RateItAll: The Opinion Network

Was a great leader.Conveyed strength and optimism.He and FDR were the two best leaders of the 20th century.The difference:Reagan proved you can be a fine leader and also a kind decent man.FDR simply was not the man Dutch was.

4 out of 5 fascist dictators agree (most notably Mr. Marcos)- Reagan was great with or without senility!

Reagan made a secret arms deal with Iran for release of U.S. hostages before he was even elected. As a president he started the whole idea of monster tax breaks for the rich and was a downright racist. He sent 241 soldiers in Lebanon to die. He damaged the right of workers to unionize, and actually added 3 billion dollars to the federal debt. He ignored the AIDS epidemic, allowing to become widespread. He violated many corporate and environmental regulations and brought us closer to nuculear war since the missle crisis in Cuba. He aided Saddam Hussein and Iraq when it tortured and killed 100,000 Iraquis and Iranis, caused 10,000 more deaths by aiding juntas and groups in Central America that were facist and invaded Grenada, which was completley defenseless. He prusued the Star Wars defense and backed the Afghanis that caused 9/11. He made millions of Americans poor, homeless and hungry and he supported the racist regime in South Africa. And to top it all off, he was a lousy father. I don't know about you, but I see that as being one of the worst presidents ever and the worst president of the 20th century.

Hands down he's the greatest American President ever.

Ronald Reagan's approach, contrary to popular notions, was not overtly trigger happy. His crisis management style usually reflected a balanced approach to solving problems, he relied on second thoughts rather than the instinctual approach advocated by George Bush and his fellow neoconservatives like Richard Perle, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Some attribute Reagan's defense buildup as hostile, but these people ignore the more subtile nuances of his foreign pollicy. One of Reagan's first acts as President was to lift the grain embargo which was imposed on the Soviet Union by Jimmy Carter, this small gesture prevented famine in the Soviet Union while also opening up dialogue and as Reagan said to fulfill our obligation to find a lasting peace. In Eastern Europe, Reagan refused to impose economic sanctions on Poland's communist government in reaction to it's imposition of martial law after protests by solidarity, instead he used indirect financial means to help out solidarity. These efforts eventually led to a democratic Poland. In the Middle East, Reagan did not support Israeli annexation of West Bank, thus maintaining peace and most crucially support from the Arab nations. He had a balanced policy unlike G.W. Bush Some claim that the Reagan legacy was a constant flow of confrontations against enemies, when in reality, there was mostly restraint. There were actually 3 military interventions which occured during his tenure; Lebanon in 1982, Grenada in 1983, and Libya in 1986. All of the above were of limited duration and scope; there were no grand schemes of imposing an American style democracy by the barrel of a gun. The Libya operation was put in place largely as a last resort and only after there was undeniable proof that Quaddafi was involved in the murder of American service personnel in a Berlin disco. Beirut was indeed a mess very much like what is occuring in Iraq today, the politics involved are just as intricate. In fact we had no vital interests as stake there either. At least in Lebanon Reagan had the guts to acknowledge failure after he realized that our intervention was creating more problems for both ourselves and the Lebanese, unlike Bush who cannot take an objective view of his own policies and can't own up to his failures. After this Reagan was far more cautious in how he used military power. Our victory in Grenada provided the impetus for such an action in Lebanon, but Grenada was really nothing. Reagan in fact devoted most of his 2nd term to arms control; the purpose of the defense buildup was in fact to position the United States to successfully negotiate with the Soviets. These negotiations involved both intermediate and strategic range missiles with a treaty being agreed upon concerning intermediate range missiles. A zero-sum and even double-zero sum options were utilized towards the Soviets as an starting position in negotiating. This represented a realist style of muscular diplomacy, as opposed to the either you're with us or against us style used by Bush and company. Reagan wanted to maximize America's options while still cooperating as closely as possible with our European allies. Reagan did not have any hegemonic ambitions, he believed in multipolarity and that there are a host of actors that the international system is dependent upon for its functioning. The question of when force should be used was one in which Reagan had to confront. He rejected talk of pre-emptive action as a means of controlling terrorism; the only time he really directly confronted a terrorist regime was after Libyan complicity was established in the Berlin attack. The confrontation was direct, swift and effective. Quadaffi was never again a problem after that. Bush should learn a lesson from that on how to fight terrorism. The Bush approach as opposed is force friendly and lacking in any precise objectives. But policy aside, Reagan exhibited a different temperment from Bush. Reagan was an optimist who appealed to people's hopes, Bush Jr.'s one-dimensional approach to foreign policy utilizes fear as a means of extracting our aims. No long-term gain can be made from such an approach, and beyond that it demonstrates a certain selfishness on the part of Bush. Many neoconservatives, Bush included, would like to adopt Reagan as one their own, but the record shows that he was actually much more of a pragmatist than many would like to admit. Reagan knew how to balance idealism and pragmatism, and that's what made him an effective president.

