Ronald Reagan

Neal Gabler is an author and cultural critic who may be best known to NewsBusters readers as a longtime panelist on Fox News Watch. On Friday, lefty sites such as BillMoyers.com and Salon ran an article by Gabler in which he argued that for several decades, the mainstream media have greased the skids for movement conservatism and the Republican party. For example, Gabler asserted that after…

Has Al Hunt ever heard of de mortuis nil nisi bonum? Apparently not. On the day she was laid to rest, Hunt found it necessary to repeatedly assert that Nancy Reagan "was not a good mother." Interviewed by John Heilemann on today's With All Due Respect, here was Hunt: "she was a formidable person. Sometimes unpleasant, not a great mother, but she loved her Ronnie and had great political instincts…

If you’re a conservative brainiac, contends New York magazine’s Chait, something’s been nagging at you, especially since Donald Trump started riding high in the polls: the realization that so many of your fellow right-wingers are dumb. “The conservative movement’s tightening grip over the Republican Party has coincided with its elevation of leaders incapable of explaining their policies cogently…

Vox editor-in-chief Klein doesn’t often look back fondly at the good old days of the conservative movement, but he did so in a Sunday post inspired by the death of Nancy Reagan. Klein thinks conservatism was at its best in the 1980s, for which he gives considerable credit to the First Couple of the era. Klein wrote that the “political genius” of the Reagans “was to shape the pessimistic, angry…

Offering her memories of the late Nancy Reagan on Monday’s CBS Evening News, 60 Minutes correspondent and former White House reporter Lesley Stahl voiced her approval for how the late First Lady often pushed husband and President Ronald Reagan “to stop talking as much as he was on the social issues” like the abortion and the Second Amendment.

On Friday's Real Time show on HBO, host Bill Maher repeatedly accused Republicans of exploiting racism for political advantage as he asserted that the GOP "made a Faustian deal with the racist devil" and went on to repeat an old debunked claim that Ronald Reagan began his 1980 presidential campaign at the site of a racially motivated murder. He went on to compare the GOP to a house which has…

Former First Lady Nancy Reagan died today. The Associated Press's Christopher Weber, in an otherwise predictably passive-aggressive obituary, got one thing right: "The Reagans' mutual devotion over 52 years of marriage was legendary." How nice of him to acknowledge that now. The fact is that while it was visible during Ronald Reagan's presidency, everyone with eyes to see could recognize the…

As former Newsweek editor-in-chief Evan Thomas appeared as a guest on MSNBC Sunday to discuss former First Lady Nancy Reagan's passing, host Chris Matthews and Thomas used Presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon to chastise the current Republicans for being too unwilling to compromise. After Thomas asserted that Reagan and Nixon "are rolling over in their graves" and recalled that Nancy…

"Donald Trump was up at a podium, saying that America had gone weak and was headed for disaster," but here's the twist, Michael Daly wrote this Super Tuesday at the Daily Beast website, "This was 1987 and Trump was denouncing the course of the country as set by President Reagan, who was famously known for being the nicest of guys."

Scatology has typically been out of bounds in mainstream-media political commentary. (Not in all political commentary, of course. For example, actor John Cusack once called former actor Ronald Reagan “a criminal who used the Constitution as toilet paper.”) Nonetheless, Michael Tomasky went there in a Wednesday column trashing Senate Republicans for refusing to consider any Supreme Court…

Ronald Reagan’s admirers called him the Great Communicator, but to his detractors he was more like the Great Demonizer, crystallizing hostility toward groups ranging from the poor to left-wing protesters at UC Berkeley. In a Sunday post, Esquire's Pierce argued that Donald Trump has a similar talent for focusing outrage, and because of it, he’s attracting the same kind of supporters that Reagan…

Appearing as a guest on Sunday's Reliable Sources, CNN presidential historian Douglas Brinkley claimed that President Ronald Reagan "used to fabricate stories," and alluded to a story about the Holocaust as an example. After fellow guest James Fallows of The Atlantic recalled possible holes in stories told by GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, lamenting that voters do not seem to care,…

Chris Matthews, for all his faults, has a rather encyclopedia knowledge of modern political history. So it's rather puzzling that during MSNBC coverage this afternoon he insisted that Ronald Reagan, like 1952 New Hampshire primary winner Dwight Eisenhower and likely 2016 New Hampshire primary winner Donald Trump, didn't get into politics until middle-age. While it's true he didn't seek elective…

The kids in The Family Circus blame their misbehavior on gremlins with names like Ida Know and Not Me. The Week’s Damon Linker believes grown-up conservatives do something similar when they deny what Linker sees as the plain truth: that they run the Republican party. In a Tuesday column, Linker contended that the right-wing “counter-establishment” that first gained a share of power in 1981 now “…