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A Rebuttal of Peggy Noonan’s “Apathy in the Executive” analysis of Obama and Reagan
By Emmanuel Musaazi
Reading Peggy Noonan’s article titled “Apathy in the Executive” her analysis and portrayal of U.S. President Barack Obama as a failed leader in contrast to her former boss president Ronald Reagan and former pope, John Paul II left me riveted and thinking how politics is not only local as the famous cliché goes, but can be also subjective.
Her analysis was contextualized partisanship and cold war politics, based on an ideology that applied about 30 years ago and does not apply in the present, certainly not to Obama’s situation, and in blatant denial of the many times that Obama has shown leadership.
To understand Noonan and her article you need to understand her politics.
Noonan was a speech writer for former U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. This was the cold war era a time in history when stark ideology was the paramount credential for good leadership and there was little or no tolerance for nuanced ideas. Maybe this was the prescribed remedy at the time at least with regard to combating communism but not apartheid, another scourge on human conscience at the time.
In the Reagan era, Nelson Mandela was considered a terrorist. Indeed Reagan and the then U.K. Prime Minister Thatcher, were “heroes of anticommunism but villains of apartheid”. So wrong were they on the issue of apartheid, that it coursed Archbishop Desmond Tutu – seen by many as a living saint in the realm of Mother Theresa – to denounce Reagan’s South Africa policy as “immoral, evil and totally un-Christian”.
It can be said that Reagan inadvertently aided the growth and rise of present international Jihadism by supporting the Taliban and other Jihadists because of his obsession with toppling communism. Talk about throwing away the baby with the birth water.
Reagan famously declared that the United States would never negotiate with terrorists after the U.S. embassy hostage debacle of the Carter administration but yet was willing to aid and abet them in Afghanistan.
