20: 1980s America

“the suppression of the people of a society begins in my mind with the censorship of the written or spoken word. It was so in Nazi Germany. It is so in many places today where those in power are afraid of the consequences of an informed and educated people.”

As a result, some stores, such as Walmart, refused to sell any albums with the label or only sold them to adults.

For all the fervor they created, the first-term Reagan budgets were mild manifestos devoid of revolutionary purpose. They did not seek to ‘rebuild the foundation of our society’ (the task Reagan set for himself and Congress in a nationally televised speech of February 5, 1981) or even to accomplish the ‘sharp reduction in the spending growth trend’ called for in [his] Economic Recovery Plan.” By Reagan’s second term, the idea of seriously diminishing the budget was, to quote Stockman, “an institutionalized fantasy.” Though in speeches Reagan continued to repeat his bold pledge to “get government out of the way of the people,” government stayed pretty much where it was.

One would have to go back to FDR to find a comparable example of a president portrayed in such consistently glowing terms–and the swashbuckling triumphs depicted in these books mythologize Reagan to a degree which exceeds even that

But he entered office as an ideologue who promised a conservative revolution, vowing to slash the size of government, radically scale back entitlements, and deploy the powers of the presidency in pursuit of socially and culturally conservative goals. That he essentially failed in this mission hasn’t stopped partisan biographers from pretending otherwise.

The information from the test tape about a missile attack simultaneously appeared on screens at SAC headquarters and the NMCC, which quickly led to precautionary moves, including alert of NORAD interceptor forces and the premature launch of a dozen interceptors. Moreover, the National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP), which received the missile attack on its computer displays, launched from Andrews Air Force Base.

"As he recounted it to me, Brzezinski was awakened at three in the morning by [military assistant William] Odom, who told him that some 250 Soviet missiles had been launched against the United States. Brzezinski knew that the President's decision time to order retaliation was from three to seven minutes. Thus, he told Odom he would stand by for a further call to confirm Soviet launch and the intended targets before calling the President. Brzezinski was convinced we had to hit back and told Odom to confirm that the Strategic Air Command was launching its planes. When Odom called back, he reported that 2,200 missiles had been launched. It was an all-out attack. One minute before Brzezinski intended to call the President, Odom called a third time to say that other warning systems were not reporting Soviet launches. Sitting alone in the middle of the night, Brzezinski had not awakened his wife, reckoning that everyone would be dead in half an hour. It had been a false alarm. Someone had mistakenly put military exercise tapes into the computer system."

Non-criminal sexual harassment on the job is not a problem for the virtuous woman except in the rarest of cases.

Men hardly ever ask sexual favors of women from whom the certain answer is “no.”

Virtuous women are seldom accosted by unwelcome sexual propositions or familiarities, obscene talk, or profane language.

Ironically, on the 200th anniversary of our Bill of Rights, we find free speech under assault throughout the United States, including on some college campuses. The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones.

And political extremists roam the land, abusing the privilege of free speech, setting citizens against one another on the basis of their class or race.

And I remind myself a lot of this: We must conquer the temptation to assign bad motives to people who disagree with us.

If we've learned anything in the past quarter century, it is that we cannot federalize virtue. Indeed, as we pile law upon law, program upon program, rule upon rule, we actually can weaken people's moral sensitivity. The rule of law gives way to the rule of the loophole, the notion that whatever is not illegal must be acceptable. In this way, great goals go unmet.