Rating Reagan: A Bogus Legacy

[muchacho]

The U.S. news media’s reaction to Ronald Reagan’s death is putting on display what has happened to American public debate in the years since Reagan’s political rise in the late 1970s: a near-total collapse of serious analytical thinking at the national level.

Across the U.S. television dial and in major American newspapers, the commentary is fawning almost in a Pravda-like way, far beyond the normal reticence against speaking ill of the dead. Left-of-center commentators compete with conservatives to hail Reagan’s supposedly genial style and his alleged role in “winning the Cold War.” The Washington Post’s front-page headline – “Ronald Reagan Dies” – was in giant type more fitting the Moon Landing.

Yet absent from the media commentary was the one fundamental debate that must be held before any reasonable assessment can be made of Ronald Reagan and his Presidency: How, why and when was the Cold War “won”? If, for instance, the United States was already on the verge of victory over a foundering Soviet Union in the early-to-mid-1970s, as some analysts believe, then Reagan’s true historic role may not have been “winning” the Cold War, but helping to extend it.

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/060704.html