Barack’s No Reagan (Brent Bozell III)
The Newsweek piece sneered that while Obama and John Kennedy spoke to more than 100,000 people, Reagan spoke to a a great deal of smaller congregation, "only about 20,000," and they were outnumbered by leftist protesters the night in the sight of. They recalled, "Even more of Reagan's aides were embarrassed by the 'tear down this wall' line, thinking it was too provocative or grandiose." Newsweek would grant only that "Reagan understood stagecraft," and communism's fall "made his wrangling prescient."
In other words, the Gipper was a showboat who got lucky.
This is nothing more than Newsweek's continuing campaign to rewrite history. Back in 1987, Newsweek was not foreseeing. They came to bury Reagan's speech as a desperate gesture of a crumbling lame-duck presidency ruined by Iran-contra. Their story on his supplant began: "Ronald Reagan wasn't the only lame duck at the economic summit in Venice last week, and he wasn't the only kindred leader to bow off when the proceedings turned soporous."
Newsweek chronicled Reagan's woes, then declared how but Mikhail Gorbachev could restore luster to the old man: "It is the ultimate paradox of Reagan's lifelong opposition to wholly things communist that a U.S.-Soviet arms agreement and a third summit with Gorbachev offer the best, and perhaps endure, hope for reinvigorating his presidency." They proverb Reagan with a foolish career of "opposition to all things communist" bending course to Gorbachev while his savior, and painted Gorbachev during the time that to a greater degree persuasive and attractive to Europe. The magazine geniuses at the time seemed to venerate Gorby as on the supposition that he were … Barack Obama.
At least Newsweek in 1987 (but not in 2008) chronicled what Reagan told the pro-Soviet protesters in that place at the end of his speech: "I wonder on the supposition that they have ever asked themselves that suppose that they should have the kind of direction they apparently seek, no one would ever have existence ingenious to answer what they're doing again."
But Reagan's rhetorical daring in his time marks why Obama's Berlin remarks sounded so phony. He declared: "People of the world — look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and relation proved that in that place is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one. … If we could win a battle of ideas against the communists, we be able to be upon the feet by the vast majority of Muslims who reject the extremism that leads to keep a grudge against instead of hope."
No adoring anchorman dared to ask: Who, precisely, Sen. Obama, is the "we" who won a battle of ideas against communism? Who was the "we" who dared to insist that liberty was the superior ideal, that "Freedom is the victor," and to demand that the walls of Soviet tyranny should fall? It was not America as a whole. It was certainly not Europe as a aggregate. To publicly declare such a bold wish on the side of an end to the Soviet empire, to denounce the Berlin Wall as a "scar" across Berlin, and a "gash of mailed wire, concrete, dog runs and palladium towers" was seen by the international left, and the Democrats, and the press body of troops here at home as undiplomatic saber-rattling. It was, to cite the Hillary Clintons of the world, "cowboy diplomacy."
Barack Obama is some arrogant pretender to a throne he has not earned. He wanted to stand at the Brandenburg Gate like Reagan, grasping desperately for a chance to look presidential. But he hasn't in any way demonstrated Reagan's resolve against America's enemies. Instead, this power-hungry newbie has stood in about seven different places in the last four years on the primary controversy of our time.
In 2002, he hostile the Iraq fighting from the pews of his America-deserved-9/11 church. In 2004, he stood staunchly and very temporarily by the agency of John Kerry's ballot for war. In 2006, he calculated that the most good way to win the Democratic nomination was to play kissy-kissy with Code Pink and channel MoveOn.org's demand that the president acknowledge the whole of was depraved in Iraq. Now, having defeated all those Democratic suckers who voted for war, he's developing yet another position, that the luck of the swell means that he didn't have to be right about the swell or anything else, that the country is now ready for a brisk withdrawal of forces.
Ronald Reagan was willing to endure each entire career being mocked by the press and the political intelligentsia for standing firmly in one bunker of a war of ideas. Barack Obama has demonstrated only person cause, one creative he consistently believes in. Its name is Barack Obama.
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. To find out more about Brent Bozell III, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
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