Re: OT The REAL reagan
- From: "Mike" <mikehunt2@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 12:20:05 -0400
If one does a search of Reagan speeches it quickly becomes obvious, even to
a causal observer, that BO is down in the miner leagues in comparison.
Reagan was well aware of the fact that the US always was willing to fight
for its freedom, as well as the freedom of others and had nothing for which
it ever needed to apologize.
BO is a national disgrace and more Americans are catching on to that fact
"CharlesTheCurmudgeon" <n5hsr@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:h0dofb$f44$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://reagan2020.us/speeches/City_Upon_A_Hill.asp
There are three men here tonight I am very proud to introduce. It was a
year ago this coming February when this country had its spirits lifted as
they have never been lifted in many years. This happened when planes began
landing on American soil and in the Philippines, bringing back men who had
lived with honor for many miserable years in North Vietnam prisons. Three
of those men are here tonight, John McCain, Bill Lawrence and Ed Martin.
It is an honor to be here tonight. I am proud that you asked me and I feel
more than a little humble in the presence of this distinguished company.
There are men here tonight who, through their wisdom, their foresight and
their courage, have earned the right to be regarded as prophets of our
philosophy. Indeed they are prophets of our times. In years past when
others were silent or too blind to the facts, they spoke up forcefully and
fearlessly for what they believed to be right. A decade has passed since
Barry Goldwater walked a lonely path across this land reminding us that
even a land as rich as ours can't go on forever borrowing against the
future, leaving a legacy of debt for another generation and causing a
runaway inflation to erode the savings and reduce the standard of living.
Voices have been raised trying to rekindle in our country all of the great
ideas and principles which set this nation apart from all the others that
preceded it, but louder and more strident voices utter easily sold
cliches.
Cartoonists with acid-tipped pens portray some of the reminders of our
heritage and our destiny as old-fashioned. They say that we are trying to
retreat into a past that actually never existed. Looking to the past in an
effort to keep our country from repeating the errors of history is termed
by them as "taking the country back to McKinley." Of course, I never found
that was so bad -- under McKinley we freed Cuba. On the span of history,
we are still thought of as a young upstart country celebrating soon only
our second century as a nation, and yet we are the oldest continuing
republic in the world.
I thought that tonight, rather than talking on the subjects you are
discussing, or trying to find something new to say, it might be
appropriate to reflect a bit on our heritage.
You can call it mysticism if you want to, but I have always believed that
there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two
oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of
freedom and a special kind of courage.
This was true of those who pioneered the great wilderness in the beginning
of this country, as it is also true of those later immigrants who were
willing to leave the land of their birth and come to a land where even the
language was unknown to them. Call it chauvinistic, but our heritage does
set us apart. Some years ago a writer, who happened to be an avid student
of history, told me a story about that day in the little hall in
Philadelphia where honorable men, hard-pressed by a King who was flouting
the very law they were willing to obey, debated whether they should take
the fateful step of declaring their independence from that king. I was
told by this man that the story could be found in the writings of
Jefferson. I confess, I never researched or made an effort to verify it.
Perhaps it is only legend. But story, or legend, he described the
atmosphere, the strain, the debate, and that as men for the first time
faced the consequences of such an irretrievable act, the walls resounded
with the dread word of treason and its price -- the gallows and the
headman's axe. As the day wore on the issue hung in the balance, and then,
according to the story, a man rose in the small gallery. He was not a
young man and was obviously calling on all the energy he could muster.
Citing the grievances that had brought them to this moment, he said, "Sign
that parchment. They may turn every tree into a gallows, every home into a
grave and yet the words of that parchment can never die. For the mechanic
in his workshop, they will be words of hope, to the slave in the mines --
freedom." And he added, "If my hands were freezing in death, I would sign
that parchment with my last ounce of strength. Sign, sign if the next
moment the noose is around your neck, sign even if the hall is ringing
with the sound of headman's axe, for that parchment will be the textbook
of freedom, the bible of the rights of man forever." And then it is said
he fell back exhausted. But 56 delegates, swept by his eloquence, signed
the Declaration of Independence, a document destined to be as immortal as
any work of man can be. And according to the story, when they turned to
thank him for his timely oratory, he could not be found nor were there any
who knew who he was or how he had come in or gone out through the locked
and guarded doors.
Well, as I say, whether story or legend, the signing of the document that
day in Independence Hall was miracle enough. Fifty-six men, a little band
so unique -- we have never seen their like since -- pledged their lives,
their fortunes and their sacred honor. Sixteen gave their lives, most gave
their fortunes and all of them preserved their sacred honor. What manner
of men were they? Certainly they were not an unwashed, revolutionary
rabble, nor were they adventurers in a heroic mood. Twenty-four were
lawyers and jurists, 11 were merchants and tradesmen, nine were farmers.
They were men who would achieve security but valued freedom more.
And what price did they pay? John Hart was driven from the side of his
desperately ill wife. After more than a year of living almost as an animal
in the forest and in caves, he returned to find his wife had died and his
children had vanished. He never saw them again, his property was destroyed
and he died of a broken heart -- but with no regret, only pride in the
part he had played that day in Independence Hall. Carter Braxton of
Virginia lost all his ships -- they were sold to pay his debts. He died in
rags. So it was with Ellery, Clymer, Hall, Walton, Gwinnett, Rutledge,
Morris, Livingston, and Middleton. Nelson, learning that Cornwallis was
using his home for a headquarters, personally begged Washington to fire on
him and destroy his home--he died bankrupt. It has never been reported
that any of these men ever expressed bitterness or renounced their action
as not worth the price. Fifty-six rank-and-file, ordinary citizens had
founded a nation that grew from sea to shining sea, five million farms,
quiet villages, cities that never sleep -- all done without an area
re-development plan, urban renewal or a rural legal assistance program.
Now we are a nation of 211 million people with a pedigree that includes
blood lines from every corner of the world. We have shed that
American-melting-pot blood in every corner of the world, usually in
defense of someone's freedom. Those who remained of that remarkable band
we call our Founding Fathers tied up some of the loose ends about a dozen
years after the Revolution. It had been the first revolution in all man's
history that did not just exchange one set of rulers for another. This had
been a philosophical revolution. The culmination of men's dreams for 6,000
years were formalized with the Constitution, probably the most unique
document ever drawn in the long history of man's relation to man. I know
there have been other constitutions, new ones are being drawn today by
newly emerging nations. Most of them, even the one of the Soviet Union,
contain many of the same guarantees as our own Constitution, and still
there is a difference. The difference is so subtle that we often overlook
it, but it is so great that it tells the whole story. Those other
constitutions say, "Government grants you these rights," and ours says,
"You are born with these rights, they are yours by the grace of God, and
no government on earth can take them from you."
Lord Acton of England, who once said, "Power corrupts, and absolute power
corrupts absolutely," would say of that document, "They had solved with
astonishing ease and unduplicated success two problems which had
heretofore baffled the capacity of the most enlightened nations. They had
contrived a system of federal government which prodigiously increased
national power and yet respected local liberties and authorities, and they
had founded it on a principle of equality without surrendering the
securities of property or freedom." Never in any society has the
preeminence of the individual been so firmly established and given such a
priority.
In less than twenty years we would go to war because the God-given rights
of the American sailors, as defined in the Constitution, were being
violated by a foreign power. We served notice then on the world that all
of us together would act collectively to safeguard the rights of even the
least among us. But still, in an older, cynical world, they were not
convinced. The great powers of Europe still had the idea that one day this
great continent would be open again to colonizing and they would come over
and divide us up.
In the meantime, men who yearned to breathe free were making their way to
our shores. Among them was a young refugee from the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. He had been a leader in an attempt to free Hungary from Austrian
rule. The attempt had failed and he fled to escape execution. In America,
this young Hungarian, Koscha by name, became an importer by trade and took
out his first citizenship papers. One day, business took him to a
Mediterranean port. There was a large Austrian warship under the command
of an admiral in the harbor. He had a manservant with him. He had
described to this manservant what the flag of his new country looked like.
Word was passed to the Austrian warship that this revolutionary was there
and in the night he was kidnapped and taken aboard that large ship. This
man's servant, desperate, walking up and down the harbor, suddenly spied a
flag that resembled the description he had heard. It was a small American
war sloop. He went aboard and told Captain Ingraham, of that war sloop,
his story. Captain Ingraham went to the American Consul. When the American
Consul learned that Koscha had only taken out his first citizenship
papers, the consul washed his hands of the incident. Captain Ingraham
said, "I am the senior officer in this port and I believe, under my oath
of my office, that I owe this man the protection of our flag."
He went aboard the Austrian warship and demanded to see their prisoner,
our citizen. The Admiral was amused, but they brought the man on deck. He
was in chains and had been badly beaten. Captain Ingraham said, "I can
hear him better without those chains," and the chains were removed. He
walked over and said to Koscha, "I will ask you one question; consider
your answer carefully. Do you ask the protection of the American flag?"
