Ronald Reagan

A promo run at the end of last week’s Fargo, to plug tonight’s (Nov. 9) new episode on FX, showed Ronald Reagan, in 1979, shaking hands at a campaign stop as a character out of his earshot declared: “I’m not shaking his hand.” Asked why not, the man explained: “Because the man made a movie with a monkey. It wouldn’t be dignified.”

It was an '80s flashback in the New York Times Sunday book review. Serge Schmemann attacked a new book about Russian dictator Vladimir Putin by Garry Kasparov. Schmemann seemed to take personally Kasparov's criticism of Barack Obama and his celebration of Ronald Reagan. Schmemann gave all the credit to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: "...ultimately it was Gorbachev, more than any American or…

On Friday's Real Time on HBO, host Bill Maher aimed venom at a number of conservative public figures as he referred to Uncle Ben's rice in a racially tinged joke about Dr. Ben Carson, and asserted that it is President Reagan's fault that many middle aged white Americans have personal problems that lead them to drunkenness, heroin addiction, and early death, as the HBO host tagged them "Trump…

The heyday of patent medicine, medicine shows, and related phenomena has been over for more than a century, right? Yes and no, implied Esquire's Pierce in a Thursday post. While it’s true that (for example) Coca-Cola no longer is sold as a cure for impotence, political snake oil, Pierce asserted, has become the chief product of the Republican party. Pierce’s peg was Ben Carson’s involvement with…

Wednesday is the thirty-sixth anniversary of the seizure of the United States embassy in Tehran, Iran. Moreover, it is the thirty-fifth anniversary of what D.R. Tucker calls “one of the great tragedies in American history”: the election of Ronald Reagan as president. (The two events are, of course, related.) Tucker asserted in a Sunday post that “Reagan’s election nearly destroyed this country”…

Say, Tom, maybe you could lead a movement to retroactively impeach George W. Bush . . . On today's Morning Joe, Tom Brokaw, downplayed the significance of Benghazi, suggesting instead that what we really needed was "a big congressional investigation about the decision to go to war in the first place in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist." Brokaw also underlined that more…

Craig Shirley has already written two terrific history books about Ronald Reagan, chronicling  the 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns. Now he has delivered the trifecta: Last Act: The Final Years and Emerging Legacy of Ronald Reagan. After spending considerable time at the Reagan Library and conducting interviews with those who knew Reagan best, Shirley presents a narrative about Reagan’s…

On Thursday's New Day, during a discussion of GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump's interview from earlier on the show, CNN political analyst and Daily Beast editor-in-chief John Avlon suggested that America was not really so "great" during the Ronald Reagan years partly because, on "gay civil rights, things were not getting done." He also went on to repeat the discredited myth that, in 1968…

Proving he’s a liberal first and a comedian second, Stephen Colbert, who had a very friendly session last Friday with socialist Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, was more hostile on Monday night to the political positions of Republican presidential contender Senator Ted Cruz, whom he described as “far right.” Colbert pushed him to match Ronald Reagan by agreeing to raise taxes and…

Apropos of Wednesday night’s Republican debates, Esquire’s Charles Pierce worried that political reporters may be treating the race for the party’s presidential nomination as if it were a Brad Thor novel rather than a highly consequential real-world event. “How do you cover a campaign in which 15 candidates are running on the basis of things that simply are not true…that simply do not exist?”…

View co-host Whoopi Goldberg on Thursday used the Republican presidential debate as an excuse to trash Ronald Reagan, assuring people that “he wasn’t all that.” Reading from note cards, Goldberg began: “I just want to point out that, you know, he did some things that were not particularly good for the country.” In a humorous moment, the View crew vainly struggled to remember Reagan’s 1984 “…

Closing out Wednesday’s NBC Nightly News, liberal correspondent and MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell played the role of Ronald Reagan biographer in using the late former president to attack the current Republican presidential field and ruled that Reagan’s “message was infused with sunny optimism” and represents “the flip side of today's angry rhetoric.”

In a report for MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Wednesday, political correspondent Kasie Hunt used the upcoming Republican debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California to proclaim the GOP to be “all but extinct” in the Golden State.

Gordon Gekko of Wall Street would be a popular choice of liberals for the 1980s movie character who best illuminated the supposedly ugly truth about the Reagan era, but he’s not Andrew O’Hehir’s choice. In a Monday analysis of the films of the late Wes Craven, O'Hehir stated that Freddy Krueger, from Craven’s 1984 movie A Nightmare on Elm Street, was “the most potent pop-culture signifier of the…