Wednesday, October 22, 2003

Reagan's legacy Nolan Finley of the Detroit News began a recent column with this evocation of Ronald Reagan: Ronald Reagan revived the conservative movement with a simple, easy-to-recognize philosophy: Take as little of the people's money as possible and spend it wisely; shrink the size of government, and leave business alone to create jobs. This is Reagan's political image, but it does not match the reality, for much the same reason that the small-is-better image does not match that of our current President.  Both would have favored, in the abstract, a Federal government with a smaller footprint.  But the events of history intervened. In both cases, the desire to minimize the Federal government was there, but the simple fact was -- they couldn't do it, in light of developing international conditions.  Reagan made himself the greatest President of the latter half of the 20th Century by seizing the opportunity presented by a faltering Soviet state, and by being astute enough to recognize that opportunity.  In order to take advantage of that opportunity, he had to increase defense spending and thereby continue to apply increasing pressure on the Soviet behemoth until it cracked along its natural fault lines and died a natural death, hastened by our assistance. The defeat of Hitler was this nation's greatest accomplishment of the first half of the 20th Century, and the defeat of Soviet communism was the greatest of the second half.  In both cases, the cost to our nation was enormous, but in both cases it was well worth the cost. Today, we are engaged in another epic struggle, and again the cost has been and is likely to continue to be enormous.  It takes courage and resilience to pursue this course, and it takes a sense of history to appreciate the fact that our President's course is well worth the cost we are paying and will pay. 10:49:45 PM     Weblogs and politics In the wake of the Easterbrook controversy, both Ernie the Lawyer and Jerry Lawson have chimed in on one of the inherent risks of maintaining a weblog: leaving an easy and well-documented trail for later use against the author, not in a court of law (although that can happen) but in the no-holds-barred world of politics.  The practice of digging up old writings and speeches and using them, often in a slanted or distorted way, to discredit the speaker -- witness the current use of old pro-Bush speeches by Wesley Clark -- is a time-honored political tradition in this country.  But if I can be forgiven for using a pair of superficially conflicting metaphors, let me make an observation.  Both the internet, with its inherent stickiness (enhanced by Google and the Internet Wayback Machine), and weblogs, which like Teflon vastly promote the fluidity of ideas, have magnified the volume of the source material that is available for this purpose. Ultimately, though, several other things are true: A person who has written or spoken extensively will probably have said things that a clever opponent can use against him. A person who seeks a political or judicial office will probably be the type of person who has written and spoken in many venues, compulsives and overachievers being what they are by nature. Often, such a person is precisely the type of person we want for such offices, as he has shown himself to be the type of person who thinks things through and can articulate his ideas. If, on the other hand, he has thought things through to ridiculous or unsupportable conclusions, there's nothing like a weblog to show it. Your mother never told you that politics was for the faint of heart -- or the weak of mind. 7:47:25 AM

© Copyright 2003 Franco Castalone. Last update: 11/2/2003; 7:54:23 AM.