The heavyweight champion as a political tool, history repeats itself!

I know who Reagan was. He was likely the best president in my lifetime. Reagan believed in peace through strength, and understood how to deal with the Soviet Union. In fact he deserves credit for bankrupting them, and opening up talks to a close minded cold war nation.

The wall went down in 1989 while Bush was in office, but the ground work was Reagan's.

As for the nuclear sites in Iran, the USA knows where they are. There is a way in and out, and it must be ventilated. There are lots of ways to destroy them and the people inside that I'm not going to post here. If needed air strikes to take out defenses combined with boots on the ground / machinery to destroy them can be accomplished.

We agree that Obama has been a disappointment. Many Democrats consider him a Republican, and many Republicans consider him a fool on foreign policy.

 

In other words, I will only batter you if I am angry. If not I will leave you alone.


Whoops!!!!!! What do you mean you will batter me back because you can?

Don't be so fvcking naive. Even the
Jews tell the Yanks to FVCK OFF and mind their own business, never mind Putin. The days of the Americans being the worlds super power, are long gone.

That is why every now and again they puff their little chests out, and pick a fight with some raghead with 2,000 camels, and a few drums of oil to massage their own ego's.

Not to be taken seriously at all.

 

Reagan invaded Grenada.
Peace through strength.

 

Do you seriously expect the people on this site to believe this?

Do you actually know anything about Reagan?

For instance did you know he was an informant for the HUAC during the 1950's witch hunts?
Did you know he was an informant for the FBI during the Freedom Of Speech protests on Berkely Campus in the 1960's whilst he was running for Governor of California?
Eventually sending in the National Guard when he became Governor
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/8/24/book_reveals_extensive_effort_by_reagan


Here are are some of his policies.And the events that happened during his watch




Aug 25, 1982
Marines Deployed to Lebanon

President Reagan deploys American Marines to war-torn Lebanon to participate in an ill-defined peacekeeping mission there.

1982
Recession

The United States endures its worst economic recession since the Great Depression. For the first time since the 1930s, the American unemployment rate exceeds 10%. President Reagan's approval ratings fall to an all-time low of 35%.

Oct 25, 1983
US Invades Grenada

The United States invades the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, overthrowing the country's Marxist dictatorship
Oct 1984
Iran-Contra Affair

Congress passes a law banning the diversion of US government funds to support Nicaragua's anticommunist Contra rebels. The Reagan Administration violates the new law, eventually leading to the Iran-Contra Crisis of 1986-87.

Aug 1985
Arms to Iran for Lebanese Hostages

The Reagan Administration begins sending arms to Iran, via Israel, in hopes that the weapons sales will lead the Iranians to pressure their allies in Lebanon to release American hostages. The secret arms shipments violate President Reagan's pledge never to negotiate with terrorists.

Nov 3, 1986
Iran-Contra Scandal

A Lebanese magazine breaks the explosive news that the United States has been secretly selling weapons to Iran. The revelation, quickly confirmed by the Iranian government, marks the beginning of the Iran-Contra Scandal.

Nov 13, 1986
Reagan Denies

President Reagan delivers a nationally televised speech to address the Iran arms-for-hostages scandal. "Our government has a firm policy not to capitulate to terrorist demands," he says. "We did not—repeat, did not—trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we

Nov 21, 1986
Meese Investigates

Attorney General Edwin Meese, a staunch Reagan loyalist, begins an internal investigation into White House involvement in the Iran-Contra Scandal. Meese allows Iran-Contra conspirator Oliver North to shred thousands of potentially incriminating documents before they can be seized as evidence.

Nov 24, 1986
Meese Finds Guilt

Attorney General Edwin Meese informs President Reagan that his investigation into the Iran-Contra Scandal has revealed that administration officials did sell arms to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages, and that the proceeds from those illegal arms sales were diverted to fund the anticommunist Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

Nov 25, 1986
Oliver North Fired

President Reagan fires Marine Colonel Oliver North, mastermind of the Iran-Contra operation, from his job with the National Security Council. North's boss, National Security Advisor John Poindexter, resigns. Both men will eventually be convicted of criminal malfeasance for their actions in the Iran-Contra Affair.

