Tuesday, June 22, 2004

Ronald Reagan, On Ronald Reagan



"My father never felt the need to wrap himself in anybody else's mantle. He never felt the need to pretend to be anybody else. This is their administration. This is their war. If they can't stand on their own two feet, well, they're no Ronald Reagans, that's for sure."

- Ronald Reagan, Jr.

The Bush response.

4 comments:

Sheryl said...

Can you believe this Bush quote?:
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"I've always said I think it's very important for someone not to try to take the speck out of someone else's eye when they may have a log in their own," President Bush said Tuesday in response to recent criticism by former President Ronald Reagan's son that politicians not wear their religious faith on their sleeve.
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What the hell was the war in Iraq about if not trying to take the speck out of the Iraqis eyes while ignoring the logs in our own?!!!! Bush is such an arrogant prick! And the irony of using a religious reference to defend himself on an attack that he abuses religion for political justification is too much.

Ryan, I absolutely love your blog, but it sure does make it hard to escape things which I have been trying to escape to maintain my sanity.

I'm not the only one either. I have talked to several people recently who say that like me they avoid Bush speeches and reports, because he is so creepy and disgusting. How do you read all this stuff and stay sane?

J.R. Boyd said...

Well, I think it explains why I have a readership of three. But it's a good question. The whole head-lobbing thing had me pretty depressed over the weekend, for instance, and the picture of the boy holding the picture of his dead dad with the American servicewoman giving the thumbs-up over him. There's not much you can do with those types of things, but I still think it's better to face them. In fact, it's our responsibility, really, since it's our own government that's contributing to the violence, and we could stop them if we wanted to.

Sheryl said...

My feeling is that the ONLY way to stop these things from happening is to get Bush out of office. Because as long as he is in office, these things will continue. (That became very clear to me before the war started when effectively the whole world stood up against the war, and yet Bush didn't give a rats ass.)

So the only real question is what stands in the way of getting him out of office:

A. Admitting mistakes:
1) people who have supported Bush don't want to admit mistakes
2) people who have supported Nader don't want to admit mistakes
3) people who have refused to vote don't want to admit mistakes

And when people can' t admit mistakes, the frequently repeat them. The question is how you deal with a population in denial? And how can you ease them out of denial? Remember, people don't want to feel bad about themselves.

Answer: "A spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down." Isn't that why so many people loved Reagan? And yet just as many loved Kennedy, who was completely different. We need a feel good way out of Iraq.

B. A Distrust in Elections
1) If a district is gerrymandered, then people's votes actually don't count as much, but they still have value.
2) If people realized all the elections that have been close (and just how close)
3) If the voting machines are rigged and there is no paper trail, how are we going to prove that Bush has lost the next election?
4) I heard recently that the felons lists used to disenfranchise voters in Florida in 2000 and 2002 have still not been cleared up.

Take care of these issues and then maybe we can solve the other problems which are byproducts of a larger issue.

Sheryl said...

PS For what it's worth, you have more blog readers than I do. There are tons of obvious ways to get readers into your blog, but who wants to jump through all those hoops?