Word: reaganism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This recording also marks a departure for Feltsman. When he arrived in the U.S. in 1987, everything was handed to him on a silver platter: hailed as a "hero of the human spirit" by Ronald Reagan, he was offered debut performances at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center, a busy concert schedule, an $80,000-a-year teaching job at the State University of New York at New Paltz and a recording contract with Sony Classical. The recording contract, however, turned out to be a Faustian bargain: the pianist was expected to concentrate on the powerhouse Russian composers -- Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky...
Bush has trivialized this scandal as the "criminalization of policy differences," suggesting that the problem merely stemmed from a disagreement between then-President Ronald Reagan and the Democratic Congress about whether to support the contras in their guerilla war against the Sandinista government...
...Boland Amendment expressly prohibited government aid to the contras--by covertly funding the Nicaraguan "freedom fighters," Reagan's underlings (if not Reagan himself) acted illegally. This is more than a disagreement about policy; it is a violation...
Maybe it is anger--anger at the American people for failing to demand full accountability of their leaders, for allowing Reagan to ride off into the sunset instead of joining Richard Nixon in (at least temporary) disgrace. Anger at government officials like North and Poindexter for their arrogant--and undemocratic--belief that they know better than either the voters or their representatives what policy our country should pursue. Anger at everyone who believes these criminals are heroes. And anger at George Bush, whose disdain for the Constitution is matched only by his disrespect for the American people...
Baker, during the Bush presidency, has carefully managed to avoid blame for his mishandlings of situations. This is nothing new for him. He was the only major Reagan administration official not to be tied to the Iran-Contra scandal. Few people seem to recall that he was secretary of the treasury during the time in which the savings and loan problems mushroomed. And he presided over the precipitous fall of the dollar that culminated in the 1987 stock market crash...