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Kanani Fong at the Ronald Reagan Roundtable at Chicago Boyz:

Reagan Roundtable: Ronald Reagan and California by Kanani Fong

….Well, there’s a lot of hullaballoo about what would have been Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday. I can’t remember a time when Ronald Reagan wasn’t part of the lexicon of California politics, even recollecting the time his face was printed on the DMV handbook. His signature even appeared on my school Report Cards. (Back then the Superintendent, the Principal’s sigs were also included).

Ronald Reagan was the sunny transplant from the midwest, the person who was proof that you could invent yourself here in the land of (then) orange trees, mild weather, and movie stars from Marlene Dietrich to Mae West. He was in radio, then movies, the president of SAG, a democrat, a republican, governor, and president. He even had a beautiful wife, and two children who were the kids he created -free thinkers. They even disagree with many of his viewpoints, but frankly, he would not have minded. Reagan was the kind of self styled rugged individualist that most people are comfortable with, one step removed from the suburbs. It was the Hollywood version of a ranch -horse trails, brush to clear, minus the livestock or orchards other ranchers depended on for their livelihood.

He was part of that golden era that I grew up in, where everything seemed possible. The state universities were very low cost, the schools were at the top of the nation, and the freeways (actually thanks to Gov. Edmund G. Brown), were smooth black lines that wound their way from mountains to desert and over to the Pacific Ocean. When I was growing up, we never asked about anyone’s religion, and it never occurred to us to casually pigeonhole anyone as liberal or conservative, democrat or republican. We were (above anything else) Californians -which was pretty damned swell. It is easy to get nostalgic for those days, but to marinate in it for too long, makes it difficult to see the changes he started and the challenges we have ahead.

Read the rest here.

Shane Deichman at the Ronald Reagan Roundtable at Chicago Boyz:

“A new hope for our children in the 21st century”

….On March 23rd, 1983, a few weeks after President Reagan presented his Fiscal 1984 budget to Congress, he gave his famous “Star Wars Speech” to a national televised audience. Although “Star Wars” was the derisive name opponents used to mock the fantastic nature of the President’s vision, President Reagan’s speech was singularly focused on restoring American military strength and credibility – and to “… pave the way for arms control measures to eliminate the [nuclear] weapons themselves.”

Ironically, unlike President Kennedy’s 1962 speech at Rice University that was fully focused on the seemingly-impossible challenge of putting a man on the moon (and Rice defeating Texas in football), Reagan’s “… call [to] the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents … to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete” warranted only a couple of sentences in an otherwise lengthy speech.

Rather, this speech was part of “…a careful, long-term plan to make America strong again after too many years of neglect and mistakes,” and (when coupled with President Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando just two weeks prior) was a deliberate escalation of Cold War rhetoric.

President Reagan was rightfully concerned that the defense budget had been “trimmed to the limits of safety” by Congress. This decay of U.S. armed forces led Reagan “…to improve the basic readiness and staying power of our conventional forces, so they could meet – and therefore help deter – a crisis.” But his confidence in the logic of deterrence had limits. The Star Wars Speech presented to the world Reagan’s realization that deterrence based solely on commensurate offensive capabilities was fallacious.

Read the rest here.

Joseph Fouche at the Ronald Reagan Roundtable at Chicago Boyz:

Reagan Roundtable: Growing Up Reagan

….I felt the reinvigoration of American pride that Reagan fed during his term. The local culture in which I grew up was extremely patriotic anyway. However, the banishment of the clouds of Carterly malaise was clear even to a young child. The martial virtues were preached during those years and my interest in military history partially flows from that influence. G.I. Joe was a real American hero and the Ruskies were the bad guys. I would draw maps and redo the borders of the world in a future era when the Soviet Union was gone. I did it with more abandon than ten Sykes and Picot at an imperialist bender. I had no idea that the Soviet Union would be gone within six years and largely peacefully instead of a global conflagration. Peaceful falls and peaceful rises are better for the people of this earth overall but less appealing to nine-year old boys with action figures.

The outcome of Reagan and his administration on future events is not fully apparent. I’m sure we’ll get more ideas on that as this roundtable proceeds. However, for a child growing up in the 1980s, Reagan was the ideal president. Whether he was a good president or not really didn’t matter to a pre-teen just like it didn’t really matter if Douglas MacArthur was a great general or not. Douglas MacArthur played a great general for the newsreels and Ronald Reagan played a great president on TV. Those who overlook the advantage that acting talent gives to a president ignore a strength that Reagan shared with his idol Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Once, at a dinner party, FDR supposedly leaned over to Orson Welles and whispered, “Mr. Welles, you and I are the two best actors in America.” For many Americans, the detailed policy fluctuations of the New Deal didn’t matter. The New Deal was one of the great stage dramas of the Golden Age of American entertainment and FDR was its most consummate performer. The personal impact of FDR on my grandparents was clear even fifty years later.

FDR may or may not have been a great president but he played one on the radio and on film

Read the rest here.

[ by Charles Cameron – a Zenpundit exclusive! ]

I was browsing the web looking for court papers from the case of Rajib Karim today, and one of the links I got took me to an Islamic Awakening page — which is to say, to an English-language, pro-jihadist forum founded by Yousef al-Khattab — where I found myself facing some unexpected advertising…

Let me get this straight. The pro-jihadist website Islamic Awakening is now receiving funds from a university that wants to train future diplomats and some schools for aspiring police officers?

If so, do these educational establishments imagine they’re recruiting from the pool of wannabe jihadists who supposedly frequent the site — or from folks already in the FBI and counter-terrorism business, who may by now be the site’s only remaining readers?

Either way, I’d say it’s a pretty subtle approach — and almost as much fun to stumble across as the Bold Christian clothing ad that I found on a previous visit to Islamic Awakening… do you remember that?

[ by Charles Cameron — cross-posted from Brainstormers on the Web ]

There are so many possible lessons to take here:

That a single image speaks louder than dozens of words. That we are more easily persuaded by images than by words. That FB and Twitter are clearly important to Egyptian youth. That dozens of words can convey nuances that a single image misses. That FB and Twitter were at best among the vehicles, rather than the drivers, of the events of January 25th.

That we’d do well to bear the Aristotelian distinction between material, formal, efficient and final causes in mind when talking about what “caused” or “becaused” those events – and elsewhere.

That the simple juxtaposition of two closely similar ideas can illuminate both, and perhaps create a spectral “third thing” which possesses the full detail of both with greater depth than either one in a single understanding, by a sort of stereo process not too different from stereoscopic vision or stereophonic sound.

That we live in exciting times…