Ronald Reagan

Presidential nominees sometimes choose one of the candidates they defeated during primary/caucus season as their running mate for the general election. In that tradition, the Washington Monthly's D.R. Tucker recommends that Hillary Clinton, assuming she’s the Democratic nominee, name Bernie Sanders to the ticket, adding that Hillary “would have to signal that [Sanders] would be something of a co-…

Michael O’Donnell is eager to push back against the belief that Reagan ranks with Franklin Roosevelt as a great 20th-century president. In his review of H.W. Brands’ Reagan: The Life in the Washington Monthly’s June/July/August issue, O’Donnell wrote that “Roosevelt saved the nation from an existential threat (the Great Depression), while Reagan merely steered it out of a funk (the 1970s).…

Appearing with journalist Carl Bernstein on Wednesday’s CNN Tonight to promote the upcoming episode of CNN’s The Seventies on Watergate, former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather decried the Republican Party’s “strong turn to the right” and blamed the size of party’s 2016 field on the Watergate scandal and the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

It seems as if the establishment press has ruined virtually everything connected with journalism. The whole idea of "fact-checking" is certainly no exception. The thoroughly misnamed Politifact pioneered this particular form of disinformation. The Associated Press, apparently determined to give that web site a run for its money, devoted a writeup to "fact-checking" (i.e., virtually ridiculing) a…

On Wednesday's CBS Evening News, Jan Crawford hyped the latest "dust-up between the musician and the politician," and underlined that "rare is the Republican candidate who isn't told to stop the music – even if...they paid licensing fees." She asked a GOP strategist, "Why is it it's always Republicans who are getting slammed by the musicians for using their songs?"

Catherine Rampell, a Washington Post opinion columnist and previously a New York Times business reporter, rehashed the tired old cliché that the Republican Party has shifted so far right that not even Ronald Reagan would be welcome in "today's shrunken GOP tent." We also learn that liberal, anti-war, pro-partial birth abortion Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee was actually a conservative. Who knew?

When did Ronald Reagan’s tenure as president of the United States end? Officially, on January 20, 1989, but Washington Monthly blogger D. R. Tucker posits that in a sense Reagan stayed in office well after that. In a Saturday post, Tucker asserted that in 1988, some right-wing “ideologues” sought to “artificially extend the Reagan administration past its constitutionally limited time by propping…

Over the past decade or so, David Letterman has become outspokenly liberal, but according to cultural critic Scott Timberg, the seemingly apolitical comedy that Dave did in the 1980s actually hurt the left. Specifically, it served as a sort of opiate which left his audience disinclined to push back against Reaganism. “For those on the progressive or liberal side of the aisle,” wrote Timberg last…

There’s been plenty of mockery of the three actual or potential Republican presidential candidates who named Ronald Reagan as the greatest living president, but New York magazine's Chait feels their pain, sort of. Chait observed in a Wednesday post that GOPers are in a bind when choosing the best living POTUS given that 1) for obvious reasons, they wouldn’t pick Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton; 2)…

Appearing on Bill Maher’s HBO show Friday night, actor/comedian Billy Crystal delighted in recounting a phone call he supposedly received from the late Robin Williams on the day of Ronald Reagan’s funeral in 2004. Crystal, now a star of FX’s The Comedians, impersonated Williams impersonating Reagan calling from Heaven and wondering why it was so hot.

A great third season ending Wednesday night on FX’s The Americans, as the episode 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 parents are Russians. Plus, a cameo of the voice of Chris…

Today's Census Bureau report on durable goods orders was like a poorly made cake with delicious frosting: tasty at first, but awful when fully experienced. The frosting in today's report was that overall orders increased in March by a seasonally adjusted 4.0 percent. The trouble is that an important, widely recognized element of that report — what the Associated Press's Martin Crutsinger vaguely…

Rush Limbaugh, as is frequently the case, was right. The other day, after a media kerfuffle surrounding Senator Rand Paul’s announcement and a rash of stories about the Senator’s televised go-rounds with NBC’s Today host Savannah Guthrie and an earlier one with CNBC’s Kelly Evans, Rush pointed out the obvious. Guthrie treated Paul as an oddball, practically an alien.

A favorite historical claim of Ronald Reagan-bashers is that he showed signs of senility in office. The New York Times is still fiddling around on this with the latest “scientific” proof in a March 30 article headlined “Parsing Ronald Reagan’s Words for Early Signs of Alzheimer’s.” The author, Dr. Lawrence K. Altman, was a Times medical correspondent for 40 years. Craig Shirley, a longtime…