"... while African-American voters backed Reagan by more than a two-to-one margin."

Oops! I think you meant FDR. From Rasmussen: "White voters are closely divided, with FDR the winner by three, but the Democrat is the favorite of African-American voters by more than two-to-one. "

This is like asking the American people: who do you prefer - Matt Damon or Mickey Mouse?

Republicans are rather desperate to keep the Reagan reputation untarnished by Bush, but the reality is Reagan is both Bush's hero and role model. Bush has achieve the Reagan Republican dream, a nightmare for all the rest of us.

Only in Amerika could 40% of the population relate to a B-movie actor who played second sapien to a simian named Bonzo....

Oops! I think you meant FDR.

Oops, indeed. Thanks for catching this; it's fixed.

This may not be as bad as it seems, because the state of historical knowledge in the U.S. population is dismal. Many people probably do not know much about FDR and what the New Deal did. Still, FDR wins over the more recent president who is touted by all Republicans. Mistakenly to be sure, but his name is in people's awareness.

Isn't this just a popularity poll, rather than a poll over who was most influential. I mean their are real Reagan fans and FDR fans, as you said add in JFK or Washington, Jefferson or Lincoln and the results would be different. That being said, if the poll is asking influential then it probably would be close. Influential and good are not the same thing. Dick Cheney and Karl Rove have been highly influential on how politics works and changing the executive branch. Influential but still bad.

If only Ronald Reagan had never been born.

huffingtonpost.com has some photos up of dead Palestinians and wounded children. Obama's spokesman says Obama supports Israel's attack on this civilian population. I can hardly wait to see what Mr. Benen has to say about this.

Reagan never put hundreds of thousands of American citizens in detention camps.

"Reagan never put hundreds of thousands of American citizens in detention camps." What do you think the War On Drugs was? Not even close, especially if you count in the job and general discrimination against an entire culture.

As Dayland says, influential is not the same as successful, or even good. Reagan scores somewhere in Harding territory.

Matt Damon vs. Mickey Mouse now (the original Mickey, of course), that's a close one.

Obama is working out at a Marine facility (remind you of anyone) while Israel bombs a civilian population. Mr Benen is ignoring the situation. Check out Glen Greenwald at Salon for some great analysis.

Who gives a fuck about Reagan?

Geeez -

You can set up your own blog. For free!

We'll all read it.

I promise.

.

Reagan was a horrific president. He supported terrorism in Central America leading to a huge death toll. There was also the involvement of the US in East Timor not to mention the Iran Contra debacle.

Reagan was strongly anti-union leading to the decline of wages and benefits for the middle class.

Reagan's slashing of the marginal tax rates lead to the collapse of manufacturing in the US and the concomitant growth of our trade deficit.

Reagan (with Greenspan's help) doubled the payroll taxes without effectively isolating this money to protect social security.

As noted above, the so called war on drugs has led to the incarceration and demonization of millions of US citizens in their own country and served as a conduit to funnel federal dollars to friends of the administration and has seriously eroded our civil rights.

That's just off the top of my head. Reagan was a true enemy of the American people.

Obama is working out at a Marine facility (remind you of anyone) while Israel bombs a civilian population.

It may have escaped your notice, but Obama is not (yet) President of the United States

"32 felonies, not including 30 who resigned in disgrace or fired following charges of legal or ethical misconduct"

You are forgetting that Republicans don't count crimes by Republicans as crimes (see Valerie Plame, etc.), so I'm not sure this would matter to the poll.

Other than that, I'm betting that 50% of those polled don't know enough about FDR to make an intelligent comment about his presidency vs. Reagan.

Reagan's standing is the triumph of pure propaganda.
Orwell would be very pleased.

Think of it as an IQ test

32 felonies, not including 30 who resigned in disgrace or fired following charges of legal or ethical misconduct

I believe in Republican parlance that is referred to as "32 badges of honor."

We don't need no stinkin' badges!

Americans always have soft spot for the underdog.

spork-incident

If I title the blog Praise Obama and never criticize I have no doubt that you will all read it.
Meanwhile, Palestinian civilians are being killed like fish in a barrel with arms supplied by us and Obama isn't saying shit. the motherfucker isn't even in office yet and he's falling into line right behind the Bushies.

