Ronald Reagan

“Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” is a well-known tune from the Golden Age of Broadway. A Friday Salon article made it sound as if a song about how today’s conservatives feel could be called “Besieged, Badgered and Beleaguered.” In a piece pegged to Sarah Palin’s endorsement of Donald Trump, Andrew O’Hehir opined that the right “has become exactly what it has long accused the left of being,…

Appearing as a panel member on Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, author and former Newsweek editor-in-chief Jon Meacham made a crack suggesting he would prefer dog excrement for President over GOP candidates Ted Cruz or Donald Trump, as host Maher asked panel members which of the two Republican frontrunners they would pick if they had no other choice. Meacham also tied former President…

You could have set your watch to it. When a leftist local, gubernatorial or presidential regime enters its final year after demonstrating its corruption, incompetence and inexcusable disrespect for law and procedure to that point, someone in the press will directly or indirectly excuse them by saying that the entity that person is running is "ungovernable," or that "its best days are behind it…

Politifact, the leftist propaganda mill disguised as a "fact-checking" web site, always has its "Pants on Fire" matches at the ready for conservatives and Republicans. This is remarkable, given that it has never given any Hillary Clinton statement or campaign assertion a "Pants on Fire" evaluation. The one example it cites falsely claims to "involve" her, but has nothing to do with anything she…

On Friday's Erin Burnett OutFront on CNN, during a segment devoted to discrediting President Ronald Reagan's conservative credentials and painting modern Republicans as far right, host Erin Burnett proclaimed that Republicans "would hate that guy," and joined with CNN presidential historian Douglas Brinkley in suggesting that Democrat Hillary Clinton's views on some issues are closer to Reagan's.

During the 1980s, a favorite talking point of liberals was that President Reagan tended to confuse movies with reality. In a Friday article, Zack Beauchamp accused a current Republican presidential candidate, Ted Cruz, of doing something similar, and alleged that the GOPers who took part in Thursday’s prime-time debate stand for a “view of the world [that] is as much a work of fiction as” Michael…

After having spent seven and a half minutes on Tuesday trumpeting President Obama’s executive actions on gun control, CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley eventually turned his newscast to the 2016 election and invoked Ronald Reagan in lecturing Republicans that “he wouldn't recognize the melee just four weeks before Iowa.”

Establishment press pundits often wring their hands over how supposedly far to the right the Republican Party and conservatives in general have moved since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, that flaming moderate, to the point of claiming that Reagan would never be accepted by today's "wingnuts." They seem to actually believe this amusing nonsense. In a classic example demonstrating where the real…

By the late summer of 1977, Jimmy Carter had been president for only a few months, but if you knew which way the cultural and political winds were blowing, he seemed unlikely to win a second term. That’s because on May 25 of that year, Star Wars had opened, and its colossal success both foreshadowed and helped to revive a mindset that carried Ronald Reagan to the White House. That’s the word from…

Starting with the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, several mass shootings have brought about considerable debate regarding restrictions on access to firearms for the mentally ill. D.R. Tucker argued last Sunday that denying guns to “deranged individuals” should have been a special cause for conservatives long before -- specifically, since March 1981, when John Hinckley tried to assassinate…

Offering his initial thoughts on Tuesday’s GOP presidential debate on the 11:00 p.m. Eastern edition of CNN’s AC360, CNN political commentator and Hillary Clinton super PAC head Paul Begala complained that Republicans possess “dominant emotion” of “fear” that they’ve somehow used to instill fear in Americans following recent terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. 

“There'll be scary ghost stories,” sang Andy Williams on a Christmas album of long, long ago. In a Monday post, Esquire’s Pierce suggested that “ghost stories” of a sort -- “obvious lies,” as he also put it -- have become part and parcel of Republican campaigning, and that “as with so many things, this all began with Ronald Reagan.” Pierce argued that Donald Trump is “the logical end product of…

On Wednesday, the Associated Press's Josh Boak added to the wire service's collection of weak "Getaway Day" business journalism by declaring that new-home sales "recovered in October." No they didn't. The seasonally adjusted annual rate of 495,000 units reported by the Census Bureau was the fourth-lowest monthly level seen this year, even well below the 521,000 and 545,000 reported in the…

During a discussion of Wednesday's interview with GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush on New Day, CNN's John King gave a glimpse into the negative mindset of media liberals toward former President George W. Bush such that they have difficulty paying any sort of compliment toward him without having to insert a qualifier like "whatever you think about him."