Don't be too hard on Rich. He's in good company. Did you see the David
Boaz Op-Ed?
http://www.cato.org/dailys/06-07-04.html
I probably liked Reagan mostly because he was the first president in my
memory. I totally remember sitting in Miss Hall's kindergarten class on the
first day back from Christmas vacation (on a fraying rug in a double-wide
trailer with bookcases for interior walls that served as temporary
classrooms for Lipscomb Elementary -- which happened under Carter's watch)
when she was putting a new year tile on the peg of the classroom's big
calendar and telling us it was now 1981, and we had a new President. In
retrospect, I'm pretty sure that she, like most teachers in the union, was
totally pissed that he got elected, but I of course didn't recognize that at
the time. I also at the time didn't know what a deficit or debt was, and
was proud I could count to 100, much less to 1 trillion. Thankfully, I
didn't know that we could also all be vaporized in an instant if the
abandonment of detente had failed. By the time I was in middle school, and
he'd been president for 2/3 of my life, I simply couldn't imagine someone
else in the White House. He was what a president ought to be.
I will say this, though. I am quite skeptical of any of the original media
coverage about Reagan. The poor old man was in office before Fox News, Rush
Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, etc. Back then, there really was only a liberal
media. And Kai and I got into it Sunday night over whether Reagan was the
reason AIDS became an epidemic ("If he'd only spent money in the federal
budget on stopping it..."). And I got into it Monday with my network
engineer over whether Reagan ever actually said that ketchup was a vegetable
(ends up it was David Stockman -- thanks, Google!).
Anyway, while I'd hardly write a tribute to the man myself, I certainly
can't call those who have written such tributes "un-libertarian", because
their arguments seem as valid to me as the ones from those trashing Reagan.
I guess you just had to be there to really know...
Rob