usual suspect wrote:
> Wilson Woods wrote:
>
>> Keynes wrote:
>>
>>> On Sat, 5 Jun 2004 21:08:53 -0700, "Immortalist"
>>> >
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> "Anonymouse Unbeknownst" > wrote in message
>>>> ...
>>>>
>>>>> Good riddance to bad rubbish.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Can you define bad rubbish and show how person is it?
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> "Trees cause pollution." -- R Reagan, playing presidential.
>>
>>
>>
>> Read it and weep, crybaby:
>>
>> When Ronald Reagan said trees caused pollution, most
>> people thought he was up a gum tree. Australian
>> researchers have now discovered that, in the case of
>> eucalypts at least, the President was right after all.
>> http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/template.cfm?name=Reaganright
>>
>>> "Catsup is a vegetable." -- E Butz, Sec of Ag. on reducing school
>>> lunches.
>>
>>
>>
>> Butz never said it. You fabricated it.
>>
>>> "Jesus is coming soon." so why save environment? -- J Watts, Sec of Int.
>>
>>
>>
>> You took Watt out of context. He didn't say what you're trying to
>> make him appear to have said. You fabricated it.
>>
>> The name is Watt, not "Watts". You stupid shitbag.
>>
>>> "Off the shelf operation." -- Casey, DCIA Iran-Contra black ops warrior
>>> "I did it and I'm Glad." -- Ollie North, traitor and thief
>>> "I don't remember. (wink, wink)" -- R Reagan under investigation.
>>> "I was out of the loop." VP GHW Bush. (I know nothing. noth-thing.)
>>>
>>> The Reagan administration was the most corrupt in US history.
>>
>>
>>
>> No, it wasn't. Not even close.
>>
>>> [snip remaining rabidly partisan foam and blah-blah-blah]
>>
>>
>>
>> You just don't get it. You don't have to *like* what Reagan did in
>> order to judge him great. I don't like most of what FDR and LBJ did,
>> but there is no escaping the fact that those two fundamentally changed
>> the policy landscape.
>>
>> Reagan did so at least as much. In the L.A. Times today (Sunday,
>> 06/06), their political analyst Ronald Brownstein quotes a Democrat
>> who sums it up succinctly and correctly:
>>
>> During the New Deal period ushered in by Roosevelt,
>> "the burden of proof was on those who tried to argue
>> that government should not act," said veteran
>> Democratic strategist Bill Galston. "But in the era
>> of Reagan, which I think we are still in, the burden
>> of proof is on those who think the government should
>> act. And if you bear the burden of proof, you have
>> the problem."
>>
>> http://tinyurl.com/23vdq
>>
>>
>> I was just about 28 years old for the election of 1980, and I remember
>> it and the next few years very vividly. Reagan DID, fundamentally,
>> change the terms of debate. For 50 years before Reagan, the
>> government-knows-best statists of the Democratic party controlled the
>> debate. There were lone dissenters who argued that government didn't
>> know best and that we didn't need a nanny state, but the statists
>> condescendingly dismissed them with arrogant, patronizing chuckles,
>> and got away with it.
>>
>> Reagan almost singlehandedly put a stop to that. Very suddenly, the
>> statists were on the intellectual defensive, and it showed. Man, did
>> it show! They simply didn't know how to deal with being outsiders,
>> after 50 years of unchallenged power. This sudden dumping explains
>> all the futile vitriol directed toward Reagan. Reagan didn't actually
>> DO anything that merited the vitriol, except that he stopped the
>> statists from doing what they wanted to do.
>>
>> That's a great accomplishment, whether or not you like it.
>>
>> As Galston notes, we ARE still in the era of Ronald Reagan.
>> Presidents Hillary and Bill Clinton learned that when they got the
>> LIVING SHIT KICKED OUT OF THEM (YEAH!) on their attempt to nationalize
>> health care. If Reagan hadn't changed the terms of debate, Billary
>> would have won on health care, and we would today be waiting 6-9
>> months for coronary bypass surgery, three years for a flu shot, and
>> everyone with eyeglasses would be wearing the Kurt Rambis model with
>> 8-year-old prescriptions.
>>
>> You can thank Reagan for the 1996 welfare reform act, California's
>> 1996 Proposition 209 (outlawed affirmative action) and 1998
>> Proposition 227 (outlawed bilingual education), all truly good and
>> outstanding measures. Reagan created the framework that allowed those
>> measures to be conceived and win.
>
>
> Don't forget the role of the Reagan revolution in changing the majority
> party in the Congress some five years after he left the White House.

I'm sure his influence helped, but the trends resulting
in that had been going on since the 1960s. See Kevin
Philips's classic "The Emerging Republican Majority",
published in 1969. This is probably one area in which
Nixon did more than Reagan. Reagan helped to solidify
what Nixon had begun.

> When Bill Clinton made his State of the Union speech in 1995, just a
> couple weeks after Speaker Gingrich had been sworn in, even he said,
> "The era of big government is over." If only that were true, but you're
> correct in pointing that even Clinton "got it" following the healthcare
> debacle and his first mid-term elections.

Yes, if only it were true. Now, unfortunately, we have
Republicans pushing Big Government, in a big way. See
what The Economist had to say about this, particularly
concerning John Ashcroft, a year ago May:
http://tinyurl.com/u7rn (Look for an earlier
reference to that URL in t.p.a. earlier this year; the
whole Economist article is there.)

>
>> Reagan, both Roosevelts, Wilson and Johnson: those were the great
>> U.S. presidents of the 20th century. Nixon came close, but didn't
>> fundamentally change anything. No one else came close, most
>> especially John Kennedy; give Kennedy some credit, though, for staring
>> down the Russians in 1962.
>
>
> Also give Kennedy a little credit for supply-side tax cuts to stimulate
> the economy.
>