Ronald Reagan

Conservatives and liberals often agree that the media have played an outsized role in making Donald Trump the Republican presidential frontrunner but differ about how they’ve done it. (Here’s a view from the right.) Lefty Esquire blogger Pierce argues that the list of offenders in this regard is long; in fact, it includes every journalist who’s failed to point out over the last few decades that…

When was the last time a badly trailing presidential candidate in either major party won relatively late-in-the-game contests by lopsided victory margins of greater than 70-30, as Bernie Sanders did in Washington today, and greater than 80-20, as Sanders did in Alaska? I'm virtually certain that the answer to that question, regardless of what happens in Hawaii's Democratic primary much later…

Quite a few conservatives were incensed over the photo of President Obama and other officials, including John Kerry and at least one of Cuba’s many vice presidents, standing against the backdrop of a several-stories-tall steel relief mural of Che Guevara. Consequently, quite a few liberals told those conservatives, in effect, to get a life. One of those liberals was Steve Benen, the primary…

The Americans returns tonight with its fourth season debut at 10 PM EDT/PDT. It will pick up after last season’s dramatic ending which juxtaposed then-President Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” speech with two undercover KGB agents in the U.S. distraught by the charge as their frantic teenage daughter, who just recently learned their true identity, gets on the phone to tell her pastor that her…

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews was still hard at work making befuddling statements early Wednesday morning following the third installment of Super Tuesday with comments that mocked “neocons” as wanting everyone to go into battle “for Israel” as “blah, blah, blah” while fellow panelist Joy Reid attacked Rubio’s concession speech as unoriginal and mash-ups of Reagan and President Barack Obama.

Michael Lind thinks that movement conservatives are becoming a minor force in American politics, supplanted less by liberal Democrats than by what might be called Trump Republicans. In a Wednesday article for Politico, Lind contended that growing “populist discontent” is bringing about “the gradual replacement of Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan conservatism by something more like European national…

Hillary Clinton broke a cardinal rule of the angry left –saying something nice about a Republican who recently passed away. After she was savaged for saying Nancy Reagan had been out front in confronting AIDS, an angry backlash ensued, and Clinton quickly fell into line. Reporter Amy Chozick really let the leftist insults fly in the longer online version, hitting both the Reagans and Hillary in a…

Appearing as a guest on CNN Friday afternoon to discuss the funeral of former First Lady Nancy Reagan, CNN political commentator Carl Bernstein at one point characterized her position on stem cell research as "to hell with" the "Republican right-wing shibboleth that stem cell research was off limits for religious reasons." Neither Bernstein nor host Brooke Baldwin made a distinction between…

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…