June 10, 2004
BUSTED:
The Simple Truth About Ronald Reagan: It took a while, but I finally realized the Gipper was a lot smarter than the folks who derided him. Folks, in other words, like me (Roger Franklin, JUNE 8, 2004, Business Week)
It was Christmas six years ago when Ronald Reagan, who died on Saturday at the age of 93, became an unexpected addition to our family, thanks to my son, who was then 11. As every parent knows, kids that age can have strange ideas about what the well-equipped adult really needs, so when Squirt handed me a little box with a mysterious present clunking heavily inside, I expected a clock or cast-iron sock rack or some such equally useless thing. What emerged instead was a small bust of the 40th President of the United States, whose forever-frozen smile gazed up from the wreckage of ribbon and gift wrap with more than a dash of mockery. [...]That Reagan was a twit went without saying, but I said it anyway, and with some vitriol. For example, there was the moron's blunder at the Detroit convention, where he said trees were worse polluters than cars. What a dolt not to know the difference between carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. How stupid would Americans be to elect him? But of course they did, and for the next eight years, most of what I wrote, including a whole book on corruption and fraud in the Reagan-era Pentagon, chronicled how the sunny fool in the White House was getting it all wrong.
Nuclear missiles in Europe, that warmonger! Homeless armies on the streets -- didn't he care? And what about this racist imperialism he was unleashing on Central America? Charismatic Sandinistas savaged by Gringo spooks and mercenaries. El Salvador a killing field. Little Grenada ground under a cowboy heel. And Star Wars -- how sad was that? It couldn't work, it wouldn't work, and yet Reagan was determined to build the bloody thing. The only unknown, or so it seemed, was whether the U.S. would go broke before mushroom clouds replaced cities with pools of black glass, which is what Reagan and his nuke-slinging cowboys evidently wanted.
So why had my son bought me this bust? His explanation surprised me, and the gist of it went like this: "Gee, I thought you liked him. You like everything he did."
Turns out, the kid was smarter than his old man, and he really had been paying attention when I'd answered those questions about why Russia wasn't the Soviet Union anymore, and what about this vanished Berlin Wall that they were talking about on TV? My son must have been listening, too, when his American mother reminisced about how, when she was his age, her family stocked the basement with tinned goods and a chamber pot to see them through the storm of nuclear fallout.
Those threats were gone because the Soviet Union was gone -- and it was Ronald Reagan who made it so.
Funny how that one generation in the middle understands so much less than those who came before and after. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 10, 2004 7:55 AM
And so much for intelligence being hereditary.
Posted by: Rick T. at June 10, 2004 10:04 AM"moron's blunder at the Detroit convention, where he said trees were worse polluters than cars. What a dolt not to know the difference between carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide"
Ah of course he was a moron, everyone knows that flatulent cows are the culprit.
Posted by: h-man at June 10, 2004 10:15 AMSmart Kid
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at June 10, 2004 10:37 AMRoger Franklin is a dolt.
What a dolt not to know the difference between carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.
1) If RF is saying that trees generate CO2 and Reagan thought they generate CO, he is at best ignorant. Trees 'eat' CO2. They do not generate either unless they are burned in which case they generate both, the ratio depending on the available O2.
2) Reagan did not specify (as far as I know) but the pollution he was talking about had nothing to do with either CO or CO2. At the time he said that the greenies were not yet doing the CO2 dance and the CO complaints were about autos.
It does appear to be true that trees do, under certain circumstances, emit a number of pollutants (in addition to O2).
Note: The O2 pollutant is not a problem unless you are an anerobic creature.
Check out The Gipper Was Right!
First, according to the report, trees and plants were creating “biogenic” hydrocarbons which were adding to the pollution content of the atmosphere. In fact, by the year 2010, these “biogenic” emissions could be greater than those released by man. In other words, by SCAQMD standards, the trees are polluting the air.Second, biogenic hydrocarbon emissions may make it impossible for the Los Angeles basin to actually achieve the strict federal Clean Air Act health standards for the ozone.
If you don't like this site - google will find more for you.
I notice that RF is wrong about other stuff also but OJ's comments are not a place for a full Fisking.
Posted by: Uncle Bill at June 10, 2004 11:36 AMh:
All mammals produce CO2, vegetation eats CO2 (see above).
The flatulent cows and sheep also produce methane which is a weak "greenhouse" gas. Water vapor is the 800 pound gorilla of greenhouse gasses but the 'scientists' don't know how to factor H2O into their climate models so they just ignore it.
Posted by: Uncle Bill at June 10, 2004 11:53 AMMethane is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, Bill.
