L42B
I offer my pity to the poor soul whose sense of humor is inspired by the death of a good man.
That ‘humourous’ avatar at the expense of the dignity of the cock-eyed is really in bad taste. Look that man straight in the eye and tell me I’m wrong.
Sincerellelly,
HB.
Pray for me Brian.My soul must be damned.
Am I a sick and twisted individual? 
Hell yes I must be 
I don’t wish harm on anyone, or normally speak badly of the recently departed (unless they deserve it, of course), but I must confess I am a bit surprised at this big todo about Reagan at his death. I never heard Americans say anything nice about him when he was in power (in fact, the humour about Reaganomics and Starwars was pretty acerbic). So how come this big outpouring of sentiment now?
djm
I don’t understand it either…
Now if I was into conspiracy theories, it seems to me that it was an awful coincidence that Mr. R died just at the same time as the G-8 meeting.
Notice that the press paid no attention to the goings on at the G-8. They were too busy flying helicopters to chase the hearse from the funeral home to the airport. It looked like a repeat of the OJ bronco chase.
I couldn’t believe the huge waste of money and so called journalism following that minute piece of ‘news’.
All the big ta-do diverted attention from something else…the hand is quicker than the eye as they say. :roll:
I dunno, but for me, there’s just something about kicking the dead that seems tasteless and disrespectful. Now if he were still alive and president, I’d be putting my steel-toed boots back on.
Go on ‘Snoogie’, you don’t have to be into conspircay theories to know that your Government manipulates the presentation of ‘World Affairs’ by your media, under the direction of multinationals etc.,. I reckon you’re spot on!
I find it hard to believe your country hasn’t just had a revolution and burned the whole corporate whoredom to the floor.
But then again, that’s 'cos I’m a people person, not a money man…
Alan
Joseph, I agree and did not intend to condone the slamming of the deceased. My point was that the media made it seem that his elevation to Saint-hood was right around the corner. These are the same media that gave him such a hard time when he was in office.
Alan, yeah if I want a perspective on international events, I never read a US paper. I go on the internet to the Hong Kong or London papers and see what they are saying. The US media is amazingly inept (maybe by design?) at reporting on world events.
I learned that lesson after traveling throughout Asia and Europe on business…reading those papers and then returing home to find that nothing of whatever the event of the day was had been communicated in the US.
Uh, oh…you got me started on one of my peeves..what I call the psuedo-journalism of our time. Camera pans back to show some guy standing in front of a building saying “Well, we HEARD that there MIGHT be some news going on inside, but no one is talking about it so we don’t really KNOW anything. Check back with me in 5 minutes and I’ll update you on what else has NOT happened.”
I guess this is much easier and cheaper to do than find a real story, understand it and then communicate it…which is what I thought journalism was all about.
Have a nice day!
-gary
Snoogie wrote: "Uh, oh…you got me started on one of my peeves..what I call the psuedo-journalism of our time. Camera pans back to show some guy standing in front of a building saying “Well, we HEARD that there MIGHT be some news going on inside, but no one is talking about it so we don’t really KNOW anything. Check back with me in 5 minutes and I’ll update you on what else has NOT happened.”
That is exactly it! But most of the stations down here in Davenport feature a heavily made up woman with a Jennifer Aniston hairdo, a dung eating grin and wild staring eyes reporting ‘no news’ in a voice that would suggest they they haven’t been taking enough fiber as of late. No matter the story, its the same look and the same tone of voice. Very creepy and very irritating.
If we want to pay tribute to the dead, lets talk about a cool one. Someone who will be greatly missed did die last week.
Ray Charles. 
I don’t think this will cause much flame war hazzard, but on here, who knows.
He heard an angelic choir and a deep voice saying,“Ray, come towards the light. No Ray over here. RAY! THE LIGHT IS OVER HERE!”
I know. Bad.
Marc
a little later, ray is standing in line at the pearly gates and wonders who’s in front of him. so ray reaches forward and starts touching the face of the person in front of him. brother ray can’t quite tell who it is and asks “who are you?” ronald reagan turns around and says " i don’t know?" 
How do you account for the popular votes he got, not even counting the landslide in the Electoral College?
Could it possibly be because his economic policy actually worked and even better than the JFK tax cuts?
And that SDI destroyed the USSR without firing a shot?
SDI destroyed the USSR? :roll:
Rewriting the history of Ronnie’s term seems all the rage now. Yes he was popular, and yes he did some good things, but the man was far from a saint and hardly what the majority of people would consider a Hero.
