[GT40FIED]

Well...Wren...you're right about one thing. The economy boomed...for people who had money. There were massive amounts of people, however, that the"trickle down" theory didn't trickle down for. As with almost any republican regime...err...administration, the rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and the middle class got ignored. I think the movie "Wall Street" perfectly captured exactly what was wrong with the Reagan era.

As for the cold war...I don't even look at it as something possible to win or lose. It was basically just a war of ideas...our own attempt to, once again, control what the rest of the world thought. Extending all the way down from the Mcarthy hearings into the '80s, we had to weed out communism because...well...we didn't like it. Sure, Russia was the main focal point, but what about Korea and Vietnam? The ONLY reasons we were there was because of communist regimes. sure, there was a huge lie about an attack in the Gulf of Tonkin that pushed us into Vietnam...but really it's all about ideology. We were so concerned with fighting ideas, we failed to respond appropriately to real problems like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the genocide in East Timor committed by Indonesia. Basically...to me...the cold war amounted to little less than a bunch of diplomats in back rooms measuring each other's dicks to see whose was bigger. The war ended when they put their dicks away. The only way you can have a war and not fire a shot is if it's a war of ideas.