Mr. Reagan won the cold war and for the most part, helped to defeat communism.

Quote: Didn't do much to rid us of communism, actually it was more to do with economic problems in USSR Let's see...could those economic problems in the USSR somehow have been caused by Ronald Reagan brillantly driving them to bankruptcy in an arms race he knew they could not afford?

You don't earn the moniker Teflon President as a result of taking the bull by the horns: you earn such by being disengaged, asleep at the switch and more than willing to let your subordinates take the fall. This clown treated the most important job on the planet like it was a 9-to-5 gig, and had a difficult time staying awake during both Cabinet and state meetings. His flawed foreign policies caused more crises than they solved, as figured in the Beirut Marine barracks disaster, the totally unnecessary attack on Grenada which underlined grave problems with U.S. military deployment capabilities despite Reagan's overspending trillions of dollars on national defense, the Gander disaster, which was treated by Reagan as a mere accident (Why were our troops being transported on a Puerto Rican charter plane instead of a military transport?), the totally unmerited bombing of Libya in order to get Khadaffi, which failed to hit its target, the USS Vincennes incident, where an American warship blew a commercial jetliner out of the sky, etc. Reagan's solution to the economic crisis of the early 1980s was the old Conservative mantra, i.e., cut taxes, thereby tripling the Federal debt, which took 200 prior years to accumulate, during his term of office. This contribution to the debt still hasn't been paid off 16 years after Bozo left office, and the cost to the taxpayers to service that debt amount has run into the trillions of dollars. Furthermore, the so-called recovery was particularly narrow, in that only a few economic sectors experienced significant growth (defense contractors, real estate speculation, junk bonds, hostile takeovers) while entire industries that were struggling went down the toilet altogether. It wasn't surprising that in 1987 when the stock market had its greatest crash since 1929 and the bubble burst in the U.S. economy, there weren't sufficient supporting structures in place to keep the country fiscally afloat. Reagan's stewardship of the economy relied exclusively on quarterly profits and shortchanged strategic, long-term planning, and the result was a persistent recession caused by gross mismanagement of resources during The Crapper's, er, The Gipper's tenure. The most salient aspect of this dildo's ineffectiveness in the face of peril was that dreadful Iran-Contra scandal, an insult to the American way of life that made the fabricated and shallow scandals of the Clinton years look like the insignificant nonsense they actually were. With Ollie North running clandestine operations in the basement of the White House, thereby defrauding the taxpayers to the tune of $150 billion, knowingly defying Congress and breaking the law, arming a bona fide enemy for the sake of fighting Communism in Central America, Reagan's inattentiveness caused not only a major geoplitical crisis and a crisis regarding the workings of our government, but a crisis of accountability and the Administration's credibility also ensued. Again, Reagan's hands off style caused crises of a major scale, and the leadership he displayed in the wake was evident: he cut and ran in his typical cowardly fashion. Interesting that no one went to jail as a result of this, despite the fact that North, Poindexter, Secor, Weinberger, et. al should still be breaking rocks in the prison yard to this present day. And isn't it interesting that this twerp made a concerted effort to scare the American public into believing that the leftists there were out to topple Our Values, Freedom and Way of Life (turns out, he was successful since Americans are gullible hicks, dopes and clods), yet despite the passage of time, there's been no spread of Communism in Central America, no threat to our nation from those quarters in the past 17 years? Rectum went on TV with these maps showing that if we didn't destroy the leftists immediately, they'd be in Texas within no time at all. Well, as the old Douchebag is taking his dirt nap it doesn't appear that they're presently singing the Internationale in Houston. Finally, when the greatest threat to public health since the Great Plagues appeared early in Douche's, er, Dutch's tenure, the Great Fornicator, er, Communicator turned a deaf ear and blind eye to the crisis. It wasn't until four months before this doddering, senile idiot left office that he finally got around to mentioning something in public about AIDS. Perhaps if the Rectum had shown some leadership in this regard early on, had met the crisis vigorously, the dread disease might have been contained to a certain extent. Ronald Reagan as Crisis Manager? What a joke. More like Conservative Blowhard and Shill for General Electric.

