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April 05, 2005

Words From the Grave

Ronald Reagan is, of course, unsurprisingly unsurprised that freedom and democracy is breaking out:

Q: If I may, Mr. President. You called on Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, but these days all sorts of walls seem to be falling. Are there any particular lessons we ought to learn from what has been taking place?

A. Well, I'm no historian. But while the professors are writing their big books, maybe I can offer a couple of simple observations. The first ought to make everybody happy. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were right--Adams sits a mount pretty well for a stocky little fella, by the way--but they were right. We really are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, and no matter what his culture, his religion, or his language, everybody would rather have a say in electing a government than have some tyrant tell him how to live.

Remember that 1982 speech to Parliament that I delivered over in London?

Q: I have it right here on my desk. I was looking it over before I got in touch with you.

A: There's a passage in the middle of that speech that I inserted in my own handwriting--you speechwriters did a good job most of the time, but every so often I did a little writing myself. It's about the 1982 election in El Salvador. Would you read that passage aloud?

Q: My pleasure, sir. "On election day the people of El Salvador braved ambush and gunfire, trudging miles to vote for freedom. A grandmother who had been told by the guerillas she would be killed when she returned from the polls told the guerillas, 'You can kill me, kill my family, and kill my neighbors, but you can't kill us all.' The real freedom fighters of El Salvador turned out to be the people of that country."

A: Now, does that 1982 election in El Salvador remind you of anything?

It certainly reminds me of something.

What infuriates liberals the most about recent developments is not that they have been wrong, but that Reagan and those who think like him were so right.

Posted by bubba138 at April 5, 2005 08:14 AM