The most interesting part of the poll was that people old enough to remember either one, preferred FDR. The only age group that preferred Reagan was 10-29 yr olds when he left office. The older ones in this group were obviously on crack.

32 felonies

Does this include people like Ollie North, whose conviction was overthrown because his congresional testimony was used despite immunity, or Cap Weinberger, who was pardoned?

Eisenhower pushed forward the Interstate Highway System, admittedly not without its problems. In terms of influencing American society I think it ranks up there with the intercontinental railroad and the internet. His administration also started NASA, which along with scientific achievements, has been enormously influential in the development of American technology. Though he opposed it, he upheld the Supreme Court's ruling on equal access to education and sent federal troops to ensure a peaceful integration of Little Rock High. (Imagine, subscribing to the notion of separate branches of government and the rule of law.) He also squashed the 1956 Middle East War and the grab of the Suez Canal.

Will Reagan's accomplishments seem nearly as significant after 50 years?

A man dressed up in a Santa suit killed at least 9 other people in Los Angeles this week. We rightly see him as a criminal and murderer. The Gaza inhabitants have been firing rockets at Israel for weeks, the Israelis even sent an envoy to Egypt to ask that it stop, and yet it did not stop. Somehow the trolls on this thread manage to find the damage to Gaza inhabitants, yet fail to even notice the threat to Israelis. Apparently it is OK to some on the left (I'm guessing here, but with some reason) that Jews die but that nothing be done to protect them. Of course we can expect (and have already seen) complaints that the Israeli response is "unbalanced." Apparently the Israelis are supposed to match Hamas weapons rocket for rocket, and casualties person for person. How about Hamas ceasing to attack Israel for a while? Meanwhile, the pundits use that barf-provoking phrase "cycle of violence" to imply that both sides are equally culpable.

Reagan was the winner of the Cold War. Too too funny.

know what I love about Geez? He/she so eloquently points out that even the wingnuts consider Obama the real leader of the country, not the lame duck bush. They can't seem to wait for January 20th either!

Bob G: How many Israelis died in those rocket attacks? Don't know do you? The answer: zero.

200 dead civilians vs. zero. Yes, those of us who are not racists in regard to Arab lives do regard that as unbalanced.

JohnN, perhaps the Palestinians should show the same care and concern for their own civilian population that the Israeli authorities show for theirs?
Meanwhile, back on topic: Reagan is the best the conservatives can offer. Gives you pause, doesn't it?

Reagan rescued the Republican psyche from the Ghost of Richard Nixon, so of course Republicans revere him.

His policies were absolutely atrocious, but his speaking skills (from a script, but still ... ) were tremendous, so when the ReThugs starting canonizing him and calling him The Great Communicator, the sheeple bought it whole.

History will not be good to RWR.

Eisenhower pushed forward ... - stonevendor

I was thinking the same thing. If you had told someone in 1960 that Ike would go down in history as one of the greats, there would have been little complaint. If you had said in 1988 that Reagan would, people would have asked why. But by today's standards, Eisenhower would be a moderate to liberal Dem.

Danp,

With respect to age groups, this is what's stated in the report:

In terms of a voter’s age, Reagan is the clear favorite of those ages 30 to 49, while those younger and older strongly support Roosevelt.

Micheline - agreed. But in 1988 they would have been 10-29, right?

Danp,

Agree.

I find it interesting and heartening that 18-29 years old believe that Roosevelt was the best president of the 20th century. That signifies a shift in thinking in the new generation.

Um, yeah. Let's talk basic methodology for a second. How likely is it that a significant portion of the people surveyed were alive during FDR's presidency? The article gives us this:

In terms of a voter’s age, Reagan is the clear favorite of those ages 30 to 49, while those younger and older strongly support Roosevelt.

Older, A LOT older, almost twice as old as 49 years old, makes sense. Younger than 30 makes no sense. Unless you assume respondents are voting against Reagan and you would have gotten the same results if the choices were Reagan and Julius Ceasar.

Christ, do people actually get paid to pull this sort of stuff together? Maybe the economy isn't as bad as I thought.

Consider the following.

In 1948 a large segment of the Palestinian population was forced to relocate out of so-called Jewish areas.

Native towns that had been overtaken by urban development were demolished and their occupants relocated to other areas well beyond city limits.

