[The Colonel John R Stingo award goes to all those journalists who have been crediting Ronald Reagan with the end of the Cold War - given in memory the late New York columnist who, as AJ Liebling put it, never permitted "facts to interfere with the exercise of his imagination."
http://prorev.com/2007/06/real-ronald-reagan.htm
The claim that Reagan won the Cold War is pure rightwing propaganda. The Soviet Union had long been far weaker than many American leaders knew, or wished to acknowledge, thanks to CIA gross overestimates of its economy. The Soviet Union was brought down by a number of factors including the inherent weaknesses of dictatorship and ethnic divides that eventually forced its breakup.
William Blum: "[George Kennan], the former US ambassador to the Soviet Union, and father of the theory of 'containment' of the same country, asserts that 'the suggestion that any United States administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic political upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is simply childish.' He contends that the extreme militarization of American policy strengthened hard-liners in the Soviet Union. 'Thus the general effect of Cold War extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union.'"
For a change of pace here are some real quotes by and about Reagan]
"A tree's a tree. How many more do you need to look at?" Ronald Reagan (Governor of California), quoted in the Sacramento Bee, opposing expansion of Redwood National Park, March 3, 1966
"All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk." Ronald Reagan (Republican candidate for president), quoted in the Burlington (Vermont) Free Press, February 15, 1980
"It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas." Ronald Reagan (candidate for Governor of California), interviewed in the Fresno Bee, October 10, 1965
"...the moral equal of our Founding Fathers." President Reagan, describing the Nicaraguan contras, March 1, 1985
"Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal." Ronald Reagan, quoted in Time, May 17, 1976
"...a faceless mass, waiting for handouts." Ronald Reagan, 1965. (Description of Medicaid recipients.)
"Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders." California Governor Ronald Reagan, in the Sacramento Bee, April 28, 1966
"We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet." Ronald Reagan, TV speech, October 27, 1964
"Reagan's only contribution [to the subject of the MX missile] throughout the entire hour and a half was to interrupt somewhere at midpoint to tell us he'd watched a movie the night before, and he gave us the plot from War Games, the movie. That was his only contribution." - Lee Hamilton (Representative from Indiana) interviewed by Haynes Johnson, Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years
"An amiable dunce" - Clark Clifford (former Defense Secretary)
"Poor dear, there's nothing between his ears." - British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
"...like reinventing the wheel." - Larry Speakes (Reagan's former press secretary) describing what it was like preparing the President for a press conference, Speaking Out: The Reagan Presidency from Inside the White House
"He has the ability to make statements that are so far outside the parameters of logic that they leave you speechless" - Patti Davis (formerly Patricia Ann Reagan) talking about her father, The Way I See It
"I have flown twice over Mount St. Helens. I'm not a scientist and I don't know the figures, but I have a suspicion that one little mountain out there, in these last several months, has probably released more sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere than has been released in the last ten years of automobile driving or things of that kind." --Ronald Reagan, quoted in Time magazine, October 20, 1980. (According to scientists, Mount St. Helens emitted about 2,000 tons of sulfur dioxide per day at its peak activity, compared with 81,000 tons per day produced by cars.)
"Approximately 80 percent of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation. So let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards for man-made sources." --Ronald Reagan, quoted in Sierra, September 10, 1980
"I've said it before and I'll say it again. The U.S. Geological Survey has told me that the proven potential for oil in Alaska alone is greater than the proven reserves in Saudi Arabia." --Ronald Reagan, quoted in the Detroit Free Press, March 23, 1980. (According to the USGS, the Saudi reserves of 165.5 billion barrels are 17 times the proven reserves--9.2 billion barrels--in Alaska.)
"Trains are not any more energy efficient than the average automobile, with both getting about 48 passenger miles to the gallon." --Ronald Reagan, quoted in the Chicago Tribune, May 10, 1980. (The U.S. Department of Transportation calculates that a 14-car train traveling at 80 miles per hour gets 400 passenger miles to the gallon. A 1980 auto carrying an average of 2.2 people gets 42.6 passenger miles to the gallon.)
"I know all the bad things that happened in that war. I was in uniform four years myself." --President Reagan, in an interview with foreign journalists, April 19, 1985. ("In costume" is more like it. Reagan spent World War II making Army training films at Hal Roach Studios in Hollywood.)
"We think there is a parallel between federal involvement in education and the decline in profit over recent years." --President Reagan, quoted in USA Today, April 26, 1983
"What we have found in this country, and maybe we're more aware of it now, is one problem that we've had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice." --President Reagan, defending himself against charges of callousness on Good Morning America, January 31, 1984
MORE ON THE REAL RONALD REAGAN
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