Tribute to Ronald Reagan

hat tip Misanthropic Humanitarian

Don Rickles performs at 1985 Reagan inauguration dinner

Have you ever seen this? As you know, Don Rickles recently passed away. Here he was performing at the 1985 inauguration dinner for Ronald Reagan.

He approves!

Who's on first?

This spoof is funny. Can you imagine the pressure on any president?

Related news: Will Ferrell has backed out of the proposed film making fun of Reagan's Alzheimers.
Kudos to Michael Reagan and Patti Davis for speaking out on behalf of the millions of families who have lived through the grief of having someone near and dear stricken with Alzheimers. There is nothing funny about it.

An open letter to Will Ferrell

Patti Davis, daughter of Ronald Reagan, has written an open letter here to Will Farrell, who plans to make a comedy about President Reagan in the throes of Alzheimers.

Trump's cover story interview with the Hollywood Reporter

Janice Min writes at The Hollywood Reporter that Donald Trump

admires Ronald Reagan, and a bust of the late commander in chief in his office is a business award with Trump's name on it. If the 40th president was "The Great Communicator," Trump, who rose to prominence not as an actor but by playing himself on TV, is the 21st century version: The Great Entertainer. And right now, it is working.

You voted for Reagan, right?

I did. I was friendly with him.

Is he your model?

No, he's not a model. I didn't like NAFTA [NAFTA was signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1993, but Reagan first proposed a "North American accord" in a 1979 speech, and a precursor to NAFTA was signed by the U.S. and Canada in 1988.], I didn't like some of the economic policies. But he was a man that I respected and liked, and he liked me.

But he also could broach moderates, conservatives, Democrats.

He did. Well, he was a Democrat with a liberal bent as a younger man. And then he became a conservative Republican. He had a great way about him. A great sense of dignity. And he was a wonderful father for the country in a sense. He had a great feel for what the country represents.

...Obviously, the power of your celebrity and brand means something.

If I weren't a successful person, it wouldn't work as well. Voters have great confidence in me because I really have been successful. I have an income of over $400 million a year. I don't need anybody's money. I was offered $5 million last week by a lobbyist to put in the campaign. I said, "No, I don't need it." He said, "What do you mean, 'I don't need it?' " I said I don't need it. This is a guy that I know well, a good lobbyist, a tough cookie. He's not giving to me because he thinks I have the most beautiful hair he's ever seen. He's giving to me because when he has one of his companies in trouble or needs something, they want to call me and say, "Hey, Don, how you doing? Remember me?" I don't need that stuff. Whereas Jeb Bush, with $114 million that he raised [so far this year], and Hillary with the $60 million [CBS News reports she raised $47 million in the campaign's first quarter] and everyone else with the money they raised, they're going to be called upon, and they're going to have to do those things like little puppets. So people do respect that about me. I don't need it.

Do you think Bloomberg will support you?

I don't know. He is a friend of mine, he likes me. I saved him on the big project in the Bronx [Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point], which was taking years. It's been under construction for 25 years, and I got it built in 11 months, got it open [in April]. We are on the opposite side of the spectrum on guns. So for that reason alone perhaps he wouldn't.

Whose side are you on in Deflategate — Tom Brady or Roger Goodell?

Tom Brady. Tom is an unbelievable guy. He's a very good friend of mine. I have his number right here someplace. Whatever. Here, look, he just called me. (He holds up a Post-it that says "Tom Brady's New Cell #.")

If you're Jeb Bush, how would you compete against Donald Trump?

Jeb is a very nice person, but he is very low energy. And you need a person with great energy, enthusiasm and brainpower to straighten out our country. Our country is a mess in almost every way.

Eventually, HBO will do a movie about this election. Who should play you?

Somebody really, really handsome. That's the only thing that matters. I don't care if he can act well. He's got to be really, really good-looking. OK?

Read more here.

"If fascism ever comes to America, it will come under the name of liberalism"

Confronting evil, or not

A timely histoical comparison from Dennis Prager at National Review:

those who refused to characterize the Soviet Union as evil loathed Ronald Reagan and other anti-Communists for doing so; and those who objected to the “Axis of Evil” label placed on North Korea, Iran, and Iraq loathed George W. Bush and his supporters. The loathing of Benjamin Netanyahu is simply the latest example of the rule that those who will not confront evil will instead confront those who do. (It’s much safer, after all.)