Sometimes I wonder about you guys. I must have heard 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall' 10 times the last few days, always explicitly or implicitly meaning that, as Orrin fantasizes, Reagan brought down Bolshevism.
Got news for you. Bolshevism failed when the wall went up, not when it went down. (Actually, it wrote its own death warrant a lot earlier when it failed to manage agriculture; the wall was an outcome of that.)
Posted by: Harry Eagar at June 10, 2004 2:22 PMYeah Harry, I know.
I was responding to h-man in that comment. CO2 is just the latest attempt of the Greens to destroy civilization. Journalists wish only to bring down a POTUS, the Greens have bigger plans.
The thing they have succeeded in doing with Kyoto, which stresses the weakest contender, is divide the world into those who have 'CO2 credits' and those who would need them.
Russia is, as we type, ia a position to blackmail the US. If Russia ratifies, the treaty 'becomes binding on' every country in the world. Thats when the you-know-what hits the fan.
They have also managed to, apparently inadvertantly, confuse many folks who have no clue as to the differences between CO and CO2.
In any case, the biggy is dihydrogen monoxide.
Posted by: Uncle Bill at June 10, 2004 3:31 PMUncle Bill
I don't if you were responding to me, because you thought I was serious or not. (i wasn't serious)
All I know about chemistry is that Hydrogen Sulfide is a bad dude, (greenhouse or not)
Posted by: h-man at June 10, 2004 4:19 PMHarry: I can't tell you the number of times I pushed that line about the Berlin Wall and the bankruptcy of communism in college. It never got me anywhere. Some smug little Marxist would explain how the wall was a measured response to the perfidy of the West and that East Germany was the summit of Communist achievement, proving that Marx was right that communism needed an industrial economy to really work.
Posted by: David Cohen at June 10, 2004 8:43 PM>Some smug little Marxist would explain ...
Copping an attitude of Moral and Intellectual Superiority the whole time.
I have an IQ of over 160, but after running into a few of those I used to quote Mussolini:
"When I hear the word 'Intellectual', I reach for my gun!"
Posted by: Ken at June 10, 2004 9:01 PMHarry:
What does it matter what we call the dominant philosophy and culture of the former USSR ?
Whatever it was in '80, and whatever it used to be prior to then, Reagan recognized that it was negative, malignant, and weaker than it appeared.
Whatever he brought down, it was a good thing.
Posted by: Michael Herdegen at June 10, 2004 11:01 PMHe didn't bring it down. It fell by itself.
Some of the adulatory comments the last few days have been as fantastic as Reagan's own, notably how he 'forced the USSR to spend itself into bankruptcy.'
Maybe that was his intention -- though if it was, it would have followed that once it collapsed, he'd had canceled Star Wars, which he didn't -- but if so, they didn't bite. They didn't blow off hundreds of billions on their own Star Wars.
I happened to support Star Wars, although it was pointless and doomed to fail at what Reagan said it was for, because it would -- and did -- solve some other urgent problems for our military.
But Reagan's profligacy, combined with his ignorance, surpassed anything any president had done since, well, since Jefferson bought 200 gunboats.
Space Station anyone?
Posted by: Harry Eagar at June 11, 2004 1:51 AMYes, the USSR was rotten, but like many a dead or dying tree, it required an outside force to topple it.
Reagan did not make the USSR dysfunctional.
He did stress it beyond the Soviet paradigm's ability to cope, and their society imploded.
It was not a given that it would happen so quickly and peacefully, however.
Harry, since the USSR was using perhaps 30% of its GDP for military spending, why would you claim that they "didn't bite" on the challenge of keeping up with the US ?
They may not have spent hundreds of billions on their own звездная программа войн (Star Wars program), but, they did have a programme, one that by some accounts was ahead of the Americans in laser technology.
The International Space Station is costing far, far more than it should have, but, even if the price tag eventually reaches $ 100 billion, that's still only one-third of what's appropriated for the military in ONE YEAR.
Posted by: Michael "Spaceman" Herdegen at June 11, 2004 4:00 AMHarry:
They didn't have the money and he'd demonstrated that even their conventional weaponry was inferior. Israel ended the Cold War arms race over Lebanon against Syrian MIGs.
Posted by: oj at June 11, 2004 8:19 AMMichael:
Didn't require one, indeed would have fallen sooner had we not engaged in the Cold War. But having started it and maintained it we had to win it--Reagan did.
Posted by: oj at June 11, 2004 8:21 AMYeah, Michael but four our Pentagon money we get something. For our Space Station money we get nothing.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at June 11, 2004 8:39 PM