagan ushered in a new era for them.
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I don't quite remember all of the details back then, but wasn't this the beginning of the first Free Trade agreement? Seems it was the beginning of all manufacturing jobs getting shipped to countries that paid their workers a lot less. I think the thinking was that American were consumers, and this would lower prices on goods which, in turn, would keep more money in Americans' pockets? Well we all know know that there have been some incredibly disastrous effects.
 
Objective Voice said:
Since Andrew Jackson, America has always run deficits but until the Reagan-era the deficits was kept relatively under control. But beginning in 1983, the deficit began to explode! :shock: History has already shown that the trend that "deficits don't matter" truly began under Reagan's watch.
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Is that because of the tax cuts to the very wealthy? You know, the money that was supposed to tickle down?
 
Middleground said:
Is that because of the tax cuts to the very wealthy? You know, the money that was supposed to tickle down?
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Damn, Middleground -- you know how excited I get every time you start to trickle.
 
Middleground said:
Is that because of the tax cuts to the very wealthy? You know, the money that was supposed to tickle down?
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No, while Reagan got a tax cut to help the country out of the Carter mess, the Congress was in control of Democrats. The president suggests a budget but all revenue bills are initiated in the House, which I believe at the time was run by Tip O'Neil. The tax cut brought in increasing revenue and congress started to spend it. Next, congress increased taxes and they were raised several times during the Reagan years. If not for congress, the economy in the 80's would have looked much different.
 
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