Indeed.
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These are not the Presidents you’re looking for…
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Right. But I don’t see “looking for a president” as the point here. To me, it’s worth rehearing St. Ronnie say such things because they highlight the irony of current republican reverence for him.
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Agreed; Reagan works because the right has long been sugar coating and deifying his terms as POTUS as if he were the greatest thing since sliced bread, despite the actual reality.
If even their poster boy was outspoken against Nazis and flagrant bigotry, then maybe some of them will take a serious look at how off course they are from their alleged beliefs.
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Not going to argue with that. But I will say that even when well meaning, politicians are human, usually middle aged or older, and they stick around a long time. Societal norms change around them and they may change faster or slower. They are also held to account for everything they’ve ever said, rarely allowed to simply admit and correct past mistakes, and struggle to always be “on,” which is exhausting and leads to saying stupid things.
In any case they need to be elected by then-current voters, which limits how far out of step with the zeitgeist they can be. In any society, the most morally wise figures (religious, philosophical, or otherwise) often arrive at similar conclusions on many basic issues. I think Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, Aristotle, Mohammad, Kant, J.S. Mill, and Martin Luther King Jr. would get along just fine and successfully reason around their many differences and create a pretty awesome governing body. None of them could get elected in the U.S. as president.
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It’s questionable whether Reagan could even get elected in today’s environment. He’s center-right by current standards.
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Almost like??
Unfortunately the white supremacists argument is that their rights are being denied-- they had a permit, they tried to march, others came along and tried to stop them. It’s their ironic little ace-up-their-sleeve: use the system to destroy the system, cry about your own rights so you can use that to deny other people their rights.
The march wasn’t really about free speech, it was about intimidation and building power, giving other closeted racists the balls to come out of the woodwork and join them.
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And our knowledge about what President Reagan was really like makes the irony all the more bittersweet.
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As a reminder of another contrast between then and now, and how much worse President Trump is then even the plummeting moral center of the GOP:
President Trump will break with White House tradition of speaking at the NAACP convention, deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday. … Presidents going back to Ronald Reagan have addressed the NAACP.
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I recall one speech he made to a Boston MA crowd when he first ran for prez. Back then, Boston was not exactly cozy with African-Americans (not to imply that it’s not that way now), and Reagan’s speech made a point of emphasizing that he would help Boston maintain it’s cultural traditions. Analysts back then read that portion of his speech as promising that white neighborhoods would remain so. That analysis was backed by the very words of some loudmouthed Bostonians following the speech, i.e., keep out the blacks.
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Like a saint. Well, he certainly did dabble in otherworldly clap-trap: astrology
Well, he likely would not have made it through the 2016 primary. Trump would have simply hit him with the ‘namby-pamby, not a real conservative’ label.
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And yet, there was his “welfare queens driving caddys” speech he gave in city in Mississippi in the 1980 election. The coded racism started under Nixon that the GOP has embraced is part and parcel of our current problems. The more overt racism rode back into the mainstream on the back of the more covert racism that Reagan and his ilk employed to win elections in the south.
I couldn’t agree more.
I’m not sure that’s the case. Surely the moderate wing of the GOP is who is doing this, because they know that they need to get away from Trump as much as possible, without damaging the party itself.
Ugh. That was bad enough, honestly. The GOP just needs to completely clean house here.
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Unfortunately (as I’m sure you remember) he was speaking out both sides of his mouth on issues of race.
I think the post-Nixon GOP really believes they can campaign with racist dog whistles and not have it descend into what it’s actually descended to. They don’t actually think the base takes it all seriously, but they absolutely do take it seriously. That’s the problem. It’s not a separate category, it’s a set of related phenomenon.
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The jackboot fits. The race-baiting crack baby and superpredator memes that Bill and Hillary Clinton used to advance their careers were reprehensible and brought ruin on thousands of American families.
One can be happy that Ms. Clinton lost, without being happy that President Trump won. In a more virtuous nation, there would have been other choices.
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right? when we wistfully look back at the days of regan and even of the bushes, we know we are seriously f*cked. during the bushes i used to console myself with, “at least it can’t get any worse”, how wrong i was. now the bar is so low we look up at those shit shows as being at least better then Trump. There are approximately 44 presidents better then Mein Trumpf.
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Would they even let him in now?
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Even in the theoretical more virtuous nation, sometimes there are no good choices.
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Reagan:
