Did anyone catch CNN's "Most fascinating people of the last 25 years?"

I only caught the Number 1 most fascinating person in the countdown: Ronald Reagan.

:wtf:

Ronald Reagan may have a lot of admirers, but if he were truly fascinating, you'd have books coming out about him selling in the millions every year. Reagan books wind up remaindered pretty quickly. And it's not hard to see why: he may have been beloved by a tiny demographic of ideologues, and even well-liked by a majority of Americans, but he was not a terribly interesting person to most people. He was not a Kennedy or a Nixon or even a Bush family member or a Clinton. Calling him fascinating is like calling your Uncle Louie fascinating.

Discuss.

Reagan makes me want to take a nap

is that he is NOT fascinating -- I would say more comforting (to some people, obviously)

I'd say Clinton or an entertainer of some kind would be more fascinating than Reagan

I have no desire to learn anything about him. Like, I'll admit, I went through a Nixon phase in high school where I wanted to learn everything about him but that's only because he was an interesting case of paranoia and self-conciousness in a human being. Reagan, not so much.

Nixon may be an SOB but at least he was an interesting person.

Got elected because Carter was "mortgaging our children's future"...then proceeded to mortgage their great-grandchildren's future.

Prattled on about the sanctity of marriage...and was our first president to have been divorced and remarried.

Spoke about the importance of family...and ignored his children.

Couldn't utter a sentence without inserting the word "god" into it...and never went to church.

Call the Soviet Union the "evil empire"...and armed the death squads in Central America so they could murder nuns.

Portrayed himself as Mr Honesty...and ran Iran/Contra.

Fuck Reagan.

TOP FASCINATING PEOPLE
1) Ronald Reagan
2) Pope John Paul II
3) Ayatollah Khomeini
4) George W. Bush
5) Deng Xiaoping
6) Bill Clinton
7) Osama bin Laden
8) Mikhail Gorbachev
9) Nelson Mandela
10) Yasser Arafat
11) Bill Gates
12) Margaret Thacher
13) Saddam Hussein
14) Sam Walton
15) Ariel Sharon
16) Steve Jobs
17) Newt Gingrich
18) Lech Walesa
19) Mother Teresa
20) Alan Greenspan
21) Michael Jordan
22) Princess Diana
23) Rev. Billy Graham
24) Oprah Winfrey
25) Steven Spielberg
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/05/02/cnn25.top.fascinating/

but I'd probably put Gorbachev or Steve Jobs at the top

on edit:
No Tony Blair?
Walesa but not Havel?

rather than with it

I find the neolibs reprehensible

Every politician on the list is rightwing. Nice. Thanks, CNN.

:eyes:

And Martin Luther King junior?

Some of the people on that list are people i'd like to learn more about but I could probably take or leave most of em. I swear, everytime some organization comes out w/ a list like this, its always a let down.

Uh why?

Don't you wanna have a beer with him?

And Paige from Trading Spaces, and that kid who interfered with the Yankee game with the Red Sox.

The only thing I find fascinating about Reagan is that he seemed to believe his own lies on occassion. Did he, or was that an act, too?

how facinating CNN is, how brilliant our KoolAid press is to come up with such meaningless lists.

For some reason, the proclamation has been made repeatedly that Reagan was the most popular president of recent times. Even the trailer for PBS's American Experience program on Reagan said as much.

The problem is that it's not exactly true. If you look at approval ratings for the various presidents of the last half of the 20th century, it's G.H.W. Bush's ratings following the first Gulf War that are actually the most remarkable. I'm sorry I don't have the chart handy.

Another factoid: Clinton actually did pretty well in the popularity department and had an approval rating higher than Reagan's when he left office.

The Washington Post, which seems to have a policy of bashing Clinton no matter what the news story, chose, following the death of Reagan, to paint RR as a consistently popular president and Clinton as having left office under a cloud. A reader helpfully pointed out the facts regarding the Clinton ratings versus the Reagan ones.

One last thing: Reagan always struck me as off-puttingly artificial. Yes, he could turn on the charm and hit the right notes with a speech or ad lib, but I still found him phoney. And he was not known for really being close to anyone but his second wife.

I believe I was a little kid. I've seen old video's of him and all that and he definitley was a phoney. You can just feel it. Nothing he said to people was sincere of what I saw. Not like your Kennedy, Carter, Clinton or Kerry.

More intriguing people of the last 25 years than Reagan (and I'm being objective here, because I find many of these people boring, myself):

Pol Pot
Michael Jackson
OJ Simpson
The Unabomber
Timothy McVeigh
Madonna
Yeltsin
The Dali Lama
Stephen King
Quentin Tarentino
Bono
Fidel Castro

but the "Gippet," as he called himself on one occasion, was held to be "chummier" (so that means he's fishbait)

well that would exclude Bush considering he's a repulsive mofo

Honesty compels me to say Top 10, but I'd be okay about being in the Top 15.

Reagan fascinating? Nah. I'd rather watch a whole four hour film about Kennedy. :loveya: I always imagine what it would be like if the Kennedy brothers were never shot. *sigh*

I am boycotting CNN and your number one makes me glad that I do.

:think: ;)