I’m not going to go into detail because honestly I don’t agree with bashing the recently departed. Let’s just say that I think it would serve the public better to have a more balanced representation of Reagan and what his administration did.
To go on about the status of being a “hero” these days, it seems to me like it’s been terribly diminished by all the people the media labels as a hero. It seems like to the media all it takes is being somewhat popular and dying by some method (preferably some dehabilitating disease or “tragic” accident). There are soldiers dying every day in Iraq who deserve this status far more than Ronald and most of them rarely get their names and/or pictures on the news much less a ridiculously expensive national/state funeral.
Anyhow, I suppose I should stop. I won’t offer my views on the war or go on about politics. This board isn’t about politics and peoples’s views are varied (thankfully) and often set (unfortunately) so arguments rarely win people over. So back to music!
Dionys
You keep proferring this piece of drivel. Is it intended as a joke? It was a long series of droughts, compounded with horrendous agricultural mismanagement that put the USSR deep in debt for years buying food from the international market, and eventually having to borrow money to buy the food. Add in a ten year war in Afghanistan, funded and orchestrated by the CIA, and you finally saw the USSR falling apart under its own weight. SDI had nothing to do with anything.
The end result, of course, was over a million Afghanis killed in the war, an Ossama bin Laden fully trained in warfare and terror tactics by your own government, and the ensuing results we all know so well.
Why did people vote for Reagan? For the same reason they voted for Nixon or any of the other presidents who have brought both good and bad - because he had a great media image. Americans buy it every time. Let Ronny go in peace. You now have a president who wasn’t given his mandate by the public, is deeply in bed with Arab oil money, and who has a great media image. History will tell …
(God, its only Saturday morning 
)
djm
No, but I will stop if it offends you.
I still believe it was the final push that toppled the USSR.
BTW, communism cannot work. Study the Mayflower Compact and see how long that agreement lasted. It seems there is no incentive to get “from each his ability”, only “each to his needs”.
The next year, they tried capitalism and it worked!
Eh?
What on earth ever makes you think it “works” in Russia today? There is more poverty and destitution than ever before. Crime and corruption is rampant … hmm, this is starting to sound like a typical day in a typical US city in the daily US news. 
Yuh know? 
djm
Yea, and it’s such a great thing to have destroyed the USSR. Now the world is burdened with a massive, starving half-continent falling back into a barbarism that includes a mafia that seems to be becoming the de facto government. Good job, guys, you destroyed the lives of millions of people AND their decendants. Hope you feel proud, and safe. Look out, there’s a commie behind you! Better shoot anything you don’t like.
God konws Amerikkka’s the only important thing on earth. The rest of us are either tools, pawns, bootlicks or enemies. And you wonder why you’re generally not liked or trusted by the rest of the world. Let’s take rewriting history for example. According to the news programs, Reagan was a more popular president than FDR and JFK. Pardon? So is the American media lying now, or were they lying then?
I joined my first political action group because America, under Reagan, thought they should begin testing cruise missles. But you didn’t want to do it on your own soil so you decided to come to MY country and BOMB MY lands. So screw The Hero Reagan. Reagan the man is dead, and I’m sorry he’s dead, but that’s what happens to people, right? He might have been a nice guy up close and personal, but he screwed the world over for the benefit of a few. That would be the rich American few.
Fancypiper, saying something as awe-inspiringly uninformed as ‘communism cannot work’ is EXACTLY the kind of thing that makes the rest of the world turn their faces away from America. I live in a democracy that assholes in the states call ‘Canuckistan’ because we think that there is more than one way to run a democracy. But if it’s not the amercian system, it’s communism, and commies are evil god-destroyers, right? And if you dare to think that there are alternates to democracy, you MUST be stupid, or evil, or both. (Just out of curiousity, without looking it up, can you name more than three political systems?)
I’m sorry but this really really pisses me off. America, after the war of independance, tried to make George Washington King of America and you’ve been hoping for Royalty since then. Lionizing a man who played fast and loose with the lives of the entire world (while suffering from a disease that was destroying his mind!!!) is no surprise to this cynic. Those who don’t learn history are condemned to repeat it.
Now I’m sure that most of you folks in the States will be all up in arms because I dared to criticize your fallen hero, and even worse, your political system, all while on an American forum. He didn’t Fall, he died, and that’s what happens to humans. The forum is on a server in Canada, by the way. I’m sure you know that, I’m just not sure you care.
Mark 
And none of this has to do with Uillean piping. Let’s stop now, right?
Glad to see you’re not taking any of this yak personally, Mark.
djm