Ralph Nader has violated campaign finance laws. Somehow it’s all the fault of big corporations.

Ralph Nader has violated campaign finance laws. Somehow it’s all the fault of big corporations.

…dated today. But it looks frighteningly like the 1930s again in Europe.

There are still a few people attempting to fight against the now-prevailing wisdom that Reagan ended the Cold War through his policies, claiming that he just had the good luck to be president when it happened. Now, of course one can never know for sure what the causes were, but I find it interesting that some people are determined to continue to attempt to prove that it wasn’t Reagan’s doing. I wonder why they have such a powerful emotional investment in that?

They should consider something–if there were a good case to be made for their position, then it should have persuaded many of those on the fence, and perhaps even some who originally thought that it was Reagan’s doing, to change their opinion, but I don’t see that happening.

From James Lileks, to Bill Whittle, Matt Welch, Roger Simon and others, many people this past week have confessed that they thought Reagan was a dunce at the time, but they’ve seen the light now. This kind of commentary has abounded in comments sections as well. But I haven’t seen a single post or comment anywhere to the effect that someone thought Reagan was great at the time, but now they realize he was an idiot who had nothing to do with defeating the Soviet Union.

I wonder why that is?

[Update a few minutes later]

And yes, I do realize that I’ve just motivated them to start leaving me spurious comments with unverifiable claims about how brilliant they thought that Reagan was at the time, but that now they’re older and wiser.

I point this out preemptively to make their claims all the more ridiculous, since none have appeared spontaneously heretofore.

The day after his interment is the seventeenth anniversary of Reagan’s famous challenge to Gorbachev. It happened on June 12, 1987.

The day after his interment is the seventeenth anniversary of Reagan’s famous challenge to Gorbachev. It happened on June 12, 1987.

The day after his interment is the seventeenth anniversary of Reagan’s famous challenge to Gorbachev. It happened on June 12, 1987.

From James Taranto today:

We didn’t have time to see the casket, but we did see the people lining up for the viewing–the backdrop for Couric’s makeshift outdoor set. Reagan, of course, was more responsible than anyone else for the end of communism, a system among whose lesser horrors were that it forced people to spend much of their lives in queues for such necessities as food and toilet paper. Somehow then it seems a fitting tribute that thousands of free men and women would voluntarily wait in line to pay their last respects.

I’m watching the ceremony as the casket is being taken down the Capitol steps, and the cannons firing on the mall, and just thinking about how embarrassing it would be if they screwed up and put real loads in them, and took out a few government buildings.

Somehow, considering who it was in honor of, it would have been fitting, especially if they were pointing south toward HHS. If I ever get a state funeral, that would be one of my requests. They’d need a little more range, but I might have them target a certain building over on E Street, too.

Andrew Sullivan has a nice collection of foolish quotes about Reagan from the eighties. This one in particular caught my eye:

“Are we rushing headlong into the next step of those 40 years of progressions by which we do something then they do something, by which we pretend that we’re going to build this and it will somehow strengthen our deterrent then they do it, and low and behold, the next thing we know is, the President of the United States is addressing the nation saying,