Ronald Reagan
Reason #89: Saddam Hussein - Just Another American Rent-a-Thug
If we hope to understand this war and its senseless killing, we need to take a hard, cold look at how the disaster began with our own shameful foreign policy. We need to talk about our good buddy Saddam, and all the back-slapping and cigars we shared with him. He was just another one of “our guys” like Manuel “Rent-a-Colonel” Noriega.
For more than a decade, beginning in the 1970s, the United States gave him weapons and he did favors in return. He helped get American oil interests set up in the Middle East. And, beginning in 1980, he went to…
August 28, 2008 | Read More
World Boss History Reason #8: Narco Politics - The Rise and Fall of Rent-a-Colonel
The Contras in Nicaragua weren’t our only drug smuggling friends in the region. Panamanian strongman and CIA informant, Manuel Noriega, moved enough cocaine in his crooked career to ski on the beach. Noriega’s code name tells you everything you need to know about the man: “Rent-a-Colonel.” He held no firm allegiances. He was on the CIA’s payroll for decades. He spied on his friends for us and helped the Contras in Nicaragua’s civil war. In 1986, he even offered to “take care of” Nicaragua’s leaders for us. But Manuel played both sides of the fence. He sold information to the Nicaraguans…
August 28, 2008 | Read More
Reason #87: The Myth That World Boss Won the Cold War
Many an old general crows that being World Boss won us the Cold War. According to them, our massive military brought the Soviets to their knees. Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars plan was supposedly the final blow, because the Soviets went broke trying to match it. But this is a gross exaggeration. The USSR never even considered trying to compete with us in space. By the mid-1980s, they were actually scaling back their military budgets, a well-kept secret concealed from the American public.
The truth is that Mikhail Gorbachev set the Perestroika process in motion for his country’s reconstruction. The United States actually…
August 28, 2008 | Read More
Reason #76: The Great American Streetcar Scandal
Ronald Reagan’s belief in the free market blinded him to the trouble that powerful private interests can cause. If he’d been looking, he could have found numerous historical examples of corporations playing fast and loose with our energy future. I wonder if Reagan had ever heard of the Great American Streetcar Scandal.
In 1936, a company called National City Lines started systematically buying up streetcar networks throughout the United States in order to dismantle them. There were 40,000 streetcars in the nation in those days. By 1955, National City Lines had reduced the figure to 5,000. Who’d want to eliminate public…
August 27, 2008 | Read More
Reason #75: Look Out Jimmy C, I’ve Got an SUV!
Jimmy Carter was serious about getting us off our oil addiction. He even had the cojones to suggest that consumers who make energy-wasting decisions should be held accountable, declaring: “Citizens who insist on driving large, unnecessarily powerful cars must expect to pay more for that luxury.” Compared to today’s watered-down political-speak, that’s one shocking statement, isn’t it?
Twenty-six years after Carter uttered those words, George W. Bush signed his Economic Stimulus Package of 2003, which awarded $100,000 in tax credits to people who purchased a 6,000 pounds-plus SUV. (A Hummer weighs around 6,400 lbs and gets ten miles to the gallon in cross-town…
August 27, 2008 | Read More
Reason #68: Oil Junkies
America’s longtime energy mantra: Keep the oil flowing no matter what the cost.
When Ronald Reagan was governor of California, nothing pissed him off more than Berkeley hippies and their Vietnam protests. The Gipper despised all the tree-hugging flower children, who in turn disdained anybody in a business suit. Today, the town is still full of wild-eyed lefties, and nothing’s changed except their rallying cries: “Hell, no, we won’t go!” has been replaced by “No blood for oil!”
That slogan gets repeated a lot, and it’s tempting to write it off as hippie-dippy nonsense when the woman chanting it has hairy legs…
August 27, 2008 | Read More
Fair Air for America
Did you know that you and I and every other American own the airwaves? They are a public resource. Radio and television stations simply rent space on them from us. Shouldn’t we be allowed to demand smarter, tougher, and more balanced media coverage? Up until 1987, we did. Under what was known as the Fairness Doctrine, news stations had to provide equal time to opposing viewpoints.
In 1987, Ronald Reagan’s Federal Communications Commission repealed the Fairness Doctrine. Congress tried to restore the rule that same year, but Reagan vetoed the bill. Since that time, our national media has gone down the…
August 26, 2008 | Read More
Reason #19: Voodoo Economics Reborn
From 2001 to 2003, George W. Bush pushed through some of the biggest tax cuts in our nation’s history. His own treasury secretary at the time, Paul O’Neill, tried to convince him the cuts were shortsighted. O’Neill rightly predicted they would kill revenues and send the government deeper into the red over the long term. Bush not only failed to listen to him, he forced him to resign.
The President pledged that the tax cuts would actually lower the national debt by spurring the economy. He promised 800,000 new jobs would be created because of them. Instead, the country lost 2.7 million…
August 25, 2008 | Read More
Reason #14: The White House Hustle - Presidents Cash In on their Offices
Until the advent of the career politician, most of our presidents not only emerged from the private sector, they returned to it again after they finished their terms. In other words, their time in politics was a temporary phase of their lives, not their be-all-end-all calling.
Thomas Jefferson, Millard Fillmore, and James Monroe worked in higher education in their post-White House years. Andrew Jackson and Franklin Pierce went back to ranching. And numerous ex-presidents took up writing. When his time in Washington was up, former President Harry Truman moved back to his modest home in Independence, Missouri-packing his belongings in his…
August 25, 2008 | Read More
