From: spl@pitstop.ucsd.edu (Steve Lamont)
Newsgroups: talk.abortion,talk.politics.guns,alt.conspiracy,alt.fan.dan-quayle,alt.fan.rush-limbaugh,talk.bizarre
Subject: Re: A Technical Request
Date: 13 Oct 1992 16:24:39 GMT
Organization: University of Calif., San Diego/Microscopy and Imaging Resource
Distribution: usa
NNTP-Posting-Host: pitstop.ucsd.edu

In article <1992Oct13.014957.25667@ringer.cs.utsa.edu> madkins@lonestar.utsa.edu (Martin L. Adkins) writes:
>Here it is again, lack of an argument and therefore name calling. ...

Yes.  Like calling people Liberals?

>                                                               ... Firstly,
>we don'T KNOW that The President is corrupt. ...

Iran-Contra.

>                                          ... In fact many of us don't even
>suspect that he is. ...

Pass the rose-colored glasses.

>                 ... Secondly there is no evidence to suggest that former
>President Reagan is senile. ...

In my (admittedly checkered) career as a member of the broadcast
industry I interviewed (then) California Governor Ronald Reagan twice
in the early 1970s for the Associated Press.  The man was a total
no-op then.  He had no idea what was going on in the state legislature
-- when I asked him about an important budget bill that was at that
time making its way through the Assembly at the time (one that even
the most uninterested member of the public couldn't avoid knowing
about if they were exposed to the media at all and that his own
administration was making comment on almost hourly), he had no idea
what I was talking about.  And that was twenty years ago!

Now that may not necessarily be evidence of senility (in fact,
senility is a pretty ill defined term in a medical sense so I hesitate
to use it), but it certainly is an indication that the man was almost
totally disconnected from reality.

A close look at almost any transcript of the man's press conferences
(the few that he had) will make your head swim.  Ronald Reagan lived
and lives in a weird Hollywood fantasy land where "Hellcats of the
Navy" is just as real as the Normandy invasion and dead German SS
officers were just as much victims of World War II as six million
Jews, gypsies, Poles, and homosexuals.

That may not be senility.  I have no idea what Ronald Reagan's medical
condition is or was during his time in office.  But it certainly it
reveals a perspective on reality that is different, to say the least.

>                         ... What really burns you folks is that Ronald
>Reagan was likely the most popular president this century and that he would
>likely still be president if not for the 22nd ammendment. ...

What really burns me is that through the manipulation of vague,
"Morning in America" imagery and of a timid, fawning, and servile
press that will take any dissimilative pap handed out to them by
"press spokespersons" and repeat it as if it's truth handed down from
the Oracle at Delphi, Ronald Reagan and his handlers were able to pull
the wool over the eyes of a substantial fraction of the dwindling
American electorate for eight years.  The fact that Ronald Reagan was
elected twice by landslide margins speaks not so much for the
rightness of his cause but the laziness of the American press in
exposing the fraudulence, dissemblings, and out right lies of the
Reagan campaign and the miserable excuses for candidates that the
Democratic Party foisted on the public.  Walter Mondale, for Pete's
sake!

Sure, Ronald Reagan is popular, but so is professional wrestling.
The simple fact of popularity doesn't make either one of them any more
credible or any less of a sham, the 22nd Amendment notwithstanding.

>                                                       ... Remember the last
>Democratic president was Jimmy Carter and before that LBJ. ...

Nor, I might suggest, was Richard Nixon.

Jimmy Carter went down partially because he had the temerity to tell
at least some of the truth to the American people -- that there's
something wrong with the system and it has to be changed.  The
"Malaise in America" speech was a rare exhibition of honesty in an
otherwise dismal history, both Democrat and Republican, of sugar
coated, Panglossian claptrap and flummery.  And it brought him down.
[That, and the Iran debacle.  But there were those of us who opposed
Carter's support of the Shah of Iran, which is what got us into the
mess in the first place.  I don't claim Jimmy Carter was perfect or
that all of his policies were, either.  But at least the man has some
humanity and compassion and has some idea of how people are hurting.]

Yes, both inflation and interest rates were at record highs during the
Carter administration, there's no question about that.  People were
hurting.  But are we any better off now, with our single digit interest
rates and a dollar that's steadily and inexorably weakening against the Yen
and the Mark?  Take off those rose-colored glasses and look around.
There are people living in cars and in the streets.  There are whole
families (Family Values, anyone?) shuttling from shelter to shelter,
looking for something to eat and a roof over their heads, even for one
night.  If you don't see them at freeway offramps and you don't trip
over them on the way to the mall, then you live in a cloistered
wonderland.

Ronald Reagan and his successor, George Bush, have been feeding us the
old line of "Don't Worry, Be Happy" for so long that we've Don't
Worried ourselves into the deepest and most disasterous economic
depression since the 1930s.

>                                   ... I keep repeating it but it gets
>misconstrued, if liberal ideas and policies are so great, why does Governor
>Clinton want to be thought of as a moderate?

Because he's a politician, just like George Bush, and the word
"liberal" (I can just hear George Bush's little sneering voice saying
that, can't you?) has been turned into an epithet, as if believing
that democracy should be extended to everyone, not just the rich and
powerful, was something to be ashamed of in this grab what you can,
Michael Millkin (sp?), Michale Deaver world of self-ndulgence and
greed.

Governor Clinton is the kind of gutless little shit that this sorry
excuse for a nominating process produces, beholden to the monied fat
cats and unable to utter a word without first consulting his pollsters
and his handlers.  In other words, not much different than George
Bush, really.

The whole system smells.

Yeah, I'm in a lousey mood and need more coffee.

							spl
-- 
Steve Lamont, SciViGuy -- (619) 534-7968 -- spl@szechuan.ucsd.edu
UCSD Microscopy and Imaging Resource/UCSD Med School/La Jolla, CA 92093-0608
"Twit twit twit/Jug jug jug jug jug jug/So rudely forc'd./Tereu"
                - T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land," III. The Fire Sermon
Organization: Engineering Design Research Center, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA