THE REAGAN YEARS VS THE OBAMA YEARS

 THEN

NOW

We recently compared Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama on a personal basis using each man’s own thoughts, words and ideas, or lack thereof. Unless under the influence of powerful narcotics or blind and gullible enough to believe the MSM, that round obviously went to Ron. This time we’ll take a broader look at the country as a whole under the two administrations, and see which eight year span comes out on top. 

When Ronald Reagan was in the Whitehouse, Clint Eastwood had his own police force as Mayor of Carmel and Chuck Norris was allowed to have Muslim Arabic terrorists as bad guys in his movies…and kill them. Our staunchest international ally was Maggie Thatcher, who had more balls than David Cameron and Barack Obama combined. The Soviet Union was the Evil Empire, and the Communists and Socialists trying to destroy our nation were still mostly an external threat. But Reagan had a clear and articulate plan for the Cold War: “They lose, we win.” While sneered at by the press, Reaganomics and “Trickle Down Economics” actually worked a lot better than our current policy of forced wealth redistribution and “Trickle Up Poverty”. In fact, when the Soviet Union continued to pursue many of the same policies followed by our current Presidential administration it went completely bankrupt, Communism collapsed and the bloody Iron Curtain that had fallen across Eastern Europe in 1945 finally crumbled to the ground.

Today, many people around the world are referring to the U.S. as the Evil Empire. Major American cities (which have been ruled unchallenged and mismanaged by the Left for decades) are going completely bankrupt and Communism has made a helluva comeback in Red China, funded in large part by American consumer and taxpayer dollars. As horrible as we knew it to be at the time, the national debt when Reagan left office was $2,684,392,000,000. Under Obongo’s inspired leadership, he’s single-handedly racked up more debt than the first 41 presidents combined, up over 84% from 1988, and as of this moment the US National Debt is $16,787,451,118,147.57, (it will be well over that before I can hit “Post”...HERE’S the running tally.) Lucky for us that those good Maoist Chinese Communist hate capitalism. If the Chi-Coms and others holding our national debt decided they wanted to cash in their chips, every man, woman and child in the United States would each have to personally cough up $55,092 a pop to cover the debt accrued by the dishonest, irresponsible and unaccountable “public servants” on Capital Hill. Just for the general state of things, the decade of the 80’s wins.

The decade of the 80’s also saw some particularly fierce hurricanes hit the Gulf Coast, but not even the Democrats and the media thought they could get away with trying to blame Reagan for them personally. Ditto Mount St. Helens. Today, natural disasters are still being routinely blamed on Bush Jr. and all current governmental mismanagement fiascos involving disaster relief since 2008 have been immediately and permanently swept under the rug by the media. The very same and much worse unemployment rates, economic stagnation, debt, lies and scandals which the MSM would have been viewed as evil incarnate and the end of the world under Reagan are now portrayed as successful and optimistic under Obama. For instance, unemployment rising over 10% under Reagan in his first term was reported as TEOTWAWKI and he was not allowed to blame anything on the previous president, while a successful non-government stimulus program which actually grew real private-sector jobs and dropped the unemployment figure back down to 5.4% was not deemed newsworthy.

Conversely, Obama is still allowed and encouraged to blame the previous administration for anything that even might conceivably go wrong through 2025, that disastrous $787 billion “stimulus” plan which “will keep unemployment from ever rising over 8%” has been conveniently purged from the archives and news in true Orwellian/Stalinist style, while 44 months of the worst unemployment since the Great Depression has been constantly and gleefully reported as “Green Shoots!”, “Recovery!”, “Economic Rebound!” and “Happy-Happy Joy-Joy!” Democrats and the MSM called Ronald Reagan the Teflon President because no matter how much shit they threw at him, none of it stuck. Seeking something…anything…to discredit Ronnie they went apeshit over Iran-Contra because the “seriousness of the charges” was more important than mere “lack of evidence.” Since 2008, however, any and every scandal Obama has been involved in…Socialist Party Membership, School Records, Bill Ayers, ACORN, Fast & Furious, Benghazi, IRS abuses, spying on the press, Holder, Sebelius, New Black Panthers, Solyndra and a host of others…has been either deliberately ignored or vigorously suppressed by the Propaganda Ministry because “evidence means nothing” if the “seriousness of the charges” might somehow make their work-of-fiction President look bad. For abject media bias, obfuscation and lies, 2008+ wins hands down.

In 1983, McDonalds proved you don’t actually need any actual poultry to serve chicken when it comes in the form of McNuggets, and we Americans happily scarfed them down by the bucketful, with Sweet ‘N Sour sauce and Honey Mustard dip. After all, they’re USDA inspected. Thirty years later, the First Lady and the Mayor of NYC led heavily armed SWAT teams into McDonalds restaurants around the country to machinegun soft drinks considered too large to be healthful and to ensure that the food served there is halal for Muslims. I’ll take deep-fat-fried meat-like substances over Health Nazis and Islam any day; the Reagan years win.

