{"id":307,"date":"2012-01-26T19:26:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-26T23:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/?p=307"},"modified":"2012-01-26T19:26:00","modified_gmt":"2012-01-26T23:26:00","slug":"gingrich-and-reagan-national-review-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/?p=307","title":{"rendered":"Gingrich and Reagan – National Review Online"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gingrich and Reagan – National Review Online<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Off topic, but too fun to skip…<\/span><\/p>\n

The best examples come from a famous floor statement Gingrich made on March 21, 1986. This was right in the middle of the fight over funding for the Nicaraguan contras; the money had been cut off by Congress in 1985, though Reagan got $100 million for this cause in 1986. Here is Gingrich: \u201cMeasured against the scale and momentum of the Soviet empire\u2019s challenge, the Reagan administration has failed, is failing, and without a dramatic change in strategy will continue to fail. . . . President Reagan is clearly failing.\u201d Why? This was due partly to \u201chis administration\u2019s weak policies, which are inadequate and will ultimately fail\u201d; partly to CIA, State, and Defense, which \u201chave no strategies to defeat the empire.\u201d But of course \u201cthe burden of this failure frankly must be placed first on President Reagan.\u201d Our efforts against the Communists in the Third World were \u201cpathetically incompetent,\u201d so those anti-Communist members of Congress who questioned the $100 million Reagan sought for the Nicaraguan \u201ccontra\u201d rebels \u201care fundamentally right.\u201d Such was Gingrich\u2019s faith in President Reagan that in 1985, he called Reagan\u2019s meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev \u201cthe most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gingrich scorned Reagan\u2019s speeches, which moved a party and then a nation, because \u201cthe president of the United States cannot discipline himself to use the correct language.\u201d In Afghanistan, Reagan\u2019s policy was marked by \u201cimpotence [and] incompetence.\u201d Thus Gingrich concluded as he surveyed five years of Reagan in power that \u201cwe have been losing the struggle with the Soviet empire.\u201d Reagan did not know what he was doing, and \u201cit is precisely at the vision and strategy levels that the Soviet empire today is superior to the free world.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are two things to be said about these remarks. The first is that as a visionary, Gingrich does not have a very impressive record. The Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, just as Reagan had believed it must. The expansion of its empire had been thwarted. The policies Gingrich thought so weak and indeed \u201cpathetic\u201d worked, and Ronald Reagan turned out to be a far better student of history and politics than Gingrich.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Gingrich and Reagan – National Review Online: Off topic, but too fun to skip… The best examples come from a famous floor statement Gingrich made on March 21, 1986. This … Continue reading “Gingrich and Reagan – National Review Online”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.cmhughesmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}