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Monday, June 07, 2004

A wingnut credo

In 1979 the United States was a sorry place.  Inflation, high interest rates, hostages in Tehran (and a failed rescue attempt the next year), and a sorry-ass President who told us to wear sweaters and eat malaise sandwiches.

Then came Ronald Reagan.  From the day he kicked off his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, with a stirring defense of states’ rights, I knew that it would soon be morning in America again-- especially for us white people.  Reagan’s sunny optimism and traditional values brought America together again in a time of national self-doubt, and his decision to open his campaign in the little town where James Chaney, Andy Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered only sixteen years before, championing “states’ rights” in a way that every Thurmond-loving Dixiecrat would understand, let us know that the period of Negro domination of government was finally coming to an end.  It’s true that Reagan himself wasn’t openly opposed to any individual black people-- just things like the Voting Rights Act-- but then, he didn’t need to be.  We knew perfectly well what he was talking about, even if he didn’t.

Ronald Reagan brought America back from the brink-- and completed the conversion of the Solid South, while bringing the ways of wonder-working Providence into the federal government for the first (but not the last!) time.  He was not a man who would let a little thing like the rape and murder of American nuns get in the way of an important hemispherical political alliance, and his willingness to bypass petty Constitutional technicalities in order to trade arms to Islamist mullahs in exchange for American hostages and divert the profits to the equivalent of the Founding Fathers in Central America will always mark him as a man of conviction and strength.  Just as important, he was a fair and balanced man who knew when discretion was the better part of valor-- which is why, unlike so many of his shrillest critics, he never descended to finger-wagging and grandstanding when it came to our dealings with important allies like Iraq and South Africa.  In so many ways, he paved the way for the restoration of American power and the global moral clarity we enjoy now.

We cannot thank him enough.  Though it might be a good idea to put his likeness on every denomination of U.S. currency we can think of, for a start.

Posted by Michael on 06/07 at 01:13 PM
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