Hell of a read!

http://www.cracked.com/article_15895_5-m...-time.html

Not having Ronald Wilson Reagan on there makes the list uncredible.

What did Reagan do that made him a badass?

And acting in movies is not an answer :)

Honestly, Ninerfan1 must not have read the reasons for those guys on that list, or he wouldn't be saying that.

subflea Wrote:What did Reagan do that made him a badass?

He had an entire country (USSR) scared sh!tless we were going to blow them off the face of the earth.

He won the cold war without firing a shot. I'd say that makes him a bad man.

I still believe that the USSR was on its way to imploding with or without Reagan turning up the heat with the arms race. However, he was very effective at advancing his agenda and has to be the last President in recent history who actually kept a majority of his campaign promises.

uhmump95 Wrote:I still believe that the USSR was on its way to imploding with or without Reagan turning up the heat with the arms race.

All civilizations trend towards implosion, it's just a question of how quick they get there.

The USSR was struggling, but communism was spreading. People make the mistake of just looking at the Soviets from a Cold War standpoint and forget that Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, North Korea, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Yugoslavia and Romania were all communist. Today only China (and really not true communism) Cuba, North Korea Laos and Vietnam are.

Communism went from spreading to practically disappearing as anything meaningful. True that may have happened at some point, but Reagan forced it in less than 10 years.

Quote:However, he was very effective at advancing his agenda and has to be the last President in recent history who actually kept a majority of his campaign promises.

Very true.

Ninerfan1,

Do you consider China not two be truly communistic because their growing business class? I think they saw the USSR's mistake and realized that capitalism is not an enemy of communism.

I can tell you that Beijing doesn't look much like a communist city. Certainly nothing like the eastern european cities that we used to see back in the 60s and 70s. It kinda reminded me a little bit of Houston even, freeways and traffic everywhere.

And on my first trip back to Hong Kong since the turnover to China, I definitely found much less change from the Crown Colony days than I had been led to expect from the media. Biggest change that really affected me was that the Star Ferry is an endangered operation. But I think that was inevitable with the tunnel and the subway system, so I can't attribute that to Chinese control. I did miss the ice cream cones on the ferry.

subflea Wrote:What did Reagan do that made him a badass?

The guy was like 75 and took a bullet that would have killed a lot of people. He's got my vote.

I would have moved Jackson up higher. I've never heard the story of the assassination attempt, but the one I've always remembered is his duel with Charles Dickinson. In the duel, fought over a horse-racing debt and an insult to his wife on May 30, 1806, Dickinson shot Jackson in the ribs before Jackson returned the fatal shot. The bullet that struck Jackson was so close to his heart that it could never be safely removed. Plus there was the challenge of the Supreme Court where he said, "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!" with regards to the Indian removal.