An area totaling about 14% of the land was set aside for 'Palestinian Homelands', the remainder, including the areas rich in natural resources and the cities, were reserved for the Israelis.

Within the confines of the designated homelands the native residents had some rights and freedoms, but outside it Palestinians were to be treated as aliens.

Movement of Palestinians to and between other parts of the country was strictly regulated, the location of residence or employment (if permitted to work) was restricted, and they were not allowed to vote or own land.

Despite public demonstrations, UN resolutions, and opposition from international religious societies, the seperation was applied with increased rigor.

Pretty fair description of Israel?

Nope. This is describing South Africa under Apartheid.

Just substitute 'Black' for Palestinian and 'White' for Jewish.

---- adapted from 'Apartheid' www.soweto.co.za

propaganda notwithstanding, he was not responsible for winning the Cold War

No. But even if we were to grant that talking point, the irony is he wasn't really gunning for the Soviet Union - he was gunning for the New Deal. The USSR wasn't supposed to go bankrupt - we were. Reagan screwed up. I mean, c'mon, they had to bring in George W. Bush to finish the job!

Another example of the 'conservatives' spinning their failures as successes.

From Salon's Glenn Greenwald:

Marty Peretz and the American political consensus on Israel

(updated below - Update II)

Opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute are so entrenched that any single outbreak of violence is automatically evaluated through a pre-existing lens, shaped by one's typically immovable beliefs about which side bears most of the blame for the conflict generally or "who started it." Still, any minimally decent human being -- even those who view the world through the most blindingly pro-Israeli lens possible, the ones who justify anything and everything Israel does, and who discuss these events with a bottomless emphasis on the primitive (though dangerous) rockets lobbed by Hamas into Southern Israel but without even mentioning the ongoing four-decades brutal occupation or the recent, grotesquely inhumane blockade of Gaza -- would find the slaughter of scores of innocent Palestinians to be a horrible and deeply lamentable event.

But not The New Republic's Marty Peretz. Here is his uniquely despicable view of the events of the last couple of days:

So at 11:30 on Saturday morning, according to both the Jerusalem Post and Ha'aretz, as well as the New York Times, 50 fighter jets and attack helicopters demolished some 40 to 50 sites in just about three minutes, maybe five. Message: do not fuck with the Jews.

"Do not fuck with the Jews." And what of the several hundred Palestinian dead -- including numerous children -- and many hundreds more seriously wounded?

Israeli intelligence reported 225 people dead, mostly Hamas military leaders with some functionaries, besides, and perhaps 400 wounded. The Palestinians announced 300 dead, probably as a reflex in order to begin their whining about disproportionate Israeli acts of war. And 600 wounded.

Objections to the Israeli attack are just "whining." Those are the words of a psychopath. And what to do now?

Frankly, I am up to my gullet with this reflex criticism of Israel as going beyond proportionality in its responses to war waged against its population with the undisguised intention of putting an end to the political expression of the Jewish nation. . . .

The current warfare will go on a bit longer. If there is a pause and if I were giving advice to the Israelis, this is what I would say to Hamas and to the people of Gaza: "If a rocket or missile is launched against us, if you take captive one of our soldiers (as you have held one for two and a half years), if you raise a new Intifada against us, there will be an immediate response. And it will be very disproportionate. Proportion does not work."

This super-tough-guy warrior -- whose prime accomplishment in life was marrying an heiress and then using her family's money to buy himself The New Republic -- beats his chest and threatens that even a single Palestinian act in response to this bombing campaign will provoke still more massive retaliation in the form of collective punishment (which, not that anyone cares, happens to be a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, as are Hamas' far less harmful rocket attacks on Israeli civilians).

It may be true that, as Eric Alterman put it in his seminal article on Marty Pertez (quoting Ezra Klein), "Peretz is rarely held to account, largely because there's an odd, tacit understanding that he's a cartoonish character and everyone knows it." But how unusual are Peretz's views, revolting as they are, in the American political mainstream? He certainly expresses anti-Arab hatred and bigotry more bluntly than most, but this reflexive support for anything and everything Israel does is anything but unique in our political debates.

Here, as but one illustrative example, is Caroline Kennedy -- who, in order to win her Senate seat, is self-consciously trying to turn herself into a Barack Obama clone -- responding recently to a question about Israel from Politico:

QUESTION 8: Do you think Israel should negotiate with Hamas? Do you agree with Israel's Gaza Strip embargo? Would you support an Israeli airstrike on Iran if they felt Tehran's nuclear program represented a threat to their survival?

ANSWER: "Caroline Kennedy strongly supports a safe and secure Israel. She believe Israel's security decisions should be left to Israel."

What could be more absurd than that? Apparently, not only should we continue to feed Israel billions of dollars a year of American taxpayer money and massive amounts of weapons -- thereby ensuring that the world, quite accurately, perceives their actions as American actions -- but we should then take the position that they are free to do anything they want with it, no matter how extreme or destructive to our interests, and our only view on all of it should be that we blindly support whatever they do. Or, as Clinton aide Ann Lewis put it during the primaries, in response to Obama's observation that he needn't have a "Likud view in order to be pro-Israel":

The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel. It is not up to us to pick and choose from among the political parties.

Yesterday, the Bush administration applied this mindset, naturally, by expressing unequivocal support for Israel and heaped all blame on Hamas. And, needless to say, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi echoed the administration's view:

Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi issued a statement concerning the Israeli operation in Gaza in which she wrote that "When Israel is attacked, the United States must continue to stand strongly with its friend and democratic ally."

According to Pelosi, "Peace between Israelis and Palestinians cannot result from daily barrages of rocket and mortar fire from Hamas-controlled Gaza. Hamas and its supporters must understand that Gaza cannot and will not be allowed to be a sanctuary for attacks on Israel."

Not a word of condemnation of the Israeli blockade -- which has caused extreme suffering and deprivation in Gaza -- or of the massively disproportionate response or the ongoing and ever-expanding Israeli occupation. It is all one-sided support for whatever Israel does from our political class, and one-sided condemnation of Israel's enemies (who are, ipso facto, American enemies) -- all of it, as usual, sharply divergent from the consensus in much of the rest of the world.

It would be nice if U.S. citizens weren't connected to and responsible for every Israeli military action, so that we really could and should take the attitude that what the Israeli Government does -- or what is done to it -- is not our responsibility. That's how it should be.

Instead, since we fund a huge bulk of it and supply the weapons used for much of it and use our veto power at the U.N. to enable all of it, we are connected to it -- intimately -- and bear responsibility for all of Israel's various wars, including the current overwhelming assault on Gaza, as much as Israelis themselves. Blind support for whatever they do -- the consensus view in American political life in both parties -- is therefore a total abdication of our responsibility.

It remains to be seen if Barack Obama intends to deviate even a small amount from what has been decades of excessively loyal U.S. support for Israel -- which, over the last eight years, transformed into truly blind and absolute support for anything they do. It's impossible to know for sure until Obama is inaugurated, but the bipartisan, purely "pro-Israel" statements issued by his allies -- such as Caroline Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi -- don't bode well, nor do the statements which Obama himself made during the campaign, as compiled yesterday by Salon's Mark Schone:

The first job of any nation state is to protect its citizens. And so I can assure you that if -- I don't even care if I was a politician -- if somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.

Can't the exact same mentality be deployed to justify everything Hamas has done and is doing, to wit: "if a foreign power were brutally occupying my country for four decades -- or blockading my country and denying my children medical needs and nutrition and the ability even to exit -- I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Palestinians to do the same thing"? But the last thing that our political class ever extends is reciprocal, two-sided analysis to this dispute.

The suffocating bipartisan orthodoxies in the U.S. regarding Israel thus make virtually impossible what the new Jewish-American group, J Street -- in condemning the attack (even while calling it "justifiable") because it "will deepen the cycle of violence in the region" -- urges: "immediate, strong diplomatic intervention by the United States, the Quartet and allies in the region to negotiate a resumption of the ceasefire." Most of our political elites know enough to avoid the ugly language of Marty Peretz, but the ultimate policy positions aren't much different.

UPDATE: Without necessarily endorsing all of it, I want to recommend very highly this column by Israeli Gideon Levy in Haaretz, entitled "The neighborhood bully strikes again." What's most striking about it is that this scathing criticism of Israel's behavior can -- and does -- appear in one of Israel's leading newspapers, but not a paragraph of it could ever be uttered by any American politician, in either party, of any national prominence.

