Reply #59: There is the little question about why the hostages were held... [View All]

[teamster633]

...as long as they were. And the troubling coincidence of them being released just as that B movie actor took on his 'greatest' role. Watergate wasn't the distant memory then, that it is today. The Republicans were still carrying a lot of baggage in 1980. If the hostages had come home before Election Day, Carter would have won. If that dim-witted hack(Raygun), or anyone in his administration(read GHWB), had anything to do with extending the hostages' confinement, that election was stolen as surely as shrub stole the election of 2000. And I'm speaking as someone who was snookered into voting against his best interests. It was the one time in my life that I ever voted for a Republican. The never-ending hostage crisis just wore me down. I cried uncle and voted for the clown. It seemed as though the office of the POTUS was just for show. Who better to fill it than an actor?

1984 is harder to explain. I certainly had learned my lesson long before then and would never have considered voting for that embarrassing old man again. Some point to his 'heroic' recovery from the assassination attempt. Others may have been seduced by all his happy 'morning in America' talk. Some took comfort in the thought that maybe things were just as black and white as the Gipper claimed they were: that we were righteous and that the Commies were evil. Shades of gray are much more difficult to deal with. In any event, Reagan somehow did win over the American public between 1980 and 1984. The relevant question is, however, whether he could have done it without the 'October Surprise' of 1980 allowing him to ascend to power. What is for certain, is that the world would be a different, better place, if Ronald Reagan had stayed in California, having only betrayed his fellow actors in the Fifties, rather than betraying the entire country in the Eighties.