I think it must be difficult to write a history of Dubayah when we're still in the present. Most histories are backward looking, but I suppose some people just weren't paying that much attention in college, eh?
_________________

College history professors make you believe in time travel. They act as if they have gone fifteen years into the future and looked back.

Woody

Posted by Mustang at May 22, 2005 02:21 PM

Easily half my former and current students appear on Jay Leno's "man/woman/whatever in the street" interviews about who the current Secretary of State is, where the Middle East is, just exactly why the President can neither lower the price of gas in their hometown nor clean their windows.

Ah, the intelligence of the citizenry. Before being painted as an elitist, I would throw scorn and/or buckets of cold water (cheaper than pies..note: throwing pies would indicate that Democrats are NOT starving) on a goodly number of professors with all kinds of letters after their names and "books" (note the quotation marks) to the credit(?) that say and write things that would led one to assume they are dumber than stumps. I DO NOT think I am blowing any whistles here (Ward Churchill, Jane Christensen, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and battalions of others come to mind).

Enough.

WAIT! WAIT! I forgot to give oh so deserved credit to those paragons on real intelligence, the entertainment industry. "..and I want to thank the Academy..." If all the cretins left Hollywood and Malibu...heck, all of California, the place would have the population of North Dakota, maybe? Hey, just asking.
_________________________

The only thing more sickening than the knowledge that the votes of those folks on "Jay-Walk" count as much as mine is the knowledge that the votes of college professors do, too.

Woody

Posted by tad at May 22, 2005 03:00 PM

Reagan more than handily disgraced himself during Iran-Contra I'd say, the aid to the Contras in Nicaragua wasn't something that made people in the US feel good, nor the support for the Apartheid government, refusal to recognise the ANC, support for Rios Montt, Daubisson in El Salvador...Pinochet in Chile, Marcos in the Phillipines [41 went there and praised Marcos in one of his prouder moments].
You also missed the increasing gaps between wealthy and poor combined with decreasing real wages under Reagan. Clinton only continued that, though real wages did increase slightly [if one works the magic of people working longer hours and bringing in more income as increases in real wages] for a period during the 'boom' of the 90's.
And that S&L crisis was set up during Reagan also...hardly the stuff that has made Americans 'feel better', unless they were Neil or Jeb Bush perhaps?
_____________________

I supported the Contras. The Democrats in Congress supported the communist governments in Central America. That, to me, was the disgrace. Other things you mention have offsetting explanations, and one has to look at the entire picture and the historical context with each. Not everything was perfect--but, not everything was Reagan's fault any more than every success to Clinton was a result of his policies.

Woody

Posted by steve at May 22, 2005 05:05 PM

I'd give the answer in hexadecimal, but I doubt a CPA could convert that on his calculator :)
____________________

I'll just pull out my handy-dandy slide rule, apply my COBOL expertise, send the information to data entry to key the punch cards, run my batch program to convert the answer, and hope to avoid a computer dump to convert the answer.

Woody

Posted by jim hitchcock at May 22, 2005 05:49 PM

Worst Presidents: Polk, Buchanan.
Worst President in my lifetime: Carter. Hands down, going away. He's also the all time worst ex-President.

Most Overrated: Kennedy. He simply wasn't in office long enough for me; I liked (posthumously) his rhetoric.

Biggest Nincompoop(sp?): Gerarld Ford. Chevy Chase's caricature was fake but accurate.

As for our current leader, it is too early to say. We are all too close to the issues, we have too much invested emotionally and intellectually in current events to perform any sort of dispassionate evaluation.

And, finally, on Bill Clinton. I largely agree with you Woody but if you noticed my vote in the earlier post was for Calvin Coolidge. If the best that you can say about Clinton is that he stayed out of the way, well, that is pretty damn good in my book. I would like to see more Presidents (and Legislators) do the same.
____________________

too many steves, you make very good points.

I do believe that a lot of Clinton's success was due to doing nothing. However, when he did do something it was often illegal or in contempt of court (and the American public.)

I used to think that Franklin Pierce was one of the worst presidents, which was bad because he and I share the same birthday. However, I saw a book written on him for which the author was on C-Span's book talks several times, and it presented a different picture of the person. Pierce and his family were traveling to Washington, D.C. to move into the White House, when the train wrecked and killed his son. There's no way to recover from that.

Often a Presidents success or failures are simply dictated by the times and challenges that they have to face. Since Coolidge was president in a relatively tame period, there wasn't a lot on which he could distinguish himself.