UPDATE II: Here's Rep. Howard Berman, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and a Democrat, echoing Nancy Pelosi, George Bush and virtually every other key American political official:

Israel has a right, indeed a duty, to defend itself in response to the hundreds of rockets and mortars fired from Gaza over the past week. No government in the world would sit by and allow its citizens to be subjected to this kind of indiscriminate bombardment. The loss of innocent life is a terrible tragedy, and the blame for that tragedy lies with Hamas.

One can travel from the farthest right fringe of the GOP to the heart of the Democratic Party leadership and hear exactly the same thing: Israel is always right. Israel must not be criticized. Israel never bears any blame. Any action taken by Israel is justified. No matter the situation, that just gets repeated over and over like some hypnotic bipartisan mantra. Meanwhile, American citizens overwhelmingly -- 71% -- want their Government to be "even-handed" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet that view is simply ignored, disregarded, not even viable for any American mainstream political leader to express.

-- Glenn Greenwald

Hey, when all the smoke clears and everybody realizes what a thundering useless lump Reagan was, do you think we can rename the airport back to National? Always honks me off to hear that clod's name attached to it.

Republicans know that FDR's response to the Depression and to the real Axis of Evil defined American domestic and foreign policy for decades.

The GOP is desperate to prevent Obama from becoming another FDR so while they await opportunities to attack Obama they belittle FDR in full ignorance of history.

It's the same old GOP strategy -- wage false propagandistic attacks against the Democrats on what Democrats believe are their strengths and ridicule the Democrats' factual responses as inadequate and elitist.

The GOP has become so formulaic and predictable.

If I want to read Glenn Greenwald, I'll go to Salon. And, considering his logorrhea, dedicate the day to it. Stay on topic.

And I don't think Greenwald would be very happy at rightwing trolls using him as a Trojan Horse. I'm sure he'd write volumes about it.

By "influential", they mean "percentage of people who claim they're the greatest"
So an open poll of every 20th century president would probably put FDR and Reagen 1st and 2nd.

Reagan should be a the bottom tier of presidents!

I don't think glib dismisals of Reagan do the trick here. This made me think of the Gil Troy work "Morning in America". P 354. "...perhaps the greatest gift of Reagan and the 1980s was to show things could get better, to reaffirm the traditional American faith in progress. Those of us who grew up in the 1970s, and most esp. those of us who grew up in New York in those years, simply assumed things always declined, socially, institutionally, culturally, and politically."

Actually, Reagan is the Godfather of the current complete failure. This is the consequence of Reagan's policies as surely as night follows day. Even the complicity of the Clinton administration was essentially a New Democrat capitulation to Reaganism. The heart of the philosophy which led directly to the mess that we are in today was ushered into mainstream political life by Reagan. Before him, these were the ravings of the lunatic fringe. Because it is a lunatic philosophy that is sure to lead to ruin, while enriching the few beyond imagination.

Reagan was the first president to make me embarrassed for my country.

Well, I can tell you about the idiot 30-49 bunch because I am one of those. When I went to college the vast majority of my friends were Republican idiots. State school in blue area in red state. And its the kind of college bunch who for the most part didn't know why they were Republican, just that at that time Republicans were the winning team. This is one of the reasons I felt good about hearing that the Dems had a majority of college kids this time. I think most people have a hard time admitting they were wrong so if you can get them to vote for you in their first election, you got them. As far as Ike I don't believe Ike was a true blue Repub. I have to wonder if he didn't choose the Repub party because he would have had to fight other powerful Dems for the nomination whilst in the Repubs he had the nomination wrapped up. I can't see Ike in todays Repub party. Hell, I'm not even sure Gerald Ford would choose the Repubs over the Dems right now. And BTW, Roosevelt's landslide win in 1932 is still one of the top five landslide elections in the US which is amazing esp. when you consider the huge increase in the American population since 1932. I don't think Reagan will be as well remembered once the idiot 30-49 bunch will have died off.

Rasmussen is a total whore for the Repukes. This is the standard "defining deviancy down" thing - make Reagan equal to Roosevelt.

It's nauseating.

You want to be taken seriously? Improve your fucking grammar. Upgrade your language and contribute to the political discourse of the country. Don't just type out fucking half-baked, grammatically shit scrawl and expect to be taken seriously. Not on this board or anywhere else, for that matter.

