Ronald Reagan

Well, I guess it's convoluted. Bear with me. When Ronald Reagan began his run for the presidency, I remember thinking, "An actor? What's going on with that?" I had primarily known of him from "Death Valley Days", one of the few actually good series on T.V. back in the 1960's, about the really tough frontier days of California. He was kind of the host for that series, giving the opening set up for that day's show, and then a kind of a recap at the end. I don't remember him actually being in any of the shows, but apparently he was in eight of them. I do remember that he seemed very personable and made you want to watch the shows. I also knew he was later California's Governor. I don't remember him being involved with the conservative Barry Goldwater in 1964, giving a truly rousing speech that probably helped lead to his rise in the Republican party, and one that pertains today as much as it did forty years ago. I wasn't very political back then. I was just assuming the government needed to take a lot of my money for what was very expensive, but necessary stuff. I was just out of high school and I guess the left had nearly gotten to me.

In September 1963 I went into the Air Force, and sometime in 1964 I went to Okinawa. I didn't have many (any?) political opinions at the time. I guess I wasn't surprised that Goldwater was crushed by Lyndon Johnson. I didn't vote. I couldn't because I was only 19 years old. I honestly couldn't say who I'd have voted for even given the opportunity. I just knew that the mission I was on was important and it was the right mission to be on because it was good for the U.S.A. and that was (and is) enough for me. Fast forward to 1967. Back from Thailand for the second time, I got stationed at George AFB, in the Victorville, California high desert. I remember watching The Joe Pyne Show (look for the great Frank Zappa quote) on television there and getting completely infuriated, night after night. What was the government trying to do to us? It was something of a political awakening for me. And it was really about time, too.

Now flash into the future in 1968. Now there was a real Presidential election. Mainstream Republican Richard Milhous Nixon, Ultra-Liberal Democrat Herbert Horatio Humphrey Jr. & State's-Rights Independent George Corley Wallace. I saw both Humphrey & Wallace speak at the place I was working at that point in time. I voted for Wallace. He had a widely known terrible record on "civil rights", but he certainly had a constitutionally compelling argument. That was that states had the right to decide how they were to be governed in areas that the Federal Constitution didn't delve into (that's "State's Rights" in a nut shell). But I digress. What Joe Pyne taught me was to distrust the government. Not just the Federal government, but all governments. It was a good lesson. Later in the 1970's, when Ronald Reagan said something like, "Government isn't the solution, it's the problem", I instantly started listening. Today, I'm kind of Libertarian, but not completely.

In 1980, Reagan ran against the liberal, but all around nice guy, Jimmy Carter, who somehow happened to be president at the time. Carter was an ex-submariner who purportedly was a PhD. in some sort of Nuclear Engineering. But he gave science a bad name. I'd really have to say that he didn't have a spiteful bone in his body, but he was just not suited to big-time international politics. He just couldn't imagine that there could be people in the world that would take fifty two U.S. hostages like the jihadists in Iran did. But it happened. Week after week, month after month, we watched the news: "Day 284 of the Hostage Crisis". On and on it droned for what seemed like ages. Actually 444 grueling days. There was even a rescue attempt that ended in absolute failure, with crashed helicopters in the desert. He was hopeless. He was a liberal. In the time he was president, inflation and interest rates were both in double digits. Buy a house? O.K., the interest rate will be 20%. Seem excessive? Well the inflation rate was almost as high. No point in putting money away. Next week it would be worth even less. You'd be better off if you spent it while you had it. Where did the "American Dream" go? In 1977 at his inauguration, Carter said "The American dream endures". In very little time, Carter insured that very few people could afford to buy even a very modest house. He probably hasn't gotten it still. Maybe that's why he decided to build houses and give them away. But the American people certainly got it. Reagan won in a fairly decent landslide. Why? Reagan was an optimist that saw a bright future for the country that was eventually shared by a huge number of people that had never heard anything like that from a presidential candidate.

He was optimistic because he had a plan. Cut taxes in a big way, reduce government involvement in trade and commerce, strengthen the military to a point that no country could touch us, even the U.S.S.R. He spent a lot of money on defense, but I've always felt that the big deficits that happened were cause by the Democrat controlled Congress that spent like drunken sailors. Tax revenue increased by a lot even though the tax rates were lower. Liberals spent it faster than it came in. Result: Deficits. What a shock. It should be painfully obvious by now, that low taxes are an incentive to make more money. Reagan apparently knew this. To the libs, it seemed risky at the time. That would be them. Next election: landslide.

France has always been a problem for truly democratic countries. When Reagan decided (rightly) to bomb the hell out of Lybia for setting off bombs in a German disco and killing three people including one American GI, (I hate disco, but I hate the miserable jihadists even more), the French refused to let U.S. bombers use their air space, increasing the round trip from England substantially. One crashed on the return trip. That clinched it for me. The French are socialist idiots. The interesting thing about this episode was that amid all the flak that Reagan got for "attacking" a country, we never heard from the coward Kadafi again, until he wanted to surrender his WMD just recently. We can all thank both Reagan and Bush for that.

S.D.I. Star Wars. The Strategic Defense Initiative. What a great master plan for a livable future. All it required was that the Soviets should be nervous enough about it working that they'd have to spend like crazy to defeat it. If it worked (it will) so much the better. The Soviets were convinced we could do it. They couldn't afford the incredibly huge pace of military spending, and the S.D.I. deal was the clincher. The Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, the cold war was over. We won the cold war with MONEY. Isn't that the best way? It wasn't a no brainer that the Soviets would fold. The could have been pushed into a first strike situation before S.D.I. rendered a first strike useless. Reagan played his cards and the rest was history. So was the Soviet Union.

We live in a better world on many fronts because of Reagan. We now face a bunch of fanatic morons that have shown how much they hate us over and over again. We could use bold decisive leadership ala Ronald Reagan once again. I hope Bush is up to it.