In 1986 the space shuttle Columbia crashed and burned but at least we still had a space program back then and NASA’s stated taxpayer-funded mission was not, “To make Muslims feel warm and fuzzy about themselves and their culture for having invented some mathematic formulae centuries ago, even if they haven’t managed to master even the rudiments of a garbage collection system since.” In space, the winning decade goes to the 80’s.

In the late 1980’s, the Personal Computer first crept into American homes where we stared at flickering green letters on a fuzzy screen that only told us “Syntax Error” no matter what buttons we pushed. Today, we have the Worldwide Web in every home and all the buttons on the keyboard work but most Americans are too lazy and apathetic to dig for any real news beyond the carefully orchestrated tripe spoon-fed them by the Obama Propaganda Ministry. The triumph of ignorance and gullibility goes to the Obama Era.

In 1989, although Reagan’s second term was over, we and the rest of the Free World still strongly condemned the Red Chinese when they rolled out the tanks to crush political dissent in Tiananmen Square. In 2012, the United States Department of Homeland Security purchased 2,700 armored vehicles of its own, the better to “protect” us with, and we already saw a few of them roll down the streets of Boston. Even at this very moment Illinois Democrats are calling for the National Guard to roll tanks through the streets of Chicago; “for the children”, of course. I guess I always held onto the apparently out-dated notion that rolling tanks in the streets of your own country and using them against your own citizens, whether it was in Poland, Hungary, Beijing or Chicago, was always a bad and repressive thing. Nowadays the MSM tells me that tanks in the streets can be either good or bad, depending on whether or not the person who sends them has a (D) behind his or her name. This tells me we should expect more of it in the future. For creeping Orwellian Police State growth while the Media Watch Dogs nap, Obama wins.

Not all was sweetness and light in the 1980’s, however. On television, one of the most popular shows was The Dukes of Hazard, featuring the kind of cartoonish characters, meaningless dialog and unbelievable premises we wouldn’t see again until MSM press coverage of Obama Campaign ’08. The last episode of M*A*S*H aired in 1983, but by then it needed to go as Alan Alda had turned it into a kind of Olive Drab Oprah Winfrey Show. It was the era of prime-time soap operas, too, but I personally never gave a shit who shot J.R., or why. But the 80’s were to eventually redeem themselves with the appearance of other shows like Magnum P.I., Cheers, The Simpsons, Married With Children and the little appreciated comedy masterpiece Sledgehammer. But, as opposed to today, there was no such thing as Reality TV in the 1980’s, which sadly makes that decade the winner almost by default.

Musically, the 80’s was A Tale of Two Cities; it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Cassettes made my vinyl and 8-tracts obsolete until they too were turned into dinosaurs by the CD, at which point I gave up on a music collection as too costly. On our Sony Walkmans and boom boxes we had to put up with two Jacksons (Michael and Janet), Madonna dressed like a bag-lady prostitute while singing about her virginity, the artist formerly known as Prince was still known as Prince, and to this day it brings me to tears to even contemplate that Culture Club and Boy George actually existed. Rap and Hip Hop became huge in the 80’s, and Ice-T sang about shooting cops instead of playing one on TV. The country music world is still scratching its head over the whole k.d. lang thing, whose very existence was just a media creation, much like a certain president I could mention. Perhaps most chilling of all was the popularity of the WTF “music” put out by the likes of the New Kids on the Block, Milli Vanilli, the Pet Shop Boys, A-ha, Debbie Gibson and Tiffany. I don’t want to depress Jim, so I won’t mention Men at Work.

On the other hand, we still had Tom Petty, Billys Joel and Idol, Joan Jett, John Cougar, Blondie, Bob Seger, Pat Benatar, and Tina Turner and her legs. The 80’s Hair Bands looked ridiculous even then, but they did give us some great rock ballads: Wanted Dead or Alive, Livin’ on a Prayer, Sweet Child o’ Mine, Paradise City, Every Rose has its Thorn. My wife still listens to these and I…and I’m not sure if this is good or bad…still know all the lyrics by heart when they come on. Others in that last category that are still stuck in my head: Jesse’s Girl, Jack and Diane, You May be Right, I love Rock ‘n’ Roll, Dancing With Myself, Old Time Rock and Roll.  I was Country when Country wasn’t cool, and the 80’s were pretty good to country music, too. Reba, Garth, Clint and Lori all got their starts then and we had the Oaks, Alabama and the Statlers, Eddie Rabbit and Juice Newton, and of course Dolly. Waylon and Willie and Merle were going strong. Clint Eastwood listened to country music, had an ape and sang duets about drinking beer with Merle Haggard and Ray Charles. Hank Jr. was my favorite in them days, with songs like A Country Boy Can Survive, whose lyrics include what I believe is Ben’s all-time favorite musical line, “I’d love to spit some Beechnut in that dude’s eyes, And shoot him with my ol’ Forty-five…”