Koscha nodded dumbly, "Yes," and the Captain said, "You shall have it." He
went back and told the frightened consul what he had done. Later in the
day three more Austrian ships sailed into harbor. It looked as though the
four were getting ready to leave. Captain Ingraham sent a junior officer
over to the Austrian flag ship to tell the Admiral that any attempt to
leave that harbor with our citizen aboard would be resisted with
appropriate force. He said that he would expect a satisfactory answer by
four o'clock that afternoon. As the hour neared they looked at each other
through the glasses. As it struck four he had them roll the cannons into
the ports and had them light the tapers with which they would set off the
cannons -- one little sloop. Suddenly the lookout tower called out and
said, "They are lowering a boat," and they rowed Koscha over to the little
American ship.
Captain Ingraham then went below and wrote his letter of resignation to
the United States Navy. In it he said, "I did what I thought my oath of
office required, but if I have embarrassed my country in any way, I
resign." His resignation was refused in the United States Senate with
these words: "This battle that was never fought may turn out to be the
most important battle in our Nation's history." Incidentally, there is to
this day, and I hope there always will be, a USS Ingraham in the United
States Navy.
I did not tell that story out of any desire to be narrowly chauvinistic or
to glorify aggressive militarism, but it is an example of government
meeting its highest responsibility.
In recent years we have been treated to a rash of noble-sounding phrases.
Some of them sound good, but they don't hold up under close analysis. Take
for instance the slogan so frequently uttered by the young senator from
Massachusetts, "The greatest good for the greatest number." Certainly
under that slogan, no modern day Captain Ingraham would risk even the
smallest craft and crew for a single citizen. Every dictator who ever
lived has justified the enslavement of his people on the theory of what
was good for the majority.
We are not a warlike people. Nor is our history filled with tales of
aggressive adventures and imperialism, which might come as a shock to some
of the placard painters in our modern demonstrations. The lesson of
Vietnam, I think, should be that never again will young Americans be asked
to fight and possibly die for a cause unless that cause is so meaningful
that we, as a nation, pledge our full resources to achieve victory as
quickly as possible.
I realize that such a pronouncement, of course, would possibly be laying
one open to the charge of warmongering -- but that would also be
ridiculous. My generation has paid a higher price and has fought harder
for freedom than any generation that had ever lived. We have known four
wars in a single lifetime. All were horrible, all could have been avoided
if at a particular moment in time we had made it plain that we subscribed
to the words of John Stuart Mill when he said that "war is an ugly thing,
but not the ugliest of things."
The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks
nothing is worth a war is worse. The man who has nothing which he cares
about more than his personal safety is a miserable creature and has no
chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better
men than himself.
The widespread disaffection with things military is only a part of the
philosophical division in our land today. I must say to you who have
recently, or presently are still receiving an education, I am awed by your
powers of resistance. I have some knowledge of the attempts that have been
made in many classrooms and lecture halls to persuade you that there is
little to admire in America. For the second time in this century,
capitalism and the free enterprise are under assault. Privately owned
business is blamed for spoiling the environment, exploiting the worker and
seducing, if not outright raping, the customer. Those who make the charge
have the solution, of course -- government regulation and control. We may
never get around to explaining how citizens who are so gullible that they
can be suckered into buying cereal or soap that they don't need and would
not be good for them, can at the same time be astute enough to choose
representatives in government to which they would entrust the running of
their lives.
Not too long ago, a poll was taken on 2,500 college campuses in this
country. Thousands and thousands of responses were obtained.
Overwhelmingly, 65, 70, and 75 percent of the students found business
responsible, as I have said before, for the things that were wrong in this
country. That same number said that government was the solution and should
take over the management and the control of private business. Eighty
percent of the respondents said they wanted government to keep its paws
out of their private lives.
We are told every day that the assembly-line worker is becoming a
dull-witted robot and that mass production results in standardization.
Well, there isn't a socialist country in the world that would not give its
copy of Karl Marx for our standardization.
Standardization means production for the masses and the assembly line
means more leisure for the worker -- freedom from backbreaking and
mind-dulling drudgery that man had known for centuries past. Karl Marx did
not abolish child labor or free the women from working in the coal mines
in England - the steam engine and modern machinery did that.
Unfortunately, the disciples of the new order have had a hand in
determining too much policy in recent decades. Government has grown in
size and power and cost through the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New
Frontier and the Great Society. It costs more for government today than a
family pays for food, shelter and clothing combined. Not even the Office
of Management and Budget knows how many boards, commissions, bureaus and
agencies there are in the federal government, but the federal registry,
listing their regulations, is just a few pages short of being as big as
the Encyclopedia Britannica.
