Reagan on MT Rushmore

"B" actor and "C" politician.....

That's what we need! A $10 bill with a handsome, youthful and virile Ronald Reagan surrounded by starletts! Note the way the picture is cropped to avoid showing his woody.

I heard that it is only a twiggy.........

With the way they are going on I am surprised that God didn't just take him up like Enoch on a chariot rather than having him carted all over from California to Washington and then back again. Surely this will play itself out before too long.

It's just beginning - Jesus stayed on earth for 40 days.......

Put him between two slices of a roll and call him a hero. :wink:

Do you think the festivities, yes I said festivities related Reagan adoration [funeral] are being overdone to the point of being an embarrassment. I do. He after all was only an ex-president who last served 15 years ago and died at the age of 93.

In memory of President Reagan.

Republicans are just falling all over themselves proposing things to name after Reagan. The dime, $10 bill, $50 bill, half dollar coin, Mt. Rushmore, etc.

Yet as choked up as they seem to be about Reagan's passing, few of them want to honor him the way his own wife wants him honored -- by permitting and funding the type of research that would've made his last few years bearable.

I didn't mourn Reagan's passing not because of partisan spite (even though there's plenty of that in me), but because Alzheimer's is a horrible disease I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies. In a way, I was glad his ordeal was over. Ten long years he suffered. The public barely heard a word about his and his family's pain during that whole decade.

Ronald Reagan, the actor, the governor, the President, the ideological foe, had passed on years ago. We have just been waiting for it to become official.

Nancy Reagan, having borne the greatest load of service and suffering, understands the rolestem cell research could play in eradicating Alzeimer's:



That the fiercely anti-abortion advocate Orrin Hatch signed that letter is telling. Yet Bush is not budging, afraid that reversing himself on stem cell research would cause problems with his religious base.

And Bush has no room to alienate more supporters.

This morning, the administration sent out Laura Bush to counterattack Nancy Reagan's efforts:



I believe that here could be no better legacy for a person than to inspire the cure for a horrible, dehabilitating disease.

PDiddie

I don't pretend to actually all the details about stem cell research. I used to be against it because I am against abortion and I just felt the two were linked. They may be, I am ignorant on that subject.

However, I got to thinking about all the good that it could possibly do to make life better. After listening to michael J. Fox in a commercail one time, it changed my mind. I always thought his case was terribly sad.

I watched my grandmother get worse with Alzheimer's, she finally passed away two years ago after suffering for so long with periods of thinking she was still a little girl and calling for her moma. Or sometimes she would call for her dead husband. But sometimes she would get out of it for a little while, I remember right before she died she told me that she has to make it up with her husband before she dies. I had to make an excuse to leave the room for a second. Now my mother is showing signs of the beginning stages of Alzheimer's and I do wish that more could be learned before she has to suffer like her mother did.

I am not sure but aren't the stem cells from babies that have already been aborted, either on purpose or by natural causes? If so it seems to me that it would be no different than using body parts after the death of a person to donate to another that needs it which we already do. It is not necessarily promoting abortion since it is after the fact. (I could be completely wrong on the facts)

revel
The story of your grandmother is a familiar one and has been repeated in thousands of homes. I dare say there isn't anyone who hasn't been touched in some way by Alzheimer's disease or one of the other debilitating diseases that could be cured or at treated as a result of fetal stem cell research. I can't understand how research on fetal stem cells which will be discarded and destroyed can be anything but a boon to humanity.

The most recent renaming I heard was the Pentagon, by Bill Frist.....

I heard on NPR today that the best stem cells are the ones that have been rejected as having problematic genes from people have had embryos tested for defects. Now, please - what is wrong with these? The can be used for research; but, not with Federal monies.

I will be glad when the appropriate time of mourning has passed and people - including the media - remember all of Reagan's admin, not just the warm fluffy stuff.

I appreciate the media showing restraint this week, I have no issue with a temporary moratorium on objective retrospection. But - as usual - the media overdoes everything. 24/7 wall to wall coverage is unbelievably excessive and unnecessary. I've tried to avoid the TV this week.

I purposely watched the arrival ceremony, tranfer of casket to caisson and procession through DC and the service at the Rotunda. It was - all in all - nice. And I will watch the service on Friday at the National Cathedral. I wasn't alive for either JFK or Johnson funerals, and am fascinated by the pomp and circumstance and believe Reagan deserves the honor as would all presidents.

But gawd, enough already with the ridiculous efforts to immortalize this man as if he were God himself. No Reagan on money, no Reagan on Mt Rushmore, it's insane.

Yes, allow him his presidential honors then after today.....back to business please. Enough is enough.

If this administration and congress want to truly honor him they can establish and fund stem cell research in his name. Call it the Ronald Reagan stem cell research project.

au you know better. Unfortunately.