Today, I can’t name a single band in the top 40, so they must not be very good. Rihanna is now apparently a singer, not a Fleetwood Mac song. Someone named Robin Thicke is at the top of the charts…wasn’t he the guy who hosted some stupid video bloopers show? I don’t have any idea what the real songs are that Weird Al Yankovich is spoofing these days. Most damning of all has been turning popular music into nothing more than an agitprop branch of the MSM, with campaign commercials such as Yes We Can and Forward masquerading as songs. Musicians no longer rail against established authority and The Man. Instead, they have forgotten all about their whole “separation of church and state” fiction in order to make videos worshipping, praising and vowing subservience to the false messiah they helped create. The Man must now be blindly believed, obeyed and served…or else. So, as lame as music was throughout much of the 80’s, that decade still wins simply because it was still music rather than simple agitprop.

The 1980’s didn’t give us anything very cool automotive-wise, either. There were no hulking road dinosaurs like the ’57 Chevy nor were there any snarling muscle cars ala the 60’s and 70’s; instead, we got the K-Car, the Maxima and the mini-van. Oh sure, the DeLorean looked cool, but it turned out to be a real dog mechanically and performance-wise; only six production models were sold, and those were used primarily for time travel. But, in spite of the best efforts of the unions, at least there still were functioning automobile plants…and steel foundries…and shipwrights…and aircraft manufacturers…on American soil in the 80’s. Perhaps just as important, engine performance was still measured in horsepower rather than voltage, although it was a low point indeed in automotive history when they put a 90-hp 4-cylinder motor in the ’82 Firebird. Today, we as tax-payers are forced to subsidize defunct car companies which are nothing more than government fronts in order to manufacture eco-friendly cars that no one actually wants to buy and to pay the wages of union employees who dutifully and blindly vote Democrat. So, once more, score to the Reagan years.

The 1980’s were a great decade for movies. Harrison Ford was Indiana Jones, period. Ahnold was The Terminator (“I’ll be back.”), Bruce Willis was John McClain (Yippee Ki-Yeah, Motherf*****!), Mel Gibson was either Mad Max or Martin Riggs (although all I can remember is Danny Glover’s “I’m getting’ too old for this shit.”), Stallone was Rambo (“Grunting Noises.”), Clint Eastwood was still Dirty Harry (“Make my day.”), Paul Hogan was Crocodile Dundee and even Eddie Murphy was a kick-ass action hero in the 80’s in 48 Hours and as a Beverly Hills Cop. On the other hand, Roger Moore in lieu of Sean Connery as James Bond just plain sucked. Bill Murray and Chevy Chase were still funny, Belushi and Ackroyd were the Blues Brothers, and John Candy was still with us. The Empire Struck Back, we went Back to the Future, met ET, took a day off with Ferris Bueller, flew with Top Gun, spent the Weekend at Bernie’s, fought Aliens and were able to laugh at Sean Penn smokin’ weed at Ridgemont High because he hadn’t yet gotten the false impression that he should be taken seriously or that his asinine personal opinions were of national importance. Burt Reynolds kept driving fast cars, we knew Charlie Sheen had a brother, Kevin Costner still couldn’t act but made darn good movies, and teen-agers were encouraged to arm themselves and kill Commies in Red Dawn. (BTW, whatever happened to Lea Thompson and Jennifer Grey?) As if all that 80’s stuff wasn’t cool enough, Jamie Lee Curtis, Brooke Shields, Demi Moore and Darryl Hannah appeared naked and Kathleen Turner was still smokin’ hot.

Since 2008, finding a movie worth watching has been an ordeal. CGI has become a substitute for plot, characters and dialogue combined all in one fell swoop, anything with Alec Baldwin in it is guaranteed to suck, and having to rely entirely upon video games and comic books (sorry Sheldon, I meant Graphic Novels) for new movie ideas rather shows a dearth of imagination. There’s a small bright spot occasionally; I kind of like Robert Downey Jr. and Daniel Craig, we have our good old 80’s stars back in the Expendables and RED, and I will grant you that Zombieland was indeed a cinematic masterpiece. But really, when it comes right down to it Hollywierd is so hard up for ideas they’re basically just re-making every successful movie of the 1980’s, and starting on other decades as well. For Christ’s sake, just look at the recent and upcoming list…Total Recall, Judge Dredd, Mad Max, Conan the Barbarian, Highlander, Dirty Dancing, Footloose, Point Break, War Games, Deathwish, Commando. Re-doing True Grit was downright blasphemous, especially since that baby-faced Liberal pussy Matt Damon had never even seen the John Wayne original. Commie. Hollywood is doing this because (a) they haven’t had an original idea in decades, (b) a perverse Leftist form of reverse McCarthyism has permeated the entire American movie industry so that nothing critical of Liberalism may be produced and (c) they have a whole new generation of kids who’ve never seen the original movies and won’t know how bad these remakes really suck. If all your “new” ideas are 80’s-remakes, then the 80’s win again.

There you have it, folks. Scientific proof we were better off under Reagan than Obama.