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From the Right by Ed Farnan

The Greatest of Presidents

Posted on Sunday, February 06, 2011 at 09:38 AM

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February is the shortest month of the year with only 28 days. Yet it is a month packed with importance that no other month can boast. It is the birth month of Americas three greatest Presidents and another President whose potential greatness was nipped in the bud after only 34 days in office.

It is a month who sets aside a special day for lovers when Valentines days is recognized.

The entire month is celebrated as Black History Month.

Of course it is the only month that honors the mighty Groundhog who determines what our weather will be for the next 6 weeks when February 2, dawns....What power!

But without the 3 greatest Presidents who lead our country through its most turbulent eras, we might not be here today as a nation to celebrate February.

President Washington, first and only Father of our country, whose strength and determination saw us through those dark days of Valley Forge and on to victory over the British. His leadership brought us the beginning of the greatest country on earth.

President Lincoln, who saw it as his sole most important role as the leader who would preserve our union. In spite of overwhelming losses, calls for his resignation, criticisms from every corner, he persevered through our country's dark days and kept us e pluribus unum.

Which brings me to our greatest President, the humble man from humble beginnings, an Irish American who loved the USA, President Ronald Reagan. With that unmistakable twinkle in his eye, the gift of gab that only comes from a close encounter with the Blarney stone, he inspired our country to greatness in a time of national malaise and sweater wearing. When he took office we were faced with cataclysmic consequences on all fronts. Nuclear war and annihilation were a button push away.

Ronald Reagan's charismatic leadership inspired us to greatness. He steadfastly stared down the Soviet leaders which eventually broke the Soviet Union. This lead to the crumbling of the Berlin wall and opened up the floodgates of freedom around the world. We had unparalleled prosperity without the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over our heads. He was truly a great man needed for that time. He was also the man on whose principles the modern day Tea Party is based on.

This humble man once said: " I am not a great man, I just believe in great ideas".

Happy 100th President Reagan, God Bless you up there!

PS: Could you please send us another February born President...soon!

Editors note: Feb 21, 2011 ... (NewsCore) - A Gallup poll taken ahead of President's Day reveals that Americans believe Ronald Reagan was the nation's greatest president, ...

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31 Comments

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hancock | Feb 10, 2011, 02:32 PM EST

Dennis you should take some of your own advice. Just because you type a lot doesn't mean you make any sense.

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Monsoonman | Feb 10, 2011, 11:47 AM EST

"what exactly did he do?"......I believe that Ronald Reagan with help from George Lucas drove the ruskies out of business with Star Wars. They knew their goose was cooked when hollywood got behind space based defense systems. No one could compete with that so they threw in the towel.

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DennisQ | Feb 10, 2011, 04:02 AM EST

Monsoonman, you're long on claims and short on evidence. When you say Reagan drove the Soviets out of business, it sounds like you are ascribing causality to events that may or may not be related. You'd have to cite specific actions and policies that Reagan used to bring down the Soviet empire.

You derogate ooking at things from the rear view mirror as if there were something wrong with studying history. We need to study the past in order to understand the present.

Make a legitimate argument, Monsoonman. Don't just throw out random accusations that imply both laziness and cowardice. When you say Reagan "drive the USSR out of business," what exactly did he do? Understand that you do not bring down empires with rhetoric. If that's your interpretation of history, you're wrong.

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Monsoonman | Feb 09, 2011, 09:40 PM EST

Always easy to look at things through the rear view mirror, from the safety and comfort of your living room. If you had lived through those perilous times and spent a good portion of your life underground in your personal bomb shelter, you would know how liberating it was when President (God rest his soul) Reagan drove the USSR out of business.

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DennisQ | Feb 09, 2011, 08:21 PM EST

Old empires don't continue to expand the way new empires do, and they don't shrink, either - they collapse. Prof. Johnson listed a number of ways that empires fail, which are:

it takes constant warfare to maintain them;
they exhaust themselves by attempting to regulate too much;
they lose credibility because of an excess of lies and secrecy; and
they run out of money.

The fact that Reagan got up in front of the Berlin Wall and challenged Gorbachev to tear it down suggests that Reagan was simply an opportunist. The Soviet Union was no longer viable by the time Reagan took office, and it's likely that all his Soviet experts predicted its collapse.

Incidentally, Prof. Johnson's book is less of a history book than a prediction of America's future as the American empire wanes for the above-mentioned reasons. We are in decline, and the whole world knows it, especially our enemies.

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hancock | Feb 09, 2011, 11:41 AM EST

Why don't you ask Lech Walessa and Gorbachev if Reagan had something to do with it.

