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Originally Posted by bhkad
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Oh yeah, Sparky, I can repost too donchaknow?
Back at ya:
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With the mainstream media fixated on remarks by preachers at Trinity United Church in Chicago, it has largely ignored far more consequential comments by the president of the United States. Unlike the church sermons, these remarks go to the heart of how George W. Bush has governed as the leader of the free world as well as the likely approach of John McCain, who endorsed what Bush had to say.
In remarks before the Israeli Knesset, President George Bush implicitly conflated Barack Obama's willingness to talk with hostile foreign leaders with appeasement of the Nazis. To strengthen his case Bush cited an unnamed Senator who allegedly said, "As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland ... 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided."
The Senator to whom this quote is attributed was not a Democrat, but Republican William Borah of Idaho. If Borah is to be a negative exemplar for today's foreign policy, the upshot is the opposite of what President Bush would have us believe.
Unlike Obama, Borah was not an advocate of multilateral foreign policy committed to engagement with an often messy and unpleasant world. Like most other Republicans in the years between the world wars, and much like President Bush today, Borah was a nationalist who believed that America should act unilaterally to protect and advance its exceptional civilization and not tie its destiny to foreign peoples and regimes.
George W. Bush's Revisionist History | CommonDreams.org
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John McCain's revisionist history
"We have turned things around from a failed strategy of Rumsfeld, which I was the only one that spoke strongly against, to a new strategy, which I supported, which is succeeding."
That's Sen. John McCain in an interview with Charlie Rose, and there are two points worth making about the "straight talk" he was delivering.
First, as Think Progress has noted before, McCain didn't always "speak strongly" against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's strategy in Iraq. In March 2004, he declared that the United States was "on the right course" in Iraq. And in December 2005, he predicted that, "a year from now, we will have made a fair amount of progress if we stay the course."
Second, to the extent that McCain did "speak strongly" against the Rumsfeld strategy, he was hardly "the only one." While McCain was campaigning for George W. Bush's reelection in 2004, for example, Bush's opponent was criticizing Rumsfeld's war strategy and calling on him to resign.
John McCain's revisionist history - War Room - Salon.com
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Reagan infamously thought trees created the greenhouse gases that caused global warming thereby wasting valuable time and diverting funds and resources away from research efforts that could have helped head off this problem years earlier.
- he spent billions on his Strategic Defense Initiative (aka the "Star Wars" missile defense system), which was never completed (or even proven to work), based on the premise of not only defending the US from Soviet missile attacks but also on his sincere belief that it would protect the US from alien attack (I am not making this up).
- he took about six years to acknowledge that AIDS was a serious public health problem that needed to be addressed and researched and not just an issue to pander to the "moral majority" conservatives with by baiting gays and denouncing the homosexual "lifestyle choice."
And, as reported in Newsweek:
- he failed to shrink big government, contrary to one of his supposed claims to fame. The number of federal employees actually grew by 7 percent during his two terms.
- federal spending also increased as a proportion of national output.
and
- while, committed to balancing the budget, he ran the largest peacetime deficits in American history and tripled the national debt.
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in a pre-taped video eulogy, celebrated Reagan as being responsible for ending the Cold War "without firing a shot."
Well, maybe the US themselves never actually fired any shots but there were plenty of proxy battles between the two Cold War superpowers in Central America (Nicuragaua, El Salvador etc.), Africa and most notably, Afghanistan where the CIA armed and trained the anti-Soviet freedom fighters like Osama Bin-Laden who would later morph into the Taliban and groups that would form the basis for the Al-Qaeda terrorist network.
The re-casting of Reagan as the reason for the end of the Cold War, the major point being advanced in the media's revision of Reagan's legacy, is either outright false or, at best, an arguably incomplete analysis. Soley crediting Reagan without acknowledging the contribution of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev ignores key facts such as:
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the economically weak Soviet communist empire would have likely collapsed anyway without the effect of them trying to keep up with the US military build-up under Reagan (although, admittedly, it might have taken a little longer than it actually did).
- the Soviets themselves realized economic collapse was inevitable without serious reform and brought in Gorbachev knowing that they needed a leader strong enough to stand up to the Politburo and make the institutional reforms necessary to save the Soviet empire.
Contrary to the picture painted last week of Reagan being a benign and warm president eternally optimistic about the future of America, I remember Reagan as being painfully disconnected from much of America and antagonistic to the poor, minorities and gays either because of policies he supported or through his public addresses which were often infused with loaded codewords like the infamous "welfare queen" which helped stir up anti-poor and black sentiment.
Much of the Reagan legacy remains with us today: the fiscal policy of using tax cuts as economic stimulus on the basis of the "trickle down theory," now known as "Reaganomics," was widely-discredited (and consided a failure) after his presidency until Bush reintroduced them to little or not effect. The
Bush senior administration is littered with old Reagan era staffers and Bush is still actively advocating the SDI missile defense system even though, in a post-9/11, post-Iraq world, it seems pretty obvious that the paradigm for future armed conflict has probably shifted away from the dueling superpower model. Even his choice for National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice a Sovietologist and expert cold war theoretician, is a throwback to the Reagan era of thinking about the world around us. Notes from a Different Kitchen
Nope, Sparky, I'd say the Republicans of the past thirty years have cornered the revisionist history market! 