Read more here.

Remember?

Thanks to Heidi Kutney

Romney the Reagan of 2016?

Will Mitt Romney be seen by voters as the Ronald Reagan of 2016? Jim Guirard writes:

Remember, please, that the late, great Gipper's ideological and political identity began in the "New Deal Left" and moved gradually to the center-left, the center, the center-right, the moderate right, and finally to "Mister Conservative" himself. Once a classical liberal Hollywood union boss, Reagan did not become a Republican until age 53 – moving gradually toward the socio-political and foreign policy right, but never to the far right by today's standards.

And notice now that a decade or more ago, a centrist Mitt Romney began his own trek toward the center-right and moderate conservative positions he holds today – realizing as Reagan did that neither the so-called "liberal" nor the left-illiberal (i.e., the Progressive and Socialist) models work well at all, and are in fact destructive of the Life, Liberty and Happiness and the Separation of Powers assurances of our founding documents.

Read more here.

I find this article to be thought-provoking, which is why I excerpted here. However, I think the author is wrong in assuming that the voters who stayed home in 2012 would now come out in support of Romney. On the contrary, I think the "Tea Party" conservatives have only solidified in their opposition to men like Romney.

GOP Establishment attacks Senators Lee and Cruz

Ronald Reagan governed with bold colors, pointing out the differences between Republican and Democrat visions, and liberty versus Communism visions. Jeffrey Lord writes:

Reagan politics are nothing but the politics of the happy warrior – optimistic, upbeat and determined.

Lord points out that we are now seeing

the opening round in the next two years’ worth of assaults on Reagan Republicans by status quo Ford/Bush Republicans. These are the representatives of what Reagan used to call the “fraternal order” Republicans, the people who prefer for reasons as much social as political to advocate for the Democrat-lite position that has wound up over the decades proving itself to be both a governmental and political disaster.

He shows how defeated Republican moderate Senators Sununu and Bennett are attacking Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee:

The Cruz action last year that led to the Obama shutdown was, claimed one Establishment Republican after another, a disaster from which the GOP would not recover. Yet this fall conservatives swarmed to the polls electing the biggest House GOP majority since 1928 and re-taking the Senate with nine new GOP senators. The Reagan-style message Ted Cruz has been sending was received by voters. But not by John Sununu.

This is the exactly the same mentality that Ronald Reagan himself challenged throughout his political career. In the day, as with Ted Cruz and Mike Lee now, Reagan was pilloried as an extremist. As late as March of 1980, ex-GOP President Gerald Ford, the epitome of the Establishment Republican, was telling the New York Times Reagan was too extreme ever to be elected president. Suffice to say, he was not just wrong but humiliatingly wrong. It stung, too. Ford insisted in 1976 only a GOP moderate like himself could defeat Jimmy Carter. Ford lost. Four years later in 1980 Reagan conservatism carried 44 states. As would later surface in a posthumous book of interviews with Ford by former Newsweek reporter Tom DeFrank, Ford had “contempt” for Reagan. Shades of Jon Huntsman Sr.’s feelings for Mike Lee.

So as America heads into the Christmas holidays, here we go again with attacks on Reagan conservatives like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee by the GOP Establishment. One would think that by now the Sununus, Bennetts and Huntsman Srs. of the world would have learned that the politics of timidity and defending the status quo are, as mentioned, not merely political losers but devastatingly bad government. Embarrassingly, apparently not.

Read more here.
Thanks to Christopher Buckley

Remember when the left mocked "Star Wars?"

Remember in the 1980s when the left ridiculed Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, calling it Star Wars? Israel's Iron Dome has certainly vindicated Reagan's vision.

Three decades after Reagan's landmark proposal, the technical issue is moot. This week, the world has watched Israel's Iron Dome system -- partially funded by the U.S. and incorporating U.S. technology -- perform remarkably well against more than 1,000 Hamas rockets fired from the Gaza Strip. When rockets are launched, Iron Dome calculates almost instantly whether they are headed for populated areas, then intercepts them as needed. The Israeli military says Iron Dome has been 87 to 90 percent effective and is the key reason why there's been only one Israeli civilian fatality.

Please read more here.

John Bolton not a fan of Rand Paul

Whew! John Bolton is not a fan of Rand Paul. He concludes, "If Rand Paul thinks that Ronald Reagan is his model, that is not incoherence, it's fraud."