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Monsoonman | Feb 09, 2011, 11:36 AM EST

All of the proxy wars around the world at the time were safety valves in order to avoid greater conflicts with nuclear weapons. The world was never faced with the prospect of global obliteration before, so it was either local limited wars, or cold wars, or go all out with Mutally Assured Destruction(MAD). MAD works when you have sane countries who don't want to be wiped off the earth. MAD doesn't mean anything to nuclear armed religious extremists looking forward to their 72 virgins, after they die in their quest to kill infidels.

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CitizenWhy | Feb 09, 2011, 09:14 AM EST

mmccreedy makes a valid point on Vietnam. The US was so successful in breaking the Tet offensive that North Vietnam sued for Peace. Then Walter Cronkite announced that the US had lost the Tet offensive and the North Vietnamese withdraw their suit for peace. They figured the military would lose the support of the Congress. ... But the real question is, should the US, under Johnson, have taken over the Vietnam fight from the South Vietnam government by sending in massive amounts of troops? Is it wise for the US to make local governments entirely dependent on the US military?

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CitizenWhy | Feb 09, 2011, 09:08 AM EST

Reagan was not a conservative by today's extremist standards. He raised federal taxes 11 times. When governor of California he raised $1 billion in new taxes on a state budget of $6 billion. He supported gun control legislation. .. As for the collapse of the Soviet Union, Reagan heard from two micro-economists that the Soviet economy was due to collapse on its own economically and politically sometime in the 1990s. Reagan decided to speed up the process by tricking the Soviet Union to overspend on its military. Overspending on military is now what the US does. ... The Pope resisted aligning with the US and Reagan because of the church's distrust of the US brand of capitalism and consumerism.

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mmccreedy | Feb 09, 2011, 06:32 AM EST

Reagan, Thatcher, & Pope John Paul II helped to bring down the evil Soviet Empire. However, Reagan did more on the military/diplomatic front to help bring this about. Liberals always deny Reagan's role, because they were actively working against him (remember Reagan's support for the Contra's in Nicaragua?). I remember when Reagan gave the Congress a balanced budget, yet the DEMOCRAT controlled Congress refused to consider it. As for Vietnam, Whore Chi Minh was glad to come to the peace table after Nixon took the war to the enemy and ignored the left-wing nut jobs in Congress. He mined Hai-Phong harbor, and rolled out Operation Rolling Thunder. By the way, the Vietnamese NEVER defeated the Americans in any major military action during Vietnam. Ever. The anti-war loons like to credit the media, Jane Fonda (traitor), and other leftists for ending the war, but it was 535 idiots in Washington D.C. who thought they were Commander-In-Chief of the military that ended America's participation in the war.

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DennisQ | Feb 09, 2011, 02:32 AM EST

Don't be so quick to credit Ronald Reagan for the collapse of the Soviet empire. Empires have limited life spans and tend to collapse of their own dead weight, as Prof. Chalmers Johnson points out in his 2004 book, "The Sorrows of Empire." Johnson notes these aspects of all empires as their decline accelerates:

Endless wars destroy the fabric of society.
Imperial overstretch, as the government regulate anything and everything...
A rise in official deceit so that nobody trusts the government anymore
Bankruptcy. Central government simply runs out of money.

Johnson compares the collapse of the Soviet empire with the collapse of the British empire, the Byzantine empire before that; and the Roman empire before that. He states that we are experiencing the collapse of the American empire for the same reasons that all empires collapse.

Reagan did no more bring down the Soviet empire than Ho Chi Minh defeated the Americans in Viet Nam. Both Reagan and Ho Chi Minh were running the show when the other side simply upped and collapsed. The Vietnam war was unsustainable; and the Soviet empire was unsustainable as well. We are now seeing Obama take the blame for losing the Middle East, but it won't be because of any policy decisions Obama made or will make before his term expires. It's that our policies are uunsustainable and will cause our efforts to collapse next week or next year, but certainly within the next decade. Hey, why not blame Obama? People are blaming Brian Cowen for the collapse of the Irish economy, based as it was on volatile assets.

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mmccreedy | Feb 08, 2011, 10:04 PM EST

The top five Presidents (my opinion) are as follows: 1. George Washington 2. Thomas Jefferson 3. Andrew Jackson 4. Ronaldus Maximus (Ronald Reagan) 5. John Adams Of course, Richard Nixon was a great President, but he created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and only got caught at what Presidents from FDR onward had done. So, that does not rank him in the top five.On the plus side, Nixon scared the North Vietnamese enough to bring them to the peace table (thanks to Nixon I volunteered to join the Navy instead of having to sign up for the draft). By the way, HAPPY 100th Gipper!!!!!

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peterson | Feb 08, 2011, 08:56 PM EST

We need more leaders like Ronald Reagan !!

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hancock | Feb 08, 2011, 07:24 PM EST

How about driving the USSR out of business?

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Monsoonman | Feb 08, 2011, 06:13 PM EST

"Pick out a great event at random and tie it to whomever happened to occupy the White House at the time it happened." When Monica Lewinskys blue dress got stained?

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