Rating Reagan: A Bogus Legacy: The U.S. news media?s reaction to Ronald Reagan?s death is putting on display what has happened to American public debate in the years since Reagan?s political rise in the late 1970s: a near-total collapse of serious analytical thinking at the national level. [...]
Yet absent from the media commentary was the one fundamental debate that must be held before any reasonable assessment can be made of Ronald Reagan and his Presidency: How, why and when was the Cold War ?won?? If, for instance, the United States was already on the verge of victory over a foundering Soviet Union in the early-to-mid-1970s, as some analysts believe, then Reagan?s true historic role may not have been ?winning? the Cold War, but helping to extend it. [...]
George W. Bush?s strategy for rallying the American public behind the War in Iraq ? with hyped intelligence about military threats and extreme rhetoric about the evil of U.S. adversaries ? follows the game plan drawn up by Ronald Reagan?s national security team in the 1980s. [...]
Arguably, too, another troubling part of Ronald Reagan?s legacy is the press corps?s stultifying version of recent American history, a superficiality richly on display in the media paeans to Reagan following his death.