Dec 1986
Approval Drops

In the wake of recent revelations of wrongdoing in the Iran-Contra Affair, polls reveal that President Reagan's approval rating has fallen from 67% to 46% in just one month.

Mar 4, 1987
Reagan Apology

President Reagan goes on national TV to deliver a confusing apology for Iran-Contra: "A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages," he says. "My heart and my best intentions tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it's not."

The Arms that Iran now has came from Reagan and his cronies.

 

I don't mean to single out something that isn't the main point of your argument, but having done quite a bit of historical research on this subject I felt the need to comment. Those were not "witch hunts". Witches didn't exist, communists did and their purposes were not good. The story of what happened back then is much more involved than that. Anyone interested should read "Hollywood Party" by Billingsley. I would actually like to hear your opinions on it if you ever have the time to read it.

Reagan deserves a medal for what he did with HUAC.

 

Lloyd Billingsley?
Your interpretation is just that ,your interpretation, no offence.

Witch hunts destroyed actors/writers such as John Garfield, Larry Parkes,Dalton Trumbo,Lionel Stander etc.

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/mccarthy/blacklist.html

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-red-scare-comes-to-hollywood


http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/miller-mccarthyism.html

These are just a sample there are hundreds of documented stories.

Those that ratted on their friends such as Schulberg,Kazan,Hayden.

Kazan made " On The Waterfront2 as a self- justification for his own "naming of names"
Those that couldn't get before the commitee quick enough ,Taylor,Cooper,Menjou etc.
Those that said go **** yourself like Stander,Miller etc.

As much as I enjoyed John Wayne's films
I personally think the period of the HUAC was the most shameful America has gone through since the war.

Here are three reviews of" Hollywood Party".

Here's what most people know about the clash between Washington, D.C., and Hollywood involving Communist influence over the film industry: the House Committee on Un-American Activities led an organized witch hunt against writers and actors with left-wing sympathies, creating an environment that led to a blacklist destroying many talented people's careers. But some insist this isn't the whole story. "It's a false parallel. Witch hunt!" wrote Molly Kazan, whose husband Elia testified before the committee, saved his career as a film director, and earned enmity from Hollywood liberals continuing to the present day. "The phrase would indicate that there are no Communists in the government, none in the big trade unions, none in the press, none in the arts.... No one who was in the Party and the left uses that phrase. They know better." Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley works to fill in some of the historical gaps with Hollywood Party. The information on the role of Communist (and Communist- sympathetic) screenwriters is not particularly revelatory to those familiar with the basic outlines of the story, although Billingsley pushes the Communist angle hard, noting the Party's lockstep support of Stalin and what might charitably be called his "policies," as well as the vicious backlash against any leftist who spoke out against the Communists. His chronicle of Communist efforts to control the studio workers' unions, however, illuminates a less glamorous but perhaps more substantial aspect of the story. Those in search of celebrity dirt will be mildly disappointed; there are several star-studded scenes, but mostly mild anecdotes on the level of Ronald Reagan's gradual realization that, as an SAG activist, he was being played for a dupe by the Reds. Unless, that is, Billingsley is writing about a Communist or a fellow traveler, in which case no personal quirk, from screenwriter Dalton Trumbo's penchant for working in his bathtub to Bertolt Brecht's lack of hygiene to left-wing journalist Ella Winter's mannishly short hair, is overlooked. --