WASHINGTON Franklin D. Roosevelt once defined great presidents as those who were "leaders of thought at times when certain ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified." By that reckoning and most others, Roosevelt himself earned a place on the list of greats, rallying the nation during the Depression and leading it to the brink of victory in World War II. George Washington, who bent to the hard work of nation-building, Abraham Lincoln, who saved the union, and Thomas Jefferson, who codified some of its ideals, are other universal choices. Not by coincidence, all four have monuments in Washington. But what of Ronald Reagan, whose weeklong farewell tributes, reaching a climax Friday in a funeral at the National Cathedral and burial in California, have stirred such emotion and such largely laudatory comment? What will history, with its privileged vantage point far from the heat of partisan battles, conclude about him? Clearly, Reagan died a respected, perhaps even a beloved, man, although the affection was far from universal, as it is for any public figure. In office, his popularity, though dented, survived the Iran-contra affair, but popularity is never a reliable test of greatness. Harry Truman, now counted among the near-greats if not the greats, retrospectively admired for his prosecution of the cold war, left office with an approval rating of 23 percent. Warren Harding, now disdained, whose stated ambition was to be remembered as the country's "best-loved president," came close to that goal following his sudden death in 1923. It could be argued that Reagan's greatest triumphs came in his role as chief of state rather than as chief of government. He was often ignorant of or impatient with the policy minutiae that preoccupy most occupants of the Oval Office, sometimes with unfortunate consequences (as when Oliver North, a White House aide, ran amok, for instance).
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But his extraordinary political gifts carried him through - his talents as a communicator, his intuitive understanding of the average American, his unfailing geniality even after being hit by an assassin's bullet, his ability to build and sustain friendships across partisan lines. Those gifts - and his conviction that words counted for far more in politics than mere deeds - enabled him to convince large majorities that as long as he was in charge, it would remain "Morning in America." They made it possible for him to redraw the nation's political map, moving the center so abruptly to the right that even the Democrat Bill Clinton would proclaim the end of "big government" and to remold his Republican Party in his own image.
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The gifts gave him the eloquence to lead the country in mourning after the Challenger disaster and to celebrate "the boys of Pointe de Hoc" near Omaha Beach. Vice President Dick Cheney hailed Reagan as a graceful and gallant man, and more than that - "a providential man" who provided precisely what the nation and the world needed at a crucial moment. "But he was not a great president," said Sean Wilentz, professor of history at Princeton University. "He was master at projecting a mood; he could certainly rally the country. He would have made a great king, a great constitutional monarch, but we do not have that form of government."
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Success in war underpins the claims to greatness of many presidents. Andrew Jackson wins the plaudits of historians for broadening the character of American democracy by extending the franchise, but he was a celebrated soldier long before he became president, as were Washington, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, whose standing has increased markedly since he left office. Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman and James Polk were all wartime commanders in chief.
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Reagan spent World War II, the global conflict fought and won by his generation, making training films in Hollywood. But he came to power as the cold war was nearing a climax, and he did all he could to hasten the process by beefing up the American military and delivering his bold challenge in Berlin to "tear down this wall." After that, it would have been hard for Mikhail Gorbachev to believe that Americans had lost their will to resist Soviet power, and Reagan joined with Gorbachev in helping to bring it about. Though it was the end result of 45 years of aggressive allied containment, the commander in chief, as always, got much of the credit. Without doubt, that will form a very important part of Reagan's legacy, as one aspect of his vision.
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In his book "Hail to the Chief: The Making and Unmaking of American Presidents," the historian Robert Dallek lists vision as a sine qua non of presidential greatness, along with "pragmatism, ability to achieve consensus, charisma and trustworthiness."
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Few will deny Reagan's trustworthiness or his immense charisma, matched only in the modern era by Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, and he demonstrated his pragmatism in rolling back some of his huge 1981 tax cuts with two tax increases when the cuts failed to produce as much revenue as he expected.
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Reagan had another vision, but he fell well short of the ability to produce consensus behind it, then or now. Much of the country, including most of those who are physically, economically or otherwise disadvantaged, deeply resented and still resent his insistence that "government is the problem, not the solution."
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Severe and continuing cutbacks in government services to the poor and vulnerable resulted, and the gulf dividing rich from poor widened.
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If Reagan's celebrated optimism lifted the veil of malaise that darkened the Jimmy Carter era, it also obscured major problems. Many missed Carter's burning commitment to civil rights and liberties at home and human rights abroad.
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African-Americans and trade union members felt particularly aggrieved, as did many Jews, who resented Reagan's participation in a ceremony in 1985 at a German cemetery where Nazi SS troops were buried.
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To some degree, history's verdict is shaped by the values of the time in which that history is written, and who it is written by. H.L. Mencken, ever wary of pompous speeches and empty promises, rated Calvin Coolidge highly because, as he wrote, "There were no thrills while he reigned, but neither were there any headaches. He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance." Reputation is also shaped by perspective. A group of American and Australian political figures and others, assembled in Washington for a conference this week, disagreed sharply on Woodrow Wilson. The foreigners called him a flop, largely because of his rigid and eventually counterproductive idealism, while the Americans (like most historians) held him in higher esteem.
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Historians may say that Kennedy held office for too short a time to achieve true greatness in the presidency, but for many around the globe he still embodies the best of the United States, which is why there are streets named for him and pictures of him hanging in houses all over the world. So far, Reagan has achieved no such status overseas, although as president he was held in far more esteem in Europe than George W. Bush is. His brand of radical conservatism had a counterpart in Britain under Margaret Thatcher, but it has achieved little success elsewhere. Some presidents leave behind records so contradictory as to cloud generalization. Richard Nixon's foreign policy achievements, most significantly his rapprochement with China, were eclipsed in his final years in office by domestic policy failings and his evident shortcomings as a moral leader. Vietnam blackened Lyndon Johnson's reputation and forced him from office, despite his tremendous achievements in domestic policy, notably in lifting the cruel yoke of segregation from black Americans. It is not entirely clear yet what those two presidents will most be remembered for - what one achievement or failure will attach to their names, at least in popular history, as the crusade against the trusts, the "malefactors of great wealth," attaches to Teddy Roosevelt's, and scandals attach to Ulysses S. Grant's, all but wiping out his role as a war hero. The "Reaganauts," as one of them said, have been out all week seeking to burnish their man's legacy. But hagiography will not determine their leader's ultimate standing, and whether he is entitled to be called great. Only what the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called "the cool eye of history" will do that, many years hence.
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The New York Times

au, Excellent post; thanks for sharing.

I suggest David Lee Roth, Ozzy Osbourne, Bon Scott and Sid Vicious for the new Mt. Rushmore......and if you have room, Rob Halford....