-"Reagan's economic policies were largely unsuccessful."

Let's see, in 1980, unemployment was 7.1% and inflation was 13.5%(!). In 1988, unemployment was 5.5% and inflation was 4.1%. If that is a largely unsuccessful result, I would like to see what Kevin would call a successful one.

I know, I know, Reagan's policies are not supposed to be responsible for any of this; though somehow FDR is still to be given credit for the positive macroeconomic effect of the WWII spending which finally killed off the much weakened depression. And even if Reagan is to be given no positive credit, it is still true he never tried anything both as harmful and as unconstitutional as the National Recovery Act (thank God for the supreme court on that one).

To sum up, FDR faced a crisis unemployment situation and was significantly successful in dealing with it, while at the same time maintaining a positive relationship with the great bulk of the American people, then went on to win WWII (while being at least somewhat unsuccessful in setting up the post WWII situation with the Soviets). Reagan faced a bad inflation situation and solved it while maintaining a positive relationship with the great bulk of the American people.

So, yes, Roosevelt is to be judged better because he faced a crisis situation (actually two counting the war) and managed both mostly successfully while Reagan only faced a difficult one (or two if we count the Russians) which he handled successfully. But just because Roosevelt is great while Reagan only good, this makes it necessary to underrate Reagan? Has Kevin totally forgotten the inflation crisis of the 1970's? Or does he simply have the kind of historical ignorance he is only to happy to project to others?

Honestly, watching some liberals talk about Reagan is like watching some conservatives talk about Obama this last election. They know he is bad, but somehow real world results are not fitting their ideological preconceptions, so of course the pre-known politically correct solution must be held on to at all costs. If that means the inflation of the 1970's becomes the problem never to named, so be it.

If the end result of Obama's 8 years is unemployment cut by 30% and inflation by 67%, what are the odds that Kevin will write a post about Obama's largly unsuccessful economic policies and bemoaning his inexplicable popularity? I am guessing around 0%.

What a sappy poll. I'll wager that most of the respondents didn't realize that FDR was not a movie actor.

Steve wrote: "I'm not even sure what the Rasmussen poll means by "influential.""

This is a silly statement. It really doesn't matter what they mean. Influence need not be positive. Hitler was influential too--still is, in fact. He even won MOTY. In this sense, Reagan and FDR are the most influential presidents of the past century overall. There is a recency problem here as well--the latest president (Bush excepted) would exercise the most profound influence for a short period following his presidency. This is inevitable. But, in terms of policies that represent a significant trend over time, the choice was correct. The fact that we can quibble about it does not make it a bad choice.

As for the results, it is hardly unpredictable. Republicans have about a 30% hard-core support and Dems about 35%--these figures remain unchanged despite the fluid registration numbers. If you look at the results, that means that 30% plus a fraction will vote for a Republican representative (with the fraction being higher or lower depending on the choice) and 35% plus a fraction will always poll for the Democrat. If you took Kennedy and Nixon, you'd likely get a bit higher fraction for Kennedy and a bit lower fraction for Nixon, with some unpredictable number of undecideds. In this case, the results were fairly reasonable in the current US political climate. Each got 10% as the extra fraction, leaving 15% undecided. This is perfectly reasonable. Besides, Reagan got a significant majority of the *voters*, many of whom are still alive today. Those who did not vote, the ever-present swamp, likely had a fairly favorable view of him as well or they would have been radicalized against him in 1984. In contrast, most of the *voters* who supported FDR are long dead, so he's riding the party preference and reputation. Had the two presidencies been closer in time, FDR would have likely pulled a greater share.

FDR and Bush are quite similar. Both were keen for war and got us into costly and unnecessary wars. Both hated the Constitution. (How about packing the court, ha, ha.) FDR had such a big ego he wanted to be dictator for life, requiring a constitutional amendment to codify G. Washington's precedent of two terms.

Historians want to sell books, and violence sells, so a lot of tripe is written about presidents who kill masses of people. The truly great presidents are the boring peace and prosperity leaders.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/4000381/Josef-Stalin-named-among-greatest-Russians-in-nationwide-TV-vote.html

Josef Stalin named among greatest Russians in nationwide TV vote
Josef Stalin was named among the greatest Russians ever to have lived in a nationwide TV poll on Sunday modelled on the BBC's Great Britons.