During the Great Society we saw the greatest growth of this government.
There were eight cabinet departments and 12 independent agencies to
administer the federal health program. There were 35 housing programs and
20 transportation projects. Public utilities had to cope with 27 different
agencies on just routine business. There were 192 installations and nine
departments with 1,000 projects having to do with the field of pollution.
One Congressman found the federal government was spending 4 billion
dollars on research in its own laboratories but did not know where they
were, how many people were working in them, or what they were doing. One
of the research projects was "The Demography of Happiness," and for
249,000 dollars we found that "people who make more money are happier than
people who make less, young people are happier than old people, and people
who are healthier are happier than people who are sick." For 15 cents they
could have bought an Almanac and read the old bromide, "It's better to be
rich, young and healthy, than poor, old and sick."
The course that you have chosen is far more in tune with the hopes and
aspirations of our people than are those who would sacrifice freedom for
some fancied security.
Standing on the tiny deck of the Arabella in 1630 off the Massachusetts
coast, John Winthrop said, "We will be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of
all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely with our God in this
work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from
us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world." Well, we
have not dealt falsely with our God, even if He is temporarily suspended
from the classroom.
When I was born my life expectancy was 10 years less than I have already
lived - that's a cause of regret for some people in California, I know.
Ninety percent of Americans at that time lived beneath what is considered
the poverty line today, three-quarters lived in what is considered
substandard housing. Today each of those figures is less than 10 percent.
We have increased our life expectancy by wiping out, almost totally,
diseases that still ravage mankind in other parts of the world. I doubt if
the young people here tonight know the names of some of the diseases that
were commonplace when we were growing up. We have more doctors per
thousand people than any nation in the world. We have more hospitals than
any nation in the world.
When I was your age, believe it or not, none of us knew that we even had a
racial problem. When I graduated from college and became a radio sport
announcer, broadcasting major league baseball, I didn't have a Hank Aaron
or a Willie Mays to talk about. The Spaulding Guide said baseball was a
game for Caucasian gentlemen. Some of us then began editorializing and
campaigning against this. Gradually we campaigned against all those other
areas where the constitutional rights of a large segment of our citizenry
were being denied. We have not finished the job. We still have a long way
to go, but we have made more progress in a few years than we have made in
more than a century.
One-third of all the students in the world who are pursuing higher
education are doing so in the United States. The percentage of our young
Negro community that is going to college is greater than the percentage of
whites in any other country in the world.
One-half of all the economic activity in the entire history of man has
taken place in this republic. We have distributed our wealth more widely
among our people than any society known to man. Americans work less hours
for a higher standard of living than any other people. Ninety-five percent
of all our families have an adequate daily intake of nutrients -- and a
part of the five percent that don't are trying to lose weight! Ninety-nine
percent have gas or electric refrigeration, 92 percent have televisions,
and an equal number have telephones. There are 120 million cars on our
streets and highways -- and all of them are on the street at once when you
are trying to get home at night. But isn't this just proof of our
materialism -- the very thing that we are charged with? Well, we also have
more churches, more libraries, we support voluntarily more symphony
orchestras, and opera companies, non-profit theaters, and publish more
books than all the other nations of the world put together.
Somehow America has bred a kindliness into our people unmatched anywhere,
as has been pointed out in that best-selling record by a Canadian
journalist. We are not a sick society. A sick society could not produce
the men that set foot on the moon, or who are now circling the earth above
us in the Skylab. A sick society bereft of morality and courage did not
produce the men who went through those years of torture and captivity in
Vietnam. Where did we find such men? They are typical of this land as the
Founding Fathers were typical. We found them in our streets, in the
offices, the shops and the working places of our country and on the farms.
We cannot escape our destiny, nor should we try to do so. The leadership
of the free world was thrust upon us two centuries ago in that little hall
of Philadelphia. In the days following World War II, when the economic
strength and power of America was all that stood between the world and the
return to the dark ages, Pope Pius XII said, "The American people have a
great genius for splendid and unselfish actions. Into the hands of America
God has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind."
We are indeed, and we are today, the last best hope of man on earth.
________________________________
This is the REAL Ronald Reagan. Obama may use some of his catch phrases,
but he will never be like him. He has a different view.
America is evil and bad in his mind, and he is indeed making it so. That
is why I have NO repsect for Nobama, and will not salute him even for the
office he fraudulently holds.
Charles Grozny, ashamed to be an American citizen since November 3, 2008,
when we elected an unqualified crooked, wicked sandpounder from Chicago as
president.
.
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