steve03 Loc: long Lsland

What did Reagan do?
Sometimes, ‘What Would Reagan Do?’ is the wrong question
07/21/14 09:29 AM—UPDATED 07/21/14 10:46 AM
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By Steve Benen
After the public learned last week that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 had been shot down, killing all 298 people on board, it wasn’t long before an obvious comparison came to mind: in September 1983, a Russian fighter jet shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007. The attack left 269 passengers and crew dead, 62 of whom were American, including a member of Congress.

Olivia Kittel noted that for many Republicans, President Obama should not only follow Ronald Reagan’s example from 31 years ago, but also that Obama is already falling short of the Reagan example.
In the wake of a Malaysia Airlines jetliner crash, Fox News has rushed to conveniently rewrite history to disparage President Obama by drawing false comparisons to former President Ronald Reagan’s response to a 1983 attack on a Korean airliner.
After Fox News said Obama wasn’t Reagan-esque enough, plenty of other conservatives soon followed.

Let’s take a brief stroll down memory lane in case some have forgotten what actually happened in 1983.

After the Soviet pilot killed 269 people on a civilian airliner, Reagan’s aides didn’t bother to wake him up to tell him what happened. When the president was eventually briefed on developments, Reagan, who was on vacation in California at the time, announced he did not intend to cut his trip short. (Reagan’s aides later convinced him to return to the White House.)

Last week, Obama delivered a public address on the Malaysia Airlines plane about 24 hours after it was shot down, calling the incident an “outrage of unspeakable proportions.” Reagan also delivered stern words, but in contrast, he waited four days to deliver public remarks.

So what is Fox talking about?

More from Kittel’s report:
On the July 17 edition of Fox News’ The Kelly File, host Megyn Kelly connected the July 17 tragedy to the 1983 Korean airliner crash, highlighting Reagan’s speech in response and noting in comparison that Obama has “been accused of ‘leading from behind.’ ” Fox contributor Chris Stirewalt compared Reagan’s response to Obama’s, saying Reagan’s response made Americans feel “reassured and resolute,” and Kelly echoed that Obama’s response “makes him look unconnected and makes a lot of Americans feel unrepresented.” […]

Such comparisons applauding Reagan’s 1983 response to attack Obama have reverberated throughout Fox News. Andrew Napolitano invoked Reagan’s response to insist Obama should “get on national television and call Vladimir Putin a killer.” Fox correspondent Peter Johnson Jr. said of Obama, “I think the president needs to take a page out of Ronald Reagan,” while Fox strategic analyst Ralph Peters suggested Obama’s strategy should reflect “clear speech, a la Ronald Reagan, backed up by firm action and with follow-through.”
This over-the-top Reagan worship isn’t just wrong; it’s ironic. In 1983, some of the prominent conservative media voices of the day actually complained bitterly that Reagan’s response was wholly inadequate.

George Will – yes, that George Will – called the Reagan White House’s arguments “pathetic” at the time, insisting, “It’s time for [Reagan] to act.”

The president responded publicly with rhetoric that made the president sound rather helpless. “Short of going to war, what would they have us do?” Reagan said. “I know that some of our critics have sounded off that somehow we haven’t exacted enough vengeance. Well, vengeance isn’t the name of the game in this.”

One wonders what the reaction would have been from the right and the Beltway media if Obama responded with similar rhetoric to a comparable situation.

Jakebrake Loc: Broomfield, Colorado

Yawn....typical leftist falderal!

Darkroom317 Loc: Mishawaka, IN

What about Iran Air Flight 655? What did Reagan do then?

Danilo Loc: Las Vegas

Comparisons need not be drawn between President Obama's handling of the executive office and the actions of other presidents. Mr. Obama's lack of concern for his constituency (immigration, environment, veteran's affairs, public disharmony, etc.) can surely stand on its' own.

Reagan is, after all, dead. And Mr. Obama is not.

steve03 Loc: long Lsland

yeah history means nothing!🚽🚽

rgrenaderphoto Loc: Hollywood, CA

Here is what Ronald Reagan did:

President Ronald Reagan, in a statement released shortly after the attack, called the shooting down of Flight 655 by the crew of the Vincennes a “proper defensive action.” Admiral William J. Crowe, Jr., the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, justified the downing of the passenger plane, saying that commanders on the ship had “sufficient reasons to believe their units were in jeopardy and they fired in self-defense.”

We later paid the surviving family members $61 million in compensation.

It is not falderal, it is historical fact.

RichieC Loc: Adirondacks

Ah but the rest of the story is a bitch to your insinuation. No wonder why you fail to address it. Other then missiles being responsible for shooting down airlines, there is no comparison. The Iranian airline was purposefully messing with the Vincennes, refused to answer repeated calls as to its intentions and its transponder was turned off and it was out of its flight plan heading directly toward the ship and descending at 500 mph. All while Vincennes was involved with 3 gunboats at the same time... Imagine Islamic leaders sending in plane loads of innocent people for political statements.. can you point to another occurrence where this has happened? How about strapping bombs onto their own children?


(From the July 5, 1988 Christian Science Monitor by Warren Richey- go ahead and google this)

The Iranian commercial jetliner shot down Sunday over the Strait of Hormuz followed the same flight profile established by Iranian F-14 jets in recent days, according to a reliable source in the Gulf who asks not to be named.

The source says the F-14s had a routine of approaching the US cruiser Vincennes, provoking a radioed warning, and then flying off in the week before the shootdown, the source says. The information suggests that previous Iranian jetfighter activity may have contributed to the identification by the US warship of the commercial jet as a fighter.

But it leaves unresolved the major question of why officers on the state-of-the-art cruiser Vincennes were unable to distinguish between an F-14 fighter and a large, slow, commercial Airbus.

Commercial airliners throughout the world are equipped with special transponders that automatically identify them as nonbelligerent aircraft. The Iranian Airbus’s transponder was either out of order or switched off, according to US officials. And experts say that on a radar screen an Airbus at 7,000 feet appears little different than an F-14.

In addition, radar and electronic warfare technicians on the Vincennes detected “electronic emanations" that led them to believe the plane was an F-14 fighter.

That mystery deepened yesterday with a statement from the Italian Navy that an Italian warship in the area at the time of the shootdown detected two planes but was unable to identify them as either commercial or military aircraft. The statement said Italian officers assumed one of the planes was an F-14, but the other plane was not identified as an Airbus until after the shootdown.

[Rear Adm. William M. Fogarty and a US Navy team started for the Middle East yesterday to investigate the incident, the Associated Press reported.)
The Iranian Airbus, Flight 655 from Bandar Abbas to Dubai, was traveling at roughly 500 miles an hour at 7,000 feet and descending when it was destroyed by a US surface-to-air missile from the Vincennes, which was militarily engaging three Iranian gunboats at the time.

The aircraft was reportedly off its filed flight course by at least four miles, and was nine miles away and headed toward the Vincennes when the missiles were launched.

Had the plane been an F-14, or had an F-14 been flying close by, it might have been only a matter of seconds before the launch of an anti-ship missile. There was no time for the ship’s crew to check their conclusions with a visual sighting, US officials say.

Two missiles were fired at the Iranian Airbus after it failed to respond to seven radio warnings. All 290 persons on board the Iranian airliner were killed.
The shootdown has heightened tension throughout the region as the Gulf braces for a potential violent response from Iran.

Hal81 Loc: Bucks County, Pa.

Ill take Reagan any day over the liar we have in there now.