In Navajo land “snake slayers” are popular. They are essentially pistols around .410 to .45 inch bore loaded with shrapnel; not man-killers but have the best chance of hitting slithering rattlesnakes.
To each their own. I am certain we would have had the increase in national debt anyway; the correlation (in relation to GDP) with the Reagan years is poor indeed. The Reagan tax cut was in 1981, and nothing special happened to the debt/GDP ratio in the following years. The end of WW2 saw the ratio exceed 100% (1945) and it stayed above 50% until 1963. The ratio didn’t exceed 50% until his two terms were over; the rate currently is 122%. Are we to blame the president who left office 35 years ago for that?
I was recently married and struggling under “stagflation” in the early 1980s; I was very pleased indeed with the changes in the economy for the next decade. Carter was a good guy but not a very good president.
On international relations he was one of the best in modern history. The “Reagan doctrine” was exactly what we needed to control international hijackings and murders (like that of Leon Klinghoffer) by terrorists. He was consistent in it, too; 1988’s “Operation Praying Mantis” resulted in the sinking of half Iran’s Navy in a single day as retaliation for Iran’s unprovoked attack on the USS Samuel B. Roberts. The US Navy says “Operation Praying Mantis was the largest of five major U.S. Navy surface actions since World War II. It was the first, and so far only, time the U.S. Navy has exchanged surface-to-surface missile fire with an enemy, and it resulted in the largest warship sunk by the U.S. Navy since WWII. In the one-day operation, the U.S. Navy destroyed two Iranian surveillance platforms, sank two of their ships, and severely damaged another.”
The brief flurry of activity effectively cooled Iran’s ambitions for years. What president since then has been as effective?
I think there are significant numbers of people who are repelled by both extremes; we don’t like to be characterized as puppets for either party. My political opponents are not so much those who have the “other” perspective as those who have nothing more than manipulated emotions. Our own emotions are part of the legitimate process.
Often enough both at the same time: divide into scapegoats and oppressors (though they never think of themselves that way.) We will not likely forget 1930s Germany for that reason.
When democratic nations have as extremely toxic battles for votes as we saw this year in America, cohesion is simply not going to happen. Both candidates were politically weak, with nothing to make them better candidates than thousands of others in this nation of a third of a billion people. IMHO, we have had only two great presidents in my lifetime: Kennedy and Reagan. Even they were human, with feet of clay. Now we have a president-elect with a heart of clay and a head of… well, clay. The devil of it is that he is not as stupid as his speeches suggest, but he can’t get past the politics. Not a strong mind.
I don’t know how you feel about it, but I am ambivalent. I have dreams, but I also feel the yearly drag on my aging body. I suspect it will mean a bit of a crisis when I resolve the dreams. C’est la vie!
Similar to birdshot, but is often a homebrew of all sorts of small shrapnel.