Paul Berman tells Michael Totten:
If you listen to Ramadan for fifteen minutes, you will learn that he says all the right things, whatever a liberal-minded person would want such a man to say…
(…)
I had an experience like that in relation to Ronald Reagan. I had a huge learning experience in Nicaragua in the 1980s when I was reporting for the Village Voice on the Sandinista revolution — a Marxist semi-communist revolution in those days.
Reagan was against the Sandinistas, and he did all kinds of things that, at the time, I thought were terrible. And I still think he did terrible things. Still, I was always astounded when I was among very poor people in Nicaragua to learn how many people liked Ronald Reagan. I would question them, and I could comprehend their answers, pretty much.
Extremely poor market women, for instance, in an extremely poor town, would tell me, “the workers and peasants are suffering.”
I would ask, “Who is defending the workers and the peasants?”
And they would say, “Ronald Reagan.”
***
And I’m pretty sure Charles Krauthammer coined the phrase “Bush Derangement Syndrome”…
