Carol Platt Liebau: Remember Ronald Reagan?

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Remember Ronald Reagan?

How typical -- in this story, ABC's Claire Shipman asserts that Mikhail Gorbachev "is generally regarded as the man who broke down the 'iron curtain' that separated the communist world from the West and thawed the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union."

Please, Claire. We were there. You've got Gorbachev confused with President Ronald Reagan.

I'm sure Gorbachev is a fine person. But it's hard to understand why the MSM continues to hang on his every word with breathless deference. After all, a fair recounting of leadership has to include the fact that he didn't intend the break-u[ and liberation of the satellite states of the Soviet Union -- he was just trying to institute a few reforms that got out of hand . . . and then the Russian people wanted freedom. As President Reagan predicted they would.

3 Comments:

Blogger The Flomblog said...

Gorby has the distinction of outliving President Reagan. This gives him the proverbial "last licks"

Note that the refferences in the Britanica article


"Gorbachev's life and achievements are chronicled in Zhores Medvedev, Gorbachev (1986); Christian Schmidt-Häuer, Gorbachev: The Path to Power (1986; originally published in German, 1985); and Dusko Doder and Louise Branson, Gorbachev: Heretic in the Kremlin (1990)".


reflect a russian or european point of view?

Gorbachev was in a rough spot from day 1 - he had to put down a revolution by his own hardliner - generals, he had a miserable economy. He was the recipient of decades of evidence that a planned economy does not work for a farming community - in other words - he (and the soviets) was broke.

Reagan was playing table-stakes poker and Gorbachev was unarare that he was even ig the game. - Reagan had the resource to keep raising the bet until the soviets folded, quite litterally.

9:34 AM  
Blogger Greg said...

"Remember Ronald Reagan?"

Vividly! He's one of my heros. Are we still allowed to have those?

12:32 PM  
Blogger eLarson said...

Fund and train Al Qaeda, bin Laden and the Taiban.
That would be a continuation of the Green Belt strategy that was espoused by Zbig Brzezinski, among others, before Reagan took office.

The Soviets were the focus. No figured on Islamic Jihadists doing anything other than help contain Russia. (That was the essence of the Green Belt.)

Regarding point #3, what is the citation for this?

Regarding point #7, George H. W. Bush was clearly wrong.

12:44 PM  

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