8 ms·

Obama's just the first guy really seeing how far he can push things. How about Reagan?

tptacek 13y ago
For the record: among many other things, Reagan's CIA ran a covert war in Nicaragua, over the direct, statutory(!) objections of congress, in contravention of a law Reagan himself signed. Tens of thousands of people were murdered.
- hga 13y ago
  While I disagree with you on all of the specifics, I have to ask, if we accept that, what exactly does it have to do with his Administration and the press?
  - skylan_q 13y ago
    Nothing at all. People in tech have this need to bring up how Reagan is the devil. It's very odd because it was a sitting duck presidency, if there ever was one. Hardly a Senate majority for some of the time, no house majority at any point.
    - hga 13y ago
      Heh, I've never heard of a "sitting duck" presidency, but the name fits. It was the first post-Watergate Republican one, and the first to which criminalizing of normal politics was applied. The number of high administration official who were prosecuted on totally bogus grounds was appalling, from Department of Labor Secretary Ray "Which office do I go to get my reputation back?" Donovan (a singularly honest man if the prosecutors couldn't make anything stick to a New York City construction firm (!!!)) to the head of NASA, indicted by a team that didn't have a single expert on the subject in dispute (federal contracting by the team that made a working DIVAD; when they asked to dismiss the charges, the judge wouldn't let them do it without prejudice, i.e. they could not try again). In 20/20 hindsight he says he wouldn't have forced the launch of Challenger ... certainly disrupting the leadership of NASA is going to be without consequences. ADDED: And the press lied through their teeth. E.g. we were constantly regaled with horror stories of vicious budget cuts ... but in the rarefied lingo of the Beltway, a decrease from the automatically rising baseline, even if more nominal or real dollars are spent than last year, is a "cut". But most of all I think they hated how successful and happy he was, even with the Democrats holding so much power. Of course, back then enough of them realized we were facing existential threats from the two areas I've remarked on; the same in terms of threats is true today, but it's less in your face for the moment. But wait until we can no longer run "trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see" because we can't maintain zero percent interest rates (which by themselves are crushing so many, especially retirees).
    - _delirium 13y ago
      It's relevant because Reagan renewed the Nixon-era drive towards assertions of executive power to advance national security. You might even think he did it for good reasons, e.g. because the threat of communism was sufficiently dire that it really did justify a suspension of the usual legal niceties in order to defend the U.S.'s national interests. The point is not "Reagan was wrong", but rather a more descriptive one: Reagan pushed the boundaries of executive power. Maybe that's good, maybe it isn't. But as a descriptive matter, Reagan is an important link in the modern chain of presidents broadening executive power on national-security grounds. I don't think this is particularly controversial even among conservative historians. The debate is over whether Reagan's general tendency towards a strong-executive, law-and-order-via-military-if-necessary position (shared with folks like Edwin Meese) was justified, not over whether it was the case. Even going back to his pre-presidency days, for example, conservative historians typically argue that Reagan's declaration of martial law in Berkeley in 1969, in which he sent in the national guard to put down a series of protests, was necessary to maintain order and prevent subversive elements from gaining a foothold. Nobody actually argues that he didn't do so, or that it was some kind of situation where he was tricked into it. He was pretty explicitly a national-security hawk in favor of a strong executive.