A friend wants to know, after reading a newspaper column 0n the subject, whether Ron is a "Reagan Republican." Here is a very brief sketch on the history of Ron and Ronnie. In 1976, Ron did endorse Reagan for president over the incumbent, Gerald Ford; he was one of the very few elected officials to do so. This is the source of that famous Ron-Ronnie photo op.I personally believe that the most evil thing President Reagan did as president was to order the invasion of the tiny island of Grenada. Prior to the great U.S. military victory over Grenadian forces, which consisted of not much more than mowing down three men with fishing spears, the United States populace, because of Vietnam, was sick of war.
When Reagan was president--we later learned from Treasury official Manuel Johnson--the first Reagan budget was balanced, and the White House asked for a deficit of $100 billion, a lot of money in those days. (Deficits were always the order of the Reaganite day.)
Despite much pressure, Ron Paul would not vote for it; hilariously, he and the others were promised there would never be a Reagan deficit again. Ron was the lone Republican dissenter for economic sanity, as has so often been the case. He did not vote for any of Big Government Reagan's six huge tax increases, nor his greater and greater spending, nor his greater and great deficits. Reagan asked for more spending that the Democrats passed. Tip O'Neill was a restraint on him.
Read the rest here.
The great "victory" in Grenada caused the taste for blood and pride in national military superiority to be reignited in the bowels of the American boobsie set. Thus followed the invasion of Panama, Iraq etc.
As Murray Rothbard put it in a recap of the invasion:
One discouraging aspect of Reagan's October Surprise is the huzzahing by which the American public greeted the war in Grenada. It is over-optimistic to believe that the public is opposed to war; as was the case in Vietnam, the American masses are only opposed to a war that the U.S. has difficulty in winning. Give them a quick victory, with small loss of American life, and they love it. As one Pennsylvanian said after the invasion, "I'm glad our President is a man!" Americans seem to have little interest in the immorality or illegality of the invasion, in the principle of non-intervention, or in the fact that the closest modern analogy to the US. assault on Grenada was the much-reviled Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, where the Soviets invaded a country whose Commie ruler was too Commie for the Soviets to handle. No, the average Americano seems to glory in the vicarious macho thrill of war, provided victory is swift, and the resistance of the foreign victim disappears quickly.
You are forgetting to mention his horrible Lebanon intervention.
ReplyDeleteGrenada was evil and the death toll is a lie !
Many of the U.S. soldiers who died there were classified as on secret ops and their deaths are not reported in the official 19 KIAs.
Haha, it seems that the hard-core is not satisfied with the official Ron Paul campaign which has a large Reagan-Paul photo on its website, together with an awful, terrible, damning quotation in which Reagan praises Paul, a great patriot and supporter of the American military. :)
ReplyDeleteDr Paul seems to be one of those rare politicians who is without guile or malice, so of course he believed Reagan's rhetoric about reducing government power. Once he saw him in action he quickly became a spoiler.
ReplyDeleteIf he can use Reagan's PERCEIVED legacy to his political benefit, then more power to him.