[Porsche-O-Phile]

The best thing about Reagan is he wasn't Carter.

Not particularly a Reagan fan here. . . I remember the 80s well. I thought he was a decent president at times and a complete idiot at times. I guess that makes him. . . well. . . human. He personalized the office by making it "human" and he came off as someone you could relate to - or at least he was good at faking it. Either way, it was hard not to like the guy as a person, although his politics had an awful lot to be desired a lot of times.

FWIW I used to work up in Santa Monica (no more, thank God), but when I did a couple years back it was pretty interesting and surreal to have his funeral procession start literally two blocks away from my office. I drove in to work that morning and they had all kinds of hubbub around this funeral home nearby - later that morning I heard that it was the location of the former president's services. We all later went downstairs to see the funeral procession as it headed to the airport to transport his casket to Washington before it was placed in state in the Capitol rotunda. Pretty surreal. I've got some photos somewhere.

Even if I didn't always like his politics, I respected the guy - but it's also a bit too far to say he unilaterally ended communism or the cold war. He helped to facilitate it maybe to a degree, but both were doomed to failure anyway. Interesting man, interesting president. Hope he finally found peace.

That thing about the statue is interesting. . . You'd think they could just dedicate a new park or something. Politics aside, both the defeat of the Nazis (regardless of whether it was by Soviets or U.S. troops) AND the collapse of the communist government would be important items in their history to memorialize somehow. It just doesn't seem right for the popular politics du jour to scrub away other historically significant memorials because the politics associated with them have fallen out of favor. Almost like how I wish (and hope) a few Hussein statues were left standing in Baghdad - not because I like the guy, but because I think it's important for the Iraqi people to not forget that part of their history. . .