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    Well, Reagan has the honor of being the first president to have convicted a government official for leaking information to the press (the Samuel Loring Morison case). A New York Times editorial about the Morison case basically presented an argument that Reagan's DOJ invented the modern leak prosecution, using a novel interpretation of the Espionage Act to override the will of Congress, which had refused to criminalize leaks in general. And of course, the information Morison leaked was positively anodyne compared to entire databases full of diplomatic cables, or North Korean proliferation intelligence sources, or the precise details of which Chinese computers the NSA TAO group was hacking. Which is funny, because the NYT editorial called some of that kind of information out as the sort of the Congress did want to outlaw leaks in. But that aside: I was stepping back from leak prosecution to the broader issue of transparency. The Reagan administration was less transparent than this one, or even the Bush Administration (which was itself also less transparent than this one). The Reagan administration not only got the US involved in a war based on entirely opaque objectives and analysis, but conducted the whole war without the knowledge of the American people.
    - hga 13y ago
      It bears mentioning that Samuel Loring Morison was essentially leaking to himself, in that he was, per Wikipedia and my contemporary memory, at the same time working for the organization he was leaking to (Janes). The 2 year sentence would argue his leaks were "anodyne" ... it all depends on how little you believe the Soviets knew or assumed about how good our spysats were. Which war were you referring to? Certainly not fighting the Communist Sandinistas, that was about as secret as Obama's drone strikes in Pakistan are today, and you don't need any more justification than distracting them from other mischief, anything else is gravy. As for transparency, where outside of the Cold War was Reagan significantly less transparent than Obama or Bush for that matter? While the hits are noisy, just try a search for obama in private for starters.
      - tptacek 13y ago
        Reagan's desire to escalate the anti-Sandinista conflict in Nicaragua was so well-known that Congress passed a law banning it, which Reagan secretly bypassed. It's easy to call something "as secret as drone strikes" after it produces the Iran Contra Hearings.
- oh-real-e 13y ago
  The wise commenters in this forum have reminded us that "just because it's legal does not mean it's right." So, by this logic, just because it's illegal doesn't mean it's wrong. So Reagan broke the law. So what? He was just doing the right thing. Reagan was a hero. All hail the chief.
hga 13y ago
Specifics, please? I was around for all of these presidents, and I don't remember even a "nattering nabobs of negativism" from Team Reagan (although I'd be happy to be corrected there), let alone declaring that opposition was inherently illegitimate and the organs of the state then acting in congruence with that. Reagan was focused on two particularly broad things, that I'll also note were stunning successes: rescuing the economy and government fiscal situation (e.g. the prime rate was around 20%), and ending the Evil Empire. Both required working with Democrats in the Congress (Republicans only held the Senate in the beginning) and in the permanent bureaucracy.
- jebblue 13y ago
  Wow, thanks! It was like the liberal skies over HN cleared when I read you comment. I remember what it was like during the Carter years. The economy was in the toilet. Reagan took the reins, Iran immediately released the hostages which had been a saga played out every day in the news, counting each day they were held. People started to have real hope again. Was he perfect or a perfect president? No, but he did do some real, tangible and historically significant and positive things that liberals (today's liberals, not the real ones from the distant past) dismiss.
  - hga 13y ago
    You're very welcome. For those of you who weren't of political age during the '70s and especially the Carter Administration, it really was a time of losing hope. I don't know of anyone including myself who thought Reagan could put the nation out of its tailspin, and while the medicine was plenty bitter (helped by the idiots in the Congress insisting on phasing in the tax rate cuts), he truly did save the nation. Another way of looking at it is to ask which recent president Obama compares himself to: it's Reagan, the most recent who was significantly consequential, just like Obama has been consequential (I mean, the Democrats have been trying to achieve government health care since Truman (that's 1945-52), and Bill and Hillary! famously flamed out on it). Obama does not dismiss Reagan ... I guess he is smarter than the average bear....
- monkeyspaw 13y ago
  I was too young to remember his presidency. But my understanding was that he started the war on drugs as a major component of his platform. I could see his war on drugs falling under economic rescue, although my understanding is that this effort has had serious deleterious economic effects in the U.S.