I have always admired John Bolton for clearly saying what he thinks, unlike most diplomats.

Which one is more like Reagan?

So whose views are more like Ronald Reagan, those of Ted Cruz, or those of Rand Paul? Both men say they are Reaganites in foreign policy. Cruz cites Reagan's peace through strength model that defeated the Soviet Union. Paul cites Reagan's pulling back the troops from Lebanon, after 241 Marines were killed there. PJ Media's editors asks readers to weigh in with their opinions here.

What made Ronald Reagan great?

Stephen Klugewicz makes the case for the greatness of Ronald Reagan. First, Reagan revived the American economy.

Though he reduced federal spending only slightly overall, allowed the United States debt to continue to grow, and failed to dismantle major federal agencies as he promised during the 1980 campaign, Reagan spent his political capital on the central part of his domestic program: cutting taxes across the board for individuals and businesses. This action alone kickstarted the economy, and the nightmare scenarios predicted by critics of Reagan’s “voodoo economics” did not come to pass. The inflation rate fell from 10.4% to 4.2%, unemployment declined from 7.2% to 5.4%, and the American economy experienced its largest period of peacetime expansion up to that time. Along with this, Reagan’s sunny optimism and can-do spirit was contagious and inspired hope for the future in Americans, spurring them to spend, invest, and start businesses. The Carter economic “malaise” and its concomitant crisis of American spirit evaporated.

Second, He won the Cold War.

Reagan the conservative recognized that earthly life pits good against evil, and he firmly believed that the United States, despite its faults past and present, was on the side of good while the Soviet Union was “the focus of evil in the modern world.” Post-Reagan paleo-conservatism has largely adopted a pacifist attitude toward war and conflict and cringes at the notion of going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” Yet, like it or not, there are ideologies, religions, and countries that seek to destroy the West, and to acknowledge such realities does not entail embracing schemes to make the world safe for democracy. Nor does it make one a “neo-con,” but in fact it makes one a conservative, who in the spirit of Tolkien, recognizes that “there is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.”

Third, He used the bully pulpit to support socially conservative positions:

Reagan spoke out often about the importance of family, traditional morality, and the right to life. Though he has been criticized for his failure to do more to fight abortion, the president, of course, has no recognized authority to overturn Supreme Court decisions or to act against federal and state law. What Reagan did as president was to speak out passionately and often for the sanctity of human life—in many speeches, in his State of the Union address, and sometimes off the cuff. His pro-life presidential statements comprise forty-five pages of his official presidential papers.

Fourth, He was a conservative at heart.

Reagan’s constitutional views were decidedly conservative: he publicly called the United States “a federation of sovereign states” and sought to appoint only strict-constructionist federal judges (in this he was not always successful, especially when it came to the Supreme Court). Reagan had been a New Deal liberal until he witnessed the anti-Americanism of leftists in the Screen Actors Guild in the 1950s; after his political conversion, he had little time for the moderate, country-club political set that ruled the Republican party. His speech nominating fellow conservative Barry Goldwater for president at the 1964 Republican—formally called “A Time for Choosing” but known among conservatives simply as “the speech”—is still considered a seminal manifesto of conservatism.

In his abhorrence of war, Reagan was also by nature a conservative. Ironically, he was portrayed as a war-monger by many in the media during his rise to national political prominence; Ronnie “Ray-Gun” some called him. But Reagan was really a peacenik. As president he sent American forces into harm’s way only three times (in Beirut and Grenada in 1983 and in Libya in 1986). His goal in building up the American military in his first term, as he stated repeatedly at the time, was to force the Soviets to come back to the arms negotiating table where the United States, from a position of strength, could forge deals that did not merely reduce nuclear stockpiles, but eliminated them. Reagan had been deeply affected after watching the television movie, The Day After, in 1983. The film portrayed the horror of a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was this nightmare scenario that drove Reagan and to try to force the Soviets to negotiate and to develop his Strategic Defense Initiative, which held out the promise of insulating Americans from nuclear strikes.

Fifth, He was a gentleman.

Perhaps Reagan’s ex-wife, the classy Jane Wyman, said it best upon Reagan’s death in 2004: “America has lost a great president and a great, kind, and gentle man.” Ronald Reagan was indeed a giant among men, a true Man of the West, and conservatives should rightly and proudly claim him as one of their own.