A tribute to President Reagan

Bob at Wattersblogged gave this beautiful tribute

One of history’s truly great men died today.

Truman and Ike and LBJ were clearly near-greats, and George W. Bush may well, in a second term, achieve the next level beyond them. But Ronald Wilson Reagan will go down in history as the one truly great president of my lifetime. It isn’t simply that, like President Bush, he brought us out of a cyclical recession. It was his determination that brought down not only the Iron Curtain, but the Soviet Union itself. There are millions of people who tonight will mourn their liberator, and who can have a better epitaph than that?

I didn’t always agree with President Reagan. In fact, I voted against him twice. More than that, I opposed Mr. Reagan throughout his eight years as strongly as I would oppose Bill Clinton four years afterward. In retrospect, I was wrong. I didn’t appreciate Mr. Reagan at the time. Those of you who did were wiser than I. Not until the buildup to the current war did I realize just how much greater a leader Mr. Reagan was than the man whose defeat at his hands I so resented in 1980.

We miss you already, Mr. President. You made a difference as few presidents do. You brought us out of that “malaise” with your Churchillian vision and single-mindedness, coupled with a sense of humor which disarmed even your opponents.

When President Lincoln died, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton went to great lengths to ensure that history remembered him (whether or not it was true) as sitting by Lincoln’s deathbed, uttering at the final moment the words which appear above Lincoln’s last resting place in the tomb in Springfield: “Now he belongs to the ages.”

They mocked Mr. Reagan, as they mock our current leader. They questioned his intelligence. If they didn’t compare him to a chimpanzee, they remembered his association with one in a role he played as an actor. But he had the last laugh, not so much over his enemies- I don’t think he was the type to have enjoyed the discomfiture of those who disagreed with him- as over one of the most evil systems in human history. And now, he belongs to the ages.

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