Ronald Reagan.

[JokingClown]

"Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do." -- 1981

"A tree is a tree. How many more do you have to look at?" -- 1966, opposing expansion of Redwood National Park as governor of California.

"I have flown twice over Mt. St. Helens out on our west coast. I'm not a scientist and I don't know the figures, but I have a suspicion that that one little mountain has probably released more sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere of the world than has been released in the last ten years of automobile driving or things of that kind that people are so concerned about." -- 1980, (Actually, Mount St. Helens, at its peak activity, emitted about 2,000 tons of sulfur dioxide per day, compared with 81,000 tons per day by cars.)

"Facts are stupid things." -- 1988, a misquote of John Adams, "Facts are stubborn things."

"Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal." -- 1976

"You can't help those who simply will not be helped. One problem that we've had, even in the best of times, is people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice." -- 1/31/84, on Good Morning America, defending his administration against charges of callousness.

"(The Contras are) the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers." -- 1985

"I read every comic strip in the paper." -- 1984

"(Nazi soldiers) were victims, just as sure as the victims in the concentration camps." -- 1985

"How are you, Mr. Mayor? I'm glad to meet you. How are things in your city?" -- (Proving they all look alike to him when greeting the only African American member of his cabinet, Housing Secretary Samuel Pierce, June 12, 1981).

"We think there is a parallel between federal involvement in education and the decline in profit over recent years." -- (Explaining that the recession is due to educating children, April 26, 1983).

"He wrote in Braille, to tell me that if cutting his pension would help get the country back on it's feet, he'd like to have me cut his pension." -- (Telling a bald-faced lie about an "alleged" letter he received in order to justify further cuts in social programs, November 30, 1981).

"Just remember, for every person who is out of work, there are nine of us with jobs." -- 1982

"My name is Ronald Reagan. What's yours?" -- (To his son Michael, when attending his graduation from an Arizona boarding school, pg. 192, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime by Lou Cannon).

"Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?" -- 1980

"I know all the bad things that happened in that war. I was in uniform four years myself." -- (In an interview with foreign journalists, April 19, 1985. Reality Check: Reagan spent World War II making Army training films at Hal Roach Studios in Hollywood.)

"We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet." -- 1964

And a few words from others.......

"He knows less about the budget than any president in my lifetime. He can't even carry on a conversation about the budget. It's an absolute and utter disgrace." -- (House Speaker Tip O'Neill after a meeting with Ronnie, November 23, 1980).

"He only works three to three and a half hours a day. He doesn't do his homework. He doesn't read his briefing papers. It's sinful that this man is President of the United States." -- (Tip O'Neill exasperated after meeting with Ronnie, October 31, 1983).

"God, he's a bore. And a bad actor. Besides, he has a low order of intelligence, with a certain cunning. And not animal cunning, Human cunning. Animal cunning is too fine an expression for him. He's inflated, he's egotistical -- he's one of those people who thinks he is right, and he's not right. He's not right about anything." -- (Movie director John Huston, after a meeting with Ronnie).

"What do you do when your President ignores all the palpable, relevant facts and wanders in circles?" -- (David Stockman, ex- Reagan Cabinet member, explaining what briefings with Ronnie were like, April 12, 1986).

"His answers to any questions about young men being killed for some vague and perhaps non-existent reason in Central America has been to smile, nod, wave a hand and walk on. And America applauds, thus proving that senility is a communicable disease." -- (Columnist Jimmy Breslin explaining Ronnie's ability to "get away with it").

"The frustration of dealing with a situation in which the schedule of the President of the United States was determined by occult prognostications was very great--far greater than any other I had known in nearly forty-five years of working life." -- (Donald Regan, For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington).

"Poor dear, there's nothing between his ears." -- (British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher).

[James]

where'd you get them from?
Surely this is also now "history"?
Or even OI?

[ParanoidHumanoid]

"A tree is a tree. How many more do you have to look at?"

I think that this quote best personifies his mutated look on the world. ;)

[frankiegoestostoke]

"I read every comic strip in the paper." -- 1984

Fair enough.

All the rest show that he's a bastard.

[Funky Monk]

Well, The New Deal was copied pretty much from Hitler's Germany, sure its an unsubtle quote, but not completely untrue.

[Don't Change Your Name]

He was too stupid.

He should have died before.

This quotes make nice signatures btw.

