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Comment by myko | Hacker News Reader

Great by whose measure? As far as I'm concerned he is an embarrassment (as a President).

I do think these letters are of historical interest though, glad to see them available.

You cannot level such a stark criticism against a man who dared to be great - when you do so you embarrass only yourself.

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

Talk highly of him all you want, his rhetoric has hurt the US far more than it has helped. Between his voodoo economics and ignoring of the AIDs crisis, Iran Contra, the 'Moral Majority', I think you are embarrassing yourself here, not me. He is the epitome of style over substance.

You can say the same about just any other politician. They all made (and make) mistakes and stumble. The key is how history judges them. In the case of Reagan I think history is pretty clear about what he accomplished and what he didn't. Notice I said "I think" because that's just my opinion; everyone is entitled to one. Informed opinions are not embarrassing. Waving your arms and pushing your own absolutes on other people however can be quite so.

I think you just nicely reiterated my response to the OP, thanks.

Go troll somewhere else.

You're being silly now. I am not trolling - I stated my opinion. You said:

> Waving your arms and pushing your own absolutes on other people however can be quite so.

Which seemed to be directly in response to the OPs assertion:

> Ronald Reagan was a wise man and great president.

You can see how I would think you were referencing this in your comment as you specified that you were stating an opinion and the OP asserted this comment as fact, yet I stated:

> As far as I'm concerned he is an embarrassment

Which is obviously presented as opinion and not hard fact. I did however back up my opinion with points in a follow up comment.

edit: the downvotes don't make me any less correct in my response, if you disagree please explain.

I'd say winning the Cold War was a pretty significant triumph for the man.

The US didn't win the cold war, the USSR stopped playing due to an insolvency of mostly their own creation. And the same could happen to the US if it is not extremely careful over the next decade or so.

Much as I hate to stray this far from the topic at hand, AIDS turned out to be a much, much smaller deal than the alarmists of the 1980s would have had you believe. Not that it wasn't worth being concerned about, researching, and educating people about, but y'know what the death toll from AIDS is in the United States nowadays? Forty per million per year.

While that's still an order of magnitude above "lightning strike" it's below, say, Hepatitis C or many hundreds of other diseases that get less press.

You don't think its current status has something to do with all the energy put into it early on?

Also, I think you're a little breezy about the threat AIDS poses. It's still killing 2m people a year, down from 3m at its peak.

Talk about hindsight fallacy. "Nowadays" is hardly the point; at the time, depending on what circles you moved in (or perhaps one should say, which classes of human beings you cared about), AIDS was devastating.

The cultural losses were especially incalculable. So many artists at the height of their powers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hGpjsgquqw

This is exactly why this political stuff needs to stay off HN. By your apparent definition no one could level start criticism against Hitler (hopefully that kills the thread).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwins_law --> this should end it ;)

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