Ronald Wilson Reagan, our 40th President, was inaugurated on January 20th, 1981, joining Pope John Paul II and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on the world stage. President Reagan was the last and greatest piece of this holy anti-Communist trinity that began finally the bell tolling for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the patriarchal font of global Communism, the greatest evil of the 20th Century (despite the ignoble mid-centum efforts of one Adolf Hitler).
On this same day, we also had an all too impermanent victory over what was to become the greatest evil (we hope) of the 21st Century, Islamist terrorism, as the insufferable 444 days sixty-six American hostages spent in Iranian captivity came to an end.
A quarter century hence, we have many of the U.S.S.R.'s bastard offspring still with us, but the tiger has largely been tamed, and the greatest Communist cat of all is no more, all in very large part because of President Reagan's lifelong passionate obsession with bringing about the demise of this fetid ideology.
But nature abhors a vacuum, and unfortunately these two events have retrospectively more in common than merely the tremendous influence of Ronaldus Magnus. That to which we were privy, although unbeknownst to us at the time, was the birth of the new evil, rising and rushing to fill the impending void, just as we inaugurated the beginning of the end of the old.
(Editor's Note: This affords us yet another opportunity to thank our 39th President, Jimmy Carter, for his myriad contributions to world peace and stability, this time for his tremendous forethought in allowing the Shah of Iran to be overthrown by the Islamofascist mullahs who then immediately abducted the contingency they held until a man they actually respected (Read: feared) arrived via orderly succession. Thank you, again, Mister Nobel Peace Prize.)
Ronald Reagan began his pursuit of Communistic implosion in 1946, which culminated with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. We face similar calendarial longitude in fighting this new form of totalitarianism. May we now show the same dedication, determination and resolve in ending the scourge of our time as Reagan amply exhibited in his forty-three year pursuit of the demise of his.
Freedom demands, and victory requires, absolutely nothing less.