If a president doing nothing makes him the best, consider William Henry Harrison, who served only 31 days. Here's a brief wikipedia paragraph on him:

"As Harrison arrived in Washington he focused on showing that he was still the stalwart hero of Tippecanoe he had campaigned as. It was an extremely cold and windy day, March 4, 1841, when Harrison was to take the oath of office. Nevertheless he faced the weather with no coat on, and delivered the longest inaugural address in American history, at nearly two hours (his friend and fellow Whig, Daniel Webster, had edited it for length). Around the time of the address he caught a cold, which developed into pneumonia and pleurisy. He passed away a month later, becoming the first American president to die in office. Harrison served the shortest term of any American president, a total of only 31 days."

Good job on your assignment.

Woody

Posted by too many steves at May 22, 2005 07:22 PM

The Democrats in Congress supported the communist governments in Central America.

-- The contras were terrorism in action, you can't be serious Woody. No respectable human rights organization that you turn to to show the violations of human rights in, say, Iraq under Saddam, would disagree with me on that. And I didn't know there were Communist Governments in Central America. The Nicaraguan gov't was the closest thing perhaps, and that was a mild form of mixed agrarian capitalism according to most economic analyses. The S&L crisis is not really something that needs 'context', it speaks rather clearly for itself in terms of Reagan's policies of deregulation of the S&L and its consequences for the American taxpayers who had to step in to save people like Wright, and the Bush brothers...
_________________

Dadgum, steve. When I discuss things with you I feel like those chess masters that play thirty people at the same time. There's no rest.

If you type "Daniel Ortega" and "Communist" into google, I think that you will find a lot of references linking the two. I like this one:

NICARAGUA: Don't forget 'The John Kerry Committee'
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1219935/posts

"Say what you want about Senator John Kerry, nobody ever called him lazy. He landed in Congress in 1985 and immediately rolled up his sleeves and spat on his hands. The Nicaraguan people MUST end up like the Cuban and Vietnamese! Toward this end the man was tireless.

"John Kerry stood before Congress and waved a list of heart-warming liberal reforms that Ortega promised him were imminent. ('I hold here in my hands!") Actually he called it, "a wonderful new opening!' The Massachusetts senator insisted that Nicaragua would soon blossom into tropical Sweden.

"Congress swallowed this bilge in one mighty gulp and killed the Contra aid bill (Kerry's goal all along.)

"It took a whole week after the Congressional vote for Ortega to fly to Moscow, flout his Soviet ties for all the world to see, and return with a $200 million Communist aid package. Congress, rotten egg dripping slowly off their face, reversed itself and approved Reagan's Contra aid."

Regarding the S&L crisis, for which I stated that the problem went far beyond Reagan's policies, please refer to:

Lessons from the Savings and Loan Debacle
The Case for Further Financial Deregulation
Catherine England
Catherine England is an economics consultant in Alexandria,
Virginia, and a professor economics at American University.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv15n3/reg15n3-england.html

"An April 28, 1992, Washington Post editorial warned, 'Over the past decade the country has learned a lot about the limits to deregulation.' The savings and loan crisis was, of course, one exhibit called forth: "Deregulation also has its price, as the savings and loan disaster has hideously demonstrated. Deregulation, combined with the Reagan administration's egregious failure to enforce the remaining rules, led to the gigantic costs of cleaning up the failed S&Ls.

"Such editorials demonstrate that the S&L fiasco continues to be misdiagnosed.

"The S&Ls' experience yields three important lessons. First, excessive regulation was the initial cause of the industry's problems. Second, federal deposit insurance was ultimately responsible for the high costs of the debacle. Finally, government-sponsored efforts to protect the industry only invited abuses and increased the ultimate cost of restructuring."

If there are any other differences, please go to google and type "Woody is right." You will get 3,770,000 results, and I have to be in there somewhere.

Woody

Posted by steve at May 22, 2005 08:15 PM

""It took a whole week after the Congressional vote for Ortega to fly to Moscow, flout his Soviet ties for all the world to see, and return with a $200 million Communist aid package. Congress, rotten egg dripping slowly off their face, reversed itself and approved Reagan's Contra aid."

Uhm, gee, so did most of other countries in that region send leaders to the Soviet Union in that time period. There was little unusual about trips to the Soviet Union by heads of state in the mid-1980's. Congress was extremely weak in its opposition to the support for the terrorists attacking Nicagaguan civilians as part of CIA led strategy to undermine the Nicaraguan government. It had basically no strong objection to the US circumventing the Boland admendment. And keep in mind the human rights violations, and you'd be hard pressed to deny this, in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador exceeded those reported in Nicaragua by the hundreds. So, what gives?

CATO's assertion is utterly illogical, the banking industry didn't suffer such crises when subjected to regulation, it was deregulation that brought on the crisis [and ironicially active *intervention* on the part of the gov't to save the investments of people like Neil, Jeb Bush and Wright, etc.]

Posted by steve at May 23, 2005 11:44 AM