[dopediana]

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0607-10.htm
Published on Monday, June 7, 2004 by CommonDreams.org


Collective Amnesia or Collective Alzheimer's:
America 'Remembers' Ronald Reagan


by Paul Douglas Newman





To remember Ronald Reagan as one of the greatest Presidents of the twentieth century, to replace FDR on the dime with Reagan's profile as Republicans wish to do, we are being asked to forget too much.

We are asked to forget Lebanon, where Reagan decided to "cut and run" after hundreds of Marines perished when a suicide bomber invaded their compound.

We are asked to forget the arms for hostages deal.

We are asked to forget El Salvador, where the right wing ARENA, armed with Reagan money, Reagan weapons, and Reagan military training from the School of the America's at Fort Benning, Georgia slaughtered more than 80,000 civilians in the "War on Communism."

We are asked to forget the Iran-Contra Scandal, an event that he evidently "could not recall" in response to more than one hundred questions during the Congressional hearings.

We are asked to forget the groundwork laid for nuclear disarmament by Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon.

We are asked to forget the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaties I and II.

We are asked to forget the re-freezing of the Cold War following the Nixon thaw, when Reagan bellicosely denounced the Soviets as the "Evil Empire," and then joked on his weekly radio address that our missiles were ready to launch.

We are asked to forget the silly invasion of Grenada following the Lebanon disaster, and the reversal of goodwill gestures made to the Caribbean made by previous administrations, including the return of the Panama Canal.

We are asked to forget the Soviet Union's internal move to Perestroika, a groundswell that occurred over decades resulting in a generation of new Communists by 1985 who were not manufactured by Reagan's bravado, but were products of the "Evil Empire."

We are asked to forget that Reagan presided over the worst recession since the Great Depression.

We are asked to forget the enormous cuts to social welfare programs and the Veterans Administration, moves that led to such an enormous rise in the homeless population, especially evident on the streets of Washington, D.C., that even comedians felt that they had to do something to stop the bleeding with "Comic Relief."

We are asked to forget the policies that enriched agri-business at the expense of small farmers, continuing the decline of the family farm to the point that recording artists were the only ones left to uphold the Populists' mantle with "Farm-Aid."

We are asked to forget that he slashed taxes for the wealthiest, raised taxes on the poor, and then bailed out the corrupt Savings and Loan industry at taxpayer expense.

We are asked to forget that his SEC presided over such a corrupt and over-inflated stock market that the Dow saw the largest one-day crash in its history, greater than in 1929.

We are asked to forget that Reagan's economic policies effected a reversal in the trend toward greater distribution of wealth begun by Progressive Republican, Democratic, and Socialist politicians in the early twentieth centuries, and have led us to the greatest concentration of wealth today since the days of Andrew Carnegie and James Pierpont Morgan.

We are asked to forget the enormous and outrageous military contracts, for which American taxpayers paid hundreds of dollars for nuts, bolts, and toilet seats, and the nation saw defense-spending rise to astronomical heights.

We are asked to forget the Reagan Administration's opposition to the Civil Rights movement, their blocking of busing programs and cuts to Head Start meant to bring equality of opportunity to American education.

We are asked to forget that Reagan considered ketchup to be a vegetable in federal school lunch programs.

We are asked to forget "government cheese."

We are asked to forget jelly beans, splitting wood, bad b-movies, McCarthy-ite participation in Hollywood blacklisting.

We are asked to forget our history.

We are asked to forget, and forget, and forget.

And by the looks of the New York Times and Washington Post's memorials to the "Great Communicator," it appears that what historian Studs Terkel has referred to as "America's collective amnesia" is still acute.

Perhaps it is more serious than that.

Perhaps we have a national case of Alzheimer's Disease.

Perhaps our ability to remember relatively recent events has eroded, and our capacity for rational thought has diminished as well.

Perhaps we are becoming a danger to ourselves and others.

Perhaps we need admittance into a managed care facility for nations.

Perhaps we are "riding off into the sunset." How else do we explain our descent into Bushism?: our quick repetition of past economic and foreign policy blunders, our re-visitation of failed policies to solve current problems, our persistent dementia that results in trying the same things and expecting different results? As of now, there is no cure for Alzheimer's Disease, only management of the symptoms and provision of comfort until death.

Hopefully Studs Terkel is right, and we've just suffered another blow to the head from which the American people will recover, and remember, and remember, and remember.

Paul Douglas Newman ([email protected]) is Associate Professor of American History at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, PA