From Publishers Weekly

The Soviet Union's demise, the release of spy-era files and the 50-year anniversary of the year in which Joseph McCarthy wielded lists of supposed Communists like so many sickles, has prompted new studies on the House Committee on Un-American Activities and Cold War politics. Examining accounts of movie industry unions, money trails between Russian Communists and American Communists, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and other groups' response to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 and industry insider allegiances and betrayals, Billingsley throws a wet blanket on the gushing self-congratulation with which the entertainment world has memorialized the Hollywood Ten and the era of blacklisted writers and producers. The House Committee and the blacklist it spawned, he contends, were no simple versions of the Spanish Inquisition. Not everyone accused and even persecuted was innocent of the Communist label; not every Hollywood figure told the truth. Heroes and villains, he points out, were not nearly so clear-cut as movies, like the 1991 DeNiro feature, Guilty by Suspicion, and gala events like Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist, a recreation of the HUAC hearings, would have us believe. On this point, Billingsley convinces, supplying what he calls "backstory" to subvert the assumption that the House Committee was pure sham. Filled with specific details of infiltrators and full-fledged activists, his study discloses veins of Communist influence within the studios of that era. But Billingsley also attempts to prove that a battle for control over movies themselves was nearly lost to Communist "seduction," and with this provocative charge, his argument falls apart. The stories he documents of director Edward Dmytryck, writer Dalton Trumbo and countless lesser players, who he accuses of championing themes that were consistent with the Party line, fail to add up to an underground movement to smuggle Communist ideology into American cinema. Its racy subtitle notwithstanding, this volume ultimately fails to provide a convincing picture of those dramatic times


From Library Journal

Billingsley (editorial director, Pacific Research Inst., San Francisco) offers a provocative journalistic account of the rise and fall of pro-Communist agitation in the film industry. Billingsley is critical of earlier accounts of leftist organizing in Hollywood, which, he says, gloss over the use of antifascist rhetoric by party members in mid-century Hollywood to conceal the crimes of Josef Stalin. He is particularly concerned with the ideology of wartime films that celebrated the role of the USSR in the Allied cause. Although he strives to maintain a dispassionate approach, occasionally his political reflexes kick in, as when he dismisses Katharine Hepburn on the grounds that her "commitments to the downtrodden did not prevent the pursuit of personal affluence



Billingsley was more right wing than Ward Bond! And ,as such hardly an impartial source.
Still never mind Charlton Heston agreed with him!

 

:deal

 

Few thought that he could come back from that hiatus of his, being injured, and beat Sam Peter....never mind totally outclassing him like he did....but alas and alack, he's much older man now and he's smart and sensible enough to stay retired.

 

I expected him to beat Peter and said so on here, but he was clearly slipping at the end of his reign , a comeback now would be disastrous and he is too intelligent to think otherwise.

 

Really?

So he was an actor, informing ( factual or hear say ) on FELLOW actors.

Ironically enough isn't that EXACTLY what the communist Russians encouraged their " citizens " to do, inform on each other?

 

So read the book and draw your own conclusions. The man has done a massive amount of research and cites his sources. Whenever I hear the term "witch hunts" it's usually a red flag to me that someone is merely plugging in to the fashionable opinion and has done little research beyond that. I don't know for sure if that is the case with you because I don't know your personal politics. But to simply dismiss it all with the "witch hunt" label usually betrays a certain intellectual laziness.

Again, I'm not pointing the finger at you. I really don't know how much research you've done. All I'm suggesting is that you pick up the book at your local library(no risk for you) and draw your own conclusions. I'd like to hear your opinion after you've had a view of the "other" side of this very complex story. Cheers.

 

I don't know. I do know that the Communist Manifesto is a call to arms that pretty much encourages people to rise up and murder those with whom they disagree. The perceived "have nots" murdering the perceived "haves". Anyone who supports such a thing deserves whatever they get, imo.

 

Well with respect I DO know.

The KGB, and the Politburo, actively encouraged Russians to spy on and report instances of dissidence by other Russians to them. I mean people living in what would be termed the "projects " in the US, or housing estates in Britain, not particularly middle class intellectuals. Just anyone who complained aloud about the totalitarian regime that kept them down trodden.

A good book for you to read ( though it is heavy going ) might be " A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich " by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, it tells you everything you need to know about Russian communist regimes.

 

Doesn't surprise me. But anyone who reports on communists or flushes them out is a hero, imo. I have zero tolerance for that species.