For the record: among many other things, Reagan's CIA ran a covert war in Nicaragua, over the direct, statutory(!) objections of congress, in contravention of a law Reagan himself signed. Tens of thousands of people were murdered.

hga 13y ago
While I disagree with you on all of the specifics, I have to ask, if we accept that, what exactly does it have to do with his Administration and the press?
- skylan_q 13y ago
  Nothing at all. People in tech have this need to bring up how Reagan is the devil. It's very odd because it was a sitting duck presidency, if there ever was one. Hardly a Senate majority for some of the time, no house majority at any point.
  - hga 13y ago
    Heh, I've never heard of a "sitting duck" presidency, but the name fits. It was the first post-Watergate Republican one, and the first to which criminalizing of normal politics was applied. The number of high administration official who were prosecuted on totally bogus grounds was appalling, from Department of Labor Secretary Ray "Which office do I go to get my reputation back?" Donovan (a singularly honest man if the prosecutors couldn't make anything stick to a New York City construction firm (!!!)) to the head of NASA, indicted by a team that didn't have a single expert on the subject in dispute (federal contracting by the team that made a working DIVAD; when they asked to dismiss the charges, the judge wouldn't let them do it without prejudice, i.e. they could not try again). In 20/20 hindsight he says he wouldn't have forced the launch of Challenger ... certainly disrupting the leadership of NASA is going to be without consequences. ADDED: And the press lied through their teeth. E.g. we were constantly regaled with horror stories of vicious budget cuts ... but in the rarefied lingo of the Beltway, a decrease from the automatically rising baseline, even if more nominal or real dollars are spent than last year, is a "cut". But most of all I think they hated how successful and happy he was, even with the Democrats holding so much power. Of course, back then enough of them realized we were facing existential threats from the two areas I've remarked on; the same in terms of threats is true today, but it's less in your face for the moment. But wait until we can no longer run "trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see" because we can't maintain zero percent interest rates (which by themselves are crushing so many, especially retirees).
  - _delirium 13y ago
    It's relevant because Reagan renewed the Nixon-era drive towards assertions of executive power to advance national security. You might even think he did it for good reasons, e.g. because the threat of communism was sufficiently dire that it really did justify a suspension of the usual legal niceties in order to defend the U.S.'s national interests. The point is not "Reagan was wrong", but rather a more descriptive one: Reagan pushed the boundaries of executive power. Maybe that's good, maybe it isn't. But as a descriptive matter, Reagan is an important link in the modern chain of presidents broadening executive power on national-security grounds. I don't think this is particularly controversial even among conservative historians. The debate is over whether Reagan's general tendency towards a strong-executive, law-and-order-via-military-if-necessary position (shared with folks like Edwin Meese) was justified, not over whether it was the case. Even going back to his pre-presidency days, for example, conservative historians typically argue that Reagan's declaration of martial law in Berkeley in 1969, in which he sent in the national guard to put down a series of protests, was necessary to maintain order and prevent subversive elements from gaining a foothold. Nobody actually argues that he didn't do so, or that it was some kind of situation where he was tricked into it. He was pretty explicitly a national-security hawk in favor of a strong executive.
- tptacek 13y ago
  Well, Reagan has the honor of being the first president to have convicted a government official for leaking information to the press (the Samuel Loring Morison case). A New York Times editorial about the Morison case basically presented an argument that Reagan's DOJ invented the modern leak prosecution, using a novel interpretation of the Espionage Act to override the will of Congress, which had refused to criminalize leaks in general. And of course, the information Morison leaked was positively anodyne compared to entire databases full of diplomatic cables, or North Korean proliferation intelligence sources, or the precise details of which Chinese computers the NSA TAO group was hacking. Which is funny, because the NYT editorial called some of that kind of information out as the sort of the Congress did want to outlaw leaks in. But that aside: I was stepping back from leak prosecution to the broader issue of transparency. The Reagan administration was less transparent than this one, or even the Bush Administration (which was itself also less transparent than this one). The Reagan administration not only got the US involved in a war based on entirely opaque objectives and analysis, but conducted the whole war without the knowledge of the American people.
  - hga 13y ago
    It bears mentioning that Samuel Loring Morison was essentially leaking to himself, in that he was, per Wikipedia and my contemporary memory, at the same time working for the organization he was leaking to (Janes). The 2 year sentence would argue his leaks were "anodyne" ... it all depends on how little you believe the Soviets knew or assumed about how good our spysats were. Which war were you referring to? Certainly not fighting the Communist Sandinistas, that was about as secret as Obama's drone strikes in Pakistan are today, and you don't need any more justification than distracting them from other mischief, anything else is gravy. As for transparency, where outside of the Cold War was Reagan significantly less transparent than Obama or Bush for that matter? While the hits are noisy, just try a search for obama in private for starters.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      Reagan's desire to escalate the anti-Sandinista conflict in Nicaragua was so well-known that Congress passed a law banning it, which Reagan secretly bypassed. It's easy to call something "as secret as drone strikes" after it produces the Iran Contra Hearings.
oh-real-e 13y ago
The wise commenters in this forum have reminded us that "just because it's legal does not mean it's right." So, by this logic, just because it's illegal doesn't mean it's wrong. So Reagan broke the law. So what? He was just doing the right thing. Reagan was a hero. All hail the chief.

hga 13y ago

Specifics, please? I was around for all of these presidents, and I don't remember even a "nattering nabobs of negativism" from Team Reagan (although I'd be happy to be corrected there), let alone declaring that opposition was inherently illegitimate and the organs of the state then acting in congruence with that. Reagan was focused on two particularly broad things, that I'll also note were stunning successes: rescuing the economy and government fiscal situation (e.g. the prime rate was around 20%), and ending the Evil Empire. Both required working with Democrats in the Congress (Republicans only held the Senate in the beginning) and in the permanent bureaucracy.

jebblue 13y ago
Wow, thanks! It was like the liberal skies over HN cleared when I read you comment. I remember what it was like during the Carter years. The economy was in the toilet. Reagan took the reins, Iran immediately released the hostages which had been a saga played out every day in the news, counting each day they were held. People started to have real hope again. Was he perfect or a perfect president? No, but he did do some real, tangible and historically significant and positive things that liberals (today's liberals, not the real ones from the distant past) dismiss.
- hga 13y ago
  You're very welcome. For those of you who weren't of political age during the '70s and especially the Carter Administration, it really was a time of losing hope. I don't know of anyone including myself who thought Reagan could put the nation out of its tailspin, and while the medicine was plenty bitter (helped by the idiots in the Congress insisting on phasing in the tax rate cuts), he truly did save the nation. Another way of looking at it is to ask which recent president Obama compares himself to: it's Reagan, the most recent who was significantly consequential, just like Obama has been consequential (I mean, the Democrats have been trying to achieve government health care since Truman (that's 1945-52), and Bill and Hillary! famously flamed out on it). Obama does not dismiss Reagan ... I guess he is smarter than the average bear....
monkeyspaw 13y ago
I was too young to remember his presidency. But my understanding was that he started the war on drugs as a major component of his platform. I could see his war on drugs falling under economic rescue, although my understanding is that this effort has had serious deleterious economic effects in the U.S.