Richard Bennett

If you’re interested in mental illness, read this funny link on “real reasons” for the Tenet and Pavitt resignations:

Both resignations, perhaps soon to be followed by resignations from Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage, are about the imminent and extremely messy demise of George W. Bush and his Neocon administration in a coup d’etat being executed by the Central Intelligence Agency.

From our tin-foil hat to yours.

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One measure of Ronald Reagan’s greatness is the extent to which his detractors are willing to make fools of themselves to attack him immediately after he dies.

Many funny links follow.

Jesus Christ, Kowalski, can’t you show some respect? I’ve got some critical things to add about President Reagan too, but I’m going to wait at least until the body is in the ground before smearing them all over the Web. While you obviously don’t want to give him credit for the things that happened during and after his administration – such as the fall of Soviet Communism (the ideology of your ancestors?) only the truly blind fail to credit him for at least accelerating the process. So the comfort with which you assign him blame is a logical disconnect. If we can argue that the Soviet Union would have fallen anyway, why can’t we argue that the Death Squads would have also?

Rightly or wrongly, we’ve established the tradition of assigning both credit and blame for the major events that occur during a presidential administration, and on that basis alone Reagan was one of our five greatest presidents; if you disallow that sort of thinking, then the Clinton Economy “would have happened anyway.” So what’s it going to be, logical consistency or left-wing wackaholism?

UPDATE: I guess the body’s getting cold, because the vultures are circling. See lovable troll Christopher Hitchens bragging about his vocabulary, Tony Pierce demonstrating his lack of one, Marc Cooper whining like a little crybaby, and our favorite Carrie Bradshaw wannabe carry on in predicatable fashion.

Victor Davis Hanson remembers Reagan:

He hastened the fall of the Soviet Union. We could not have been able to have fought Gulf War I without his prior commitment to reconstituting our forces; he established the principle we would support democracy and be active in its promotion, whether in undermining leftist thugs like the Ortegas or rightist tyrants like Noriega and Marcos. Like Clinton he was a great communicator, and like Clinton again, he sometimes compromised and moved to the center; but unlike the latter, he had a sense of core beliefs that remained unchanged and would not be sacrificed to the politics of the day.

Davis’ tone is quite restrained, and effective.

Dan Walters, the dean of Sacramento political reporters, puts Reagan in the California context:

Reagan is gone but, perhaps fittingly, California’s new governor is a spiritual clone, another immigrant who sought his fortune in Hollywood, who ousted an incumbent Democratic governor with a color in his name (Gray instead of Brown) on the promise to clean up the mess in Sacramento, whose political skills are sometimes underestimated, and who out-Reagans Reagan in exuding can-do optimism.

Like Reagan, Arnie is a conservative who’s socially tolerant, and that’s the direction the Republican Party needs to take now and in the future. Let’s not forget that under Reagan’s watch in Sacramento, abortion was legalized (in cases of rape, incest, or health of the mother) and no-fault divorce was passed. Tom DeLay, are you listening?

Ronald Reagan’s favorite think tank, the Heritage Foundation, has this page setup for reminiscences of the man who won the Cold War.

When Reagan was in office, I wasn’t smart enough to appreciate what a great president he was, and made all the standard jokes about ketchup as a vegetable and Nancy and Ed Meese pulling the strings. But as I’ve learned more about politics – much of it from liberals he worked with in the legislature in Sacramento – I’ve come to appreciate the fact that he was our greatest president since Roosevelt, a man with high principles and the ability to fashion a good compromise, and somebody who never held a grudge. Every president (and every California governor) following Reagan has been measured by the standard he set, and they’ve all been found wanting.

The thing I’ll always remember him for is his stopping the orgy of national guilt about the failure of our Vietnam strategy that was threatening to erode our national will to a disastrous degree. Sure, Vietnam warranted some soul-searching, but we carried it way too far. In essence, it was just war poorly fought, not a symptom of moral rot at the heart of the American character.

If we’d been more patient and restrained on the military front, and more selective on the political front, the outcome would have been different, and that would have been good for America, good for Vietnam, and good for justice. But it was what it was, and after some time, you just have to move on.