Check out Max’s sporty new digs! He even has a re-sized and appropriately sized column, so that the only thing that will give you headaches are some of his opinions.
Much appreciated new look, if I must say so.
Archives for 2004
Reagan’s Legacy
The Poorman does have an interesting post up about Reagan’s Legacy in regards to the fall of Communism, in which he quotes Lech Walesa and then states:
That’s a good deal more than nothing. Other European contemporaries of Reagan have been nearly as effusive, including Vaclav Havel, who said “He was a man of firm principles who was indisputably instrumental in the fall of Communism.” Some of this is probably colored by a desire to say nice things about the dead, but it seems sort of silly to argue that Reagan was incidental to the fall of Communism in Europe against the people who were actually there. Nor did he do it single-handedly, obviously, and this doesn’t mean that the Soviet Union was flawless in conception and excecution and would have lasted for a hundred million years. But you have to give the man a good chunk of credit for moving it along at the time and in the peaceful manner in which it happened. That is not a bad legacy.
One of the things I found most intriguing this week about the debate of Reagan and the fall of Communism was that one name seemed to be absent from every discussion. As far as I am concerned, there is another individual who should be given a great deal of credit for assisting in the demise of the Communist regimes:
Kirkland was a diehard anti-communist, a committed cold-warrior, and while not a political ally of Reagan’s, his support for the National Endowment for Democracy should not be ignored or forgotten.
Clinton Portrait
Via Drudge, I see that the Clinton portrait is to be unveiled at the White House this week:
Simmie Knox, the first black artist to paint an official presidential portrait, is preparing to unveil his oil painting of former President Bill Clinton in a ceremony Monday at the White House.
“My mind hasn’t completely wrapped around it yet,” Knox said in a telephone interview from his Silver Spring, Md., home. “Just imagine: I was born in 1935 in Aliceville, Alabama, a sharecropper, and now I’m painting the president. Can you imagine that?”
The self-taught artist, best known for his portraits of black celebrities like baseball legend Hank Aaron and comedian Bill Cosby, also will unveil a painting of the former first lady, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
At the former president’s request, the oil painting is set in the Oval Office. It will be the first presidential portrait in the White House collection to include the American flag.
Couple of things:
1.) I think it is rather interesting that we still value portraits. A throwback, if you will.
2.) I had never heard of Simmie Knox (with my art background, this is wholly unsurprising), but I checked out some of his other portraits, and there is something interesting about his style. I don;t know what it is, but all of the people he has painted seem to come across as pleasant in his portraits- and at the same time they seem to have a sort of smile that leads you to think that they are part of some inside joke. At any rate, I don’t know art or art terms, but that is my impression.
OPEC Should Have It This Good
To hell with the price of gas- have you checked out the price of milk? I just got back from Kroger’s, and a gallon of milk was $3.45. not a few months ago the price was around $2.45.
On the cooler was an explanation (of sorts), with a link to this website. Read the whole thing, but the only real explanation was this:
U.S. dairy farmers produced about 1.7% less milk through April this year than they did in those same months last year. The primary cause is the low farm milk prices of 2002 and the first half of 2003. The milk supply, which is slow to adjust to reduced dairy farm returns, is finally responding. Hampering recovery is the U.S. ban of movement of live dairy cattle from Canada, formerly a major supplier of young milking cows, due to last year’s discovery of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or mad cow disease) in a Canadian cow.
The price of beef is also through the roof, too.
The PoorMan Cometh
The Poorman reviews a post here and notes:
Pluses: Complete spittle-drenched lunacy. Creepy, crypto-fascist Bush/Reagan idolatry. Nearly as shrill as The Editors have, regrettably, become.
Minuses: Uses punctuation correctly. Needs to ramble more. Not pictured in a leopard print sack in front of an enormous American flag.
I guess I missed the Reagan Idolatry (and Bush, for that matter). I thought I was talking not about them, but their (actually just Reagan’s) detractors. I also thought I made it pretty clear that the term the ‘left’ is a generalization to discuss the lunatic fringe to the left of mainstream Democrats, but the Poorman must have been overdosing on snark and missed that. Or ignored it, which is probably more likely.
At any rate, it is nice to know I am not a full-fledged fascist (just showing crypto-fascist tendencies, mind you), but I guess that does give me something for which to aim. That and a leopard print sack, at any rate.
I do have a question, though. Why is it that the people who so clearly recognized the boorish behavior of the GOP extremists in regard to Clinton so clearly miss it when they engage in the same behavior regarding Bush and Reagan?
Reagan’s Last Gift
Below, I wrote about Reagan’s last gift to the GOP, which was to highlight the venom of the left. There were the usual protests from the usual suspects, but this comment really stated what I meant best:
I think it is right and proper to honor a dead President. It is a ceremony we carry into our personal lives: we eulogize the dead as an occassion to celebrate the life of that individual. This doesn’t necessitate erasing any of the bad from our memory, but rather it is our last opportunity to offer final respect.
In Reagan’s death, this process was accompanied by an immediate reaction by those who disagreed with Reagan’s policies to remind us all that they did disagree, although the pains to put criticism out there often took the form of vitriolic ad hominem attacks.
Why the urge to indemnify Reagan upon his death? I think we can all agree that all the criticisms made during Reagan’s death have already been asserted. There was an urgency to reiterate them, lest Reagan’s detractors be forgotten. There’s a certain impropriety to it all, like a child witnessing another playing with a toy and swiping it from him because it’s making him happy.
I think a serious examination of Reagan’s policies is always a good thing, if only to learn from history, but I haven’t seen that examination at all. Rather, I’ve seen a rush to shout insults about a dead man, lest his admirers feel to much comfort in his praise.
Exactly. We all know you have to take the good with the bad, but the attempts by those on the left were not to provide a balanced outlook of the man’s legacy. Indeed, there was no balance at all, but rather nothing but insults, jeers, and attacks. There was no constructive effort by liberal bloggers to show the good with the bad, all that was done was attempts to highlight why Reagan sucked.
After a day or two, it really started to approach the absurd. Not only was the left not content to merely focus on the ngeatives repeat mantras about Iran/Contra and AIDS, by midweek we were learning that there was no Reagan boom, that Reagan had absolutely nothing to do with the fall of the Soviet Union, and that Reagan really didn’t lower taxes, and that he was the least popular president ever. In fact, the only praise that could be found of Reagan from the usual suspects came in the form of backhanded compliments (best typified by this Drum piece), which took the form of ‘Reagan sucked, but he was harmless compared to Bush.’
Bill Clinton wailed about the politics of personal destruction. Too bad his party has mastered it.
Cease and Desist
I am hereby calling on the media to cease and desist all inane stories such as this idiotic Wilgorne piece. Some tidbits:
He is a diligent greeter, never speeding through a hotel kitchen without handshakes. He is chronically and unapologetically late