He was an aweful, vindictive, psychopathic man who presided over an era of avarice and rape of the Federal treasury not seen since the robber barons of the 20's. for substantiation, goto www.island-life.net/islandlife.htm for his obit. nothing is made up and all quotes are verbatim.

Great man with some even greater advisors. Classy guy with a great love for this country of ours.

Reagan was a weak and blustering president, completely driven by his advisors in the mold of Hollywood's Governor Schwarzenegger. The most recent escalation of American animosity in the world and putting the wagons in a circle started in his presidency and continues today, to the frustration of America's would-be allies. Communism - the great traditional enemy of America - was already failing, and Gorbachev was a reformist leader from the start. However - the Star Wars program (even though it was unimplementable) scared the Soviet Union military, as they were unable to fund an equal defense shield. I was briefly in Moscow during that period and saw the propoganda. That did speed up the collapse of Russia and the Eastern Bloc. So 2 stars for that, Pardner, but bad overall because you are part of the reason I hate the world I live in today.

When Ronald Reagan assumed office in 1981, things were tense. The Middle East was becoming more and more unstable, with new terrorist groups developing. Relations with the Soviet Union were tense, and throughout Reagan's term, those tensions were heightened several times. With regards to the Cold War, Reagan advocated peace through strength. He initiated a massive military buildup and an escalation of the arms race. Reagan's escalation signaled a drastic change in the U.S. policy of detente', which can be traced back to the Kennedy Administration. However, I am convinced that Reagan's Peace Through Strength mentality was indeed the right attitude for the 1980s. Things were tense during that time, and the cordial days of U.S.-Soviet relations that had been established under Kennedy and Nixon were long gone. Reagan's bold step of escalation forced the Soviets to finally back off. A 1985 Geneva meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev marked an improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations. In 1987 the two leaders signed a historic treaty in Washington that would eliminate their intermediate-range nuclear forces. In 1988, Reagan attended a friendly summit meeting in Moscow. Reagan's policies contributed directly to the fall of the Soviet Union. By 1989, the Arms Race had bankrupted the Communist nation, and no longer was change just envisioned in the Soviet Union; change was needed in the Soviet Union. Reagan's handling of the Cold War in the 1980s was supurb. Twenty years of detente' had proven that in the absence of Krushchev, there was no real desire for peace in the Soviet Union. Co-existance was no longer a possibility, and thankfully, Reagan knew this. Also as President, Reagan faced increased threats of terrorism in Latin America and the Middle East. When an American plane was hijacked by Libyan terrorists in 1985, Reagan was convinced that strong action needed to be taken against terrorists in general and against the Libyan leader in particular. The 39 passengers involved in the ordeal were eventually released. When evidence surfaced that Libya was involved in other acts of terrorism throughout the world, Reagan, in 1986, ordered the bombing of several sites in and around Tripoli. Reagan's response to Libyan terrorism was prudent and wise, and it sent a strong message to not just Libya, but all nations, that the United States would not negotiate with terrorists and would not tolerate terrorism period. So, in the final analysis, Ronald Reagan's crisis management record is one of prudence and true leadership. Peace Through Strength resulted in the fall of the Soviet Union and his actions with regards to Libya was the first real attempt to curb the spread of terrorist activities in that region. Kennedy and Nixon were both successful at crisis management, but Ronald Reagan was arguably the best. His policies brought an end to a historic struggle between the world's two superpowers.

Didn't do much to rid us of communism, actually it was more to do with economic problems in USSR. He was presumably awake while communism fell. But I loved the line Mr Gorbechov tear down this wall! Gorbechov: OK Ronnie, I will tremble in my shoes, you singlehandely brought down communism LOL.