Josef Stalin wasn't Russian - he was Georgian.

All this proves is that 40 years of right wing disinformation will confuse many people. It's what we are going to have to contend with as we get rid of the past 40 years of fascist coup.

I met Ronal Reagan in 1973. He was an amiable dunce, who believed his own bullshit, but was willing to back down when confronted with facts.

We need to start re-naming every item in the country that was tarred with Bozo the Clown's name.

Somebody else posted the long Glenn Greenwald excerpt and also signed as Bob G. Perhaps he is one too.

Here's how I respond to my leftist friends who do the rote anti-Israel lines that seemed to originate after the 1967 war -- this was a dramatic switcheroo on the part of the American left; before that, Israel was an underdog and liked by the left:

Israel came into existence in 1948 as a result of the UN vote. It may be that arabs reject that decision and therefore support the right of arabs to fight against Israel's existence. I don't think that we can change either side's mind on this -- Israelis believe in their right to exist in a sovereign nation, and arabs believe in their right to destroy Israel and put the whole middle east under Islamic control. There is no logical solution to this sort of dispute; it's somewhat analogous to the difference of opinion between protestantism and catholicism in Europe in the middle ages, or to the dispute between slave and free states leading up to 1861. What I can say, however, is that given a war against Israel -- civilians and military, it doesn't seem to matter -- that has been going on for 60 years, the fundamental question remains: Does or does not Israel have a right to exist? All other questions fall out of this fundamental naturally -- if Israel has a right to exist, then its people have the right to live without being shelled and rocketed from beyond its own borders. If Israelis have the right to live free from external aggression and terrorism, then the government has the duty to protect its people.

So that's where the legitimate argument should be. If the other Bob G wants to argue that this week's Israeli reaction is excessive, but that Israelis as a people have the right to defend themselves at some rational level, then I can accept that. I certainly find the pictures of dead children horrid, and I wonder whether there would have been some other way. I also wonder whether the current battle will even succeed in reducing arab violence against Israelis.

What I don't accept, however, is the idea, however unvocalized, that Jewish lives are expendable in service of some greater good which includes a half-century old religious war (actually closer to a century in reality). It has been waged against any and all who would oppose total Islamic sovereignty over the entire middle east.

One other curious point: The original UN mandate defined Jewish Israel as everything west of the Jordan river, which would have included the entire west bank. Nevertheless, Israel existed for 19 years with the 1948 boundaries, and the arabs could have made peace at any time before 1967 by accepting those boundaries. They didn't, and the Israeli occupation of the west bank was the result of the six day war. I don't think the Israelis expected to be in occupation of the west bank for very long, but expected that the magnitude of the arab defeat would lead to a political settlement and an Israeli withdrawal. That of course is what happened on the other front, where Egypt and Israel reached an agreement and Israel withdrew, admittedly only after a very long time and another war.

It really is a matter of perspective. Once you decide that arabs have the right to fight for their right to live in (and presumably control) what is now Israel, all the other stuff falls out logically -- the interminable wars, terrorist acts, rocketing, and suicide bombings. If you adopt the opposite perspective and believe that Israelis have the right to live peacefully within their own boundaries, then it follows that they have the right to take actions against those who continue to try to destroy them, and out of that comes the distasteful issue of continuing, chronic occupation.

I believe that Israelis would like to be able to live at peace with their neighbors, but find themselves in a conundrum where nothing they do seems to satisfy this need except maintaining overwhelming military superiority. And this of course isn't the kind of peace that any normal person would want.

By the way, I grew up in California and watched Reagan demagogue his way into the governor's office. Then I watched him become the luckiest man alive when Carter couldn't turn the Iranian hostage situation to his own advantage. The only good things I can say about Reagan involve the times he departed from his Republican talking points and dealt with reality. This included repeatedly raising taxes as president after his original tax cuts, and his attempts to decrease the danger of a nuclear holocaust (a very real danger at the time).

I suspect that the reason he got away with so much aggressive talk against the USSR was that they took him for an unintelligent, reckless type, and therefore a danger in his own right. By accident, he sort of turned out to be the right response to the schoolyard bully approach taken by the USSR in so many things. Later, he met with the Russian Premiere and got to do "good cop" to his own earlier "bad cop." Maybe it really helps to be an actor in the political sphere.

