To hear Kennedy refer to our nation as a Republic, perhaps the last President to refer to our nation as such (Both Nixon and Ford simply used the word 'nation' and 'United States of America' in most speeches) and the joy that Kennedy's use of the word Republic brought about, was replaced today with a bit of personal pause (as I had predicted it to a friend not long before completing the majority of my research) upon finding out it was a Republican who started heavily pushing the idea our form of government was a Democracy.

It was Ronald Reagan who really, really began this word change. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1982reagan1.html

President Reagan: Speech to the House of Commons, June 8, 1982.

We're approaching the end of a bloody century plagued by a terrible political invention -- totalitarianism. Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy's enemies have refined their instruments of repression. Yet optimism is in order because day by day democracy is proving itself to be a not at all fragile flower. From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than thirty years to establish their legitimacy. But none -- not one regime -- has yet been able to risk free elections. Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root.
The strength of the Solidarity movement in Poland demonstrates the truth told in an underground joke in the Soviet Union. It is that the Soviet Union would remain a one-party nation even if an opposition party were permitted because everyone would join the opposition party....
Historians looking back at our time will note the consistent restraint and peaceful intentions of the West. They will note that it was the democracies who refused to use the threat of their nuclear monopoly in the forties and early fifties for territorial or imperial gain. Had that nuclear monopoly been in the hands of the Communist world, the map of Europe--indeed, the world--would look very different today. And certainly they will note it was not the democracies that invaded Afghanistan or suppressed Polish Solidarity or used chemical and toxin warfare in Afghanistan and Southeast Asia.



The rest of the speech has the word Democracy in it over and over again. Reagan, who was an incredibly intelligent man, should have known better... I don't know how he was duped or coerced, but it broke my heart and boggled my mind today to reach his speech with wide open eyes, mind and heart.

It wasn't long ago that our Republic was suddenly draped over with the false flag of Democracy - the very opposite of what our nation was supposed to be, and the reason we're in such a confusing, conflicted mess now - as a people, as a nation. It's going to be hard to agree on the principles this country was founded upon, and what the role of government is supposed to be, based on the twenty-six years this nation's people have been fooled into embracing an unsustainable, immoral and unconstitutional form of government.