Ronald Reagan

First, there was this billboard featuring President George W. Bush:

bushboard Do You Miss Jimmy Carter Yet?

Then came, a great improvement:

reagan billboard 520 300x224 Do You Miss Jimmy Carter Yet?

Now, Hot Air reports that this billboard has been seen in Ennis, Texas:

miss me yet jimmy carter sm Do You Miss Jimmy Carter Yet?

Some readers will be too young to remember the presidency of Jimmy Carter. I was fortunate to immigrate to the United States in the first year of President Reagan’s first term.

But the billboard has a point. Jimmy Carter was one of the worst presidents we have ever had and certainly the worst in recent history. Inflation, interest rates and unemployment all reached record highs during his presidency. Gasoline shortages meant waiting in long lines to fill up your car, kind of like today in Florida after a hurricane except this was nationwide and there was no natural disaster causing the shortage. The ayatollahs took over in Iran and their stooges held the American embassy staff hostage for more than a year. The Soviet Union continued its expansion peaking with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Western Europe had large a anti-American, pro-disarmament movement.

So how do President Obama’s “accomplishments” compare to Jimmy Carter’s? Well, there is Obamacare, the biggest social legislation in more than forty years that, unless repealed, will bankrupt us. We have had a serious recession, record job losses, the bottom has fallen out of the housing market and American entrepreneurs still can’t get banks to lend to them. The government still runs some large banks, AIG and General Motors. Obama has appeased Iran for more than a year which has emboldened the Iranian government in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Obama flirts with the dictators of Iran, North Korea and Venezuela, to name a few, but treats the Israeli prime minister, one of our strongest allies in the world, like he is the enemy. Obama still has plenty of other bad ideas that he wants to implement including cap-and-trade legislation that would cripple the American economy further. Finally, starting with the stimulus, Obama has put us on course of permanent trillion dollar deficits. Prior to the Obama administration, large government spending was measured in billions. Obama has made the term “trillion” commonplace. Taxes and government borrowing are out of control.

So yes, maybe we miss Jimmy Carter. At least, today we know that he was gone after one term and was succeeded by a president who set America on a course of almost thirty years of less government regulation and greater freedom and who ended the Cold War by demolishing the Soviet Union and freeing hundreds of millions of people from the slavery of communism without firing a shot.

We need to work toward an even larger change away from Obama’s socialism and back towards the principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that America was founded on in the 2010 and 2012 elections.

Share and Enjoy:
  • Print
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Add to favorites
  • email
  • PDF
  • RSS
  • StumbleUpon
  • Twitter
  • Yahoo! Buzz

{ 2 comments }

reagan hat 150x150 Reagan: Government is Not the Solution to Our Problem. Government is the Problem.I will conclude this evening of historical reflection on the passage of Obamacare with President Reagan’s 1981 Inaugural Address. President Reagan distilled the essence of the conflict between the majority of Americans with President Obama and his supporters.

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.

From time to time, we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?

President Reagan was the most effective president since Abraham Lincoln expressing the principles that have made the United States great.

Watch Reagan’s entire speech. It is remarkable how what he said almost thirty years ago is just as relevant today. The repeal of Obamacare and replacing the current government in Washington needs to be rooted in President Reagan’s vision of America.

Share and Enjoy:
  • Print
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Add to favorites
  • email
  • PDF
  • RSS
  • StumbleUpon
  • Twitter
  • Yahoo! Buzz

{ 1 comment }

Ronald Reagan

February 6, 2010

reagan hat 239x300 Ronald Reagan

Today is Ronald Reagan’s 99th birthday.

Hot Air
provides a nice summary of what made Reagan unique:

Reagan is a great conservative hero for what he wasn’t as well as for what he was. In an era when people thought the entree to political leadership was a degree from an elite university and a lifetime spent currying favor and working within the establishment, Reagan was a small-town Midwesterner who’d gone to an obscure college and spent most of his adult life doing other things: a sportscaster, an actor, a pundit. He was well into middle age before he got into electoral politics.

This confounded his critics, who believed that the true measure of a 50-something man of accomplishment was a degree he’d gotten when he was 22.

He was, in short, pretty much like the rest of us – as Dinesh D’Souza noted, an ordinary man who became an extraordinary president.

He really had two great accomplishments. For starters, he had an uncommon gift for translating immensely high concepts – the economics of Hayek, the philosophy of the Federalists – into terminology that resonated with people who’d never sat through a political science seminar.

He also had a singular knack for envisioning a goal, and focusing on it with a genial ruthlessness that drew his supporters down the path, no matter how difficult, and outlasted his opponents, no matter how well entrenched.

Today, what Reagan said to Americans 20, 30 and 40 years ago still is relevant even if the current crop of politicians and the current president are trying to return to failed ideas of the past. Here is Ronald Reagan in the 1964 speech in support of Barry Goldwater that launched his political career:

Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.

And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man.

This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
- Ronald Reagan, October 27, 1964 – “A Time for Choosing”

And here is a famous moment in President Reagan’s successful effort to “leave communism on the ash heap of history”:

Share and Enjoy:
  • Print
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Add to favorites
  • email
  • PDF
  • RSS
  • StumbleUpon
  • Twitter
  • Yahoo! Buzz

{ 2 comments }