The idea that Reagan gets to take credit for the defeat of the Russian empire strikes me as preposterous. There is a certain level of truth that Reagan put huge stress on the Russians in terms of military spending, but he did this by putting huge stresses on our own economy. The mutual arms race has had similar effects on both countries -- it just took until now for our own economic melt down.

I wonder why Americans have such a hard time giving credit for the Russian liberalization to some of the Russians themselves, particularly Gorbachev.

Consider that the vast majority of Americans were not even born during FDR's lifetime, whereas most of us can remember St. Ronnie.

This makes the contest a little skewed.

If you could even out the unfamiliarity most Americans have with what happened pre-1970, the number for FDR would be much higher.

FDR and Bush are quite similar. Both were keen for war and got us into costly and unnecessary wars.

Please tell me when Roosevelt relied on the preemptive doctrine to fight the Nazis.

The "most influential" tag to this stupid poll is a ruse! The "real" question they're asking is - what do people prefer, a President that favors the rich or a President that favors the poor?

Just more destructive divisive drivel from the dangerously dumb.

More irrelevancy by rasmussen to boost the republicans morale.Even now more is coming out about him and he is being shown to be much less the savior of america that the republicans would have us believe, so in another 50 years what will his reputation be? Wait until Reagan has been dead 63 years like FDR and then poll on how influential he was. I would predict that the difference will be much greater when people will judge by actions rather than words.
The point being of course that any polling between people of different eras where one of them is still in recent memory of most of the people being polled is totally worthless except as either propoganda or entertainment. I was 8 years old when FDR died making me one of the minority who was alive during his presidency, and I remember very little of the events of the time or of the actual policies except what I have read

Applying Reaganonmics has caused the mess we are currently in financially.

As to Obama's policy regarding Israel, is there any doubt what that will be given that Rahm Emmanuel, a Likud supporter like his father, is chief-of-staff?

Uh, Steve? You might not want to link to that deliberately deceitful Kinsley essay if you want people to take you seriously. He takes a single quote from Regan where he's trying to defuse fears about the "Star Wars" initiative and disorts it to say Reagan never really expected or intended to defeat the Soviet Union. Kinsley wants us to ignore Reagan's decades as a leading anti-communist spokesman and all the other anti-
Soviet actions he took as President (missiles in Western Europe, anyone?) because Reagan wanted to sell "Star Wars" as something other than an aggressive move toward pre-emptive war?

Find something else to prop up your Reagan-hate, please.

Mike

Gee how could anybody not like FDR:

Made the Depression infinitely worse.

Attempted to "pack" the Supreme Court.

Was the first Socialist President

Probably had knowledge of Pearl Harbor but wanted to get us into WW2 so badly that he did nothing to prevent it.

Sold Eastern Europe out at Yalta thus creating the Soviet Empire (which, by the way, Reagan destroyed).

Defied all tradition and ran for the Presidency 4 times ( I guess he was better than Washington, Jefferson, Teddy R, and all the others).

Yeah, a really "great" President.

Eisenhower and Teddy Roosevelt were 20th century.
Reagan isn't fit to spit shine their boots.

Roosevelt is on Rushmore for Pete's sake!

Dopey poll.

In 2108, when the next poll comes out, Republicans spent their first decade backing the Chimp.

Not off to a roaring start, are they?

fred t,

"Sold Eastern Europe out at Yalta thus creating the Soviet Empire (which, by the way, Reagan destroyed)."

Yeah, I guess FDR should have just started WWIII instead (which the U.S. would have lost anyway). Silly him!

The reason Carter couldn't turn the hostage situation into an "advantage" was because behind the scenes the Reagan people had made a deal with the Iranians to hold the hostages - helping to derail Carter - until Reagan took office and then they would exchange the hostages for weapons. Carter refused to consider giving the Iranians weapons.

By doing the right thing Carter, at least in part, was defeated, and Reagan by doing the wrong thing, at least in part, was rewarded.

Again, the shear stupidity of the electorate is stunning.

Reagan is truly one of the "bad guys" in history, and I find it absolutely astounishing that anyone could revere this miscreant, not to mention almost an entire political party.