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.
Ronald Reagan
Salon Writer: Wes Craven’s Freddy Krueger Hinted at Dark Side of Reagan’s ‘Right-Wing Counterrevolution’
By Tom Johnson | September 5, 2015 | 1:26 PM EDT 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 Reagan years.”
By Clay Waters | August 29, 2015 | 9:02 PM EDT
Well, he may have been a "cynical figurehead," a "sinister puppet master" and "saber-rattling menace," but he did have nice hair. President Ronald Reagan is still a reliable figure of mockery in the liberal entertainment world, and a compliment about his hair was the most flattering thing in a New York Times story on the current crop of Reagan impersonations on 1980's-themed shows.
By Curtis Houck | August 21, 2015 | 12:56 PM EDT
During a segment on Thursday’s The Last Word about Jimmy Carter’s cancer diagnosis, MSNBC national correspondent Joy Reid complained that voters rejected “Carter’s decency and goodness” in the 1980 presidential election in favor of the “bluster” possessed by “cowboy” Ronald Reagan.
By Tom Blumer | August 8, 2015 | 12:04 AM EDT
On Friday, in his desire to help his employer outdo Politifact as the last place to go for accurate fact-checking, the Associated Press's Josh Lederman "fact-checked" Jeb Bush's belief that the U.S. economy can grow annually at an average rate of 4 percent.
As seen in my Friday NewsBusters post, when the AP reporter "fact-checked" assertions that really are facts, specifically Bush's claim that during his two terms as Florida's governor the state added 1.3 million payroll jobs (actually, it was 1.5 million according to the federal government's more comprehensive Household Survey), he brought up irrelevant points that did nothing to change the absolute truth of what Bush said. But in reviewing Bush's 4 percent potential growth assertion, Lederman wasn't even evaluating a fact; he was instead "fact checking" a goal — one which has frequently been met in the past — and acted as if its future achievement is virtually impossible.
In Huge NYT Mag Cover Story, Jim Rutenberg Sees New Jim Crow in North Carolina, Smears Reagan as Racist
By Clay Waters | August 2, 2015 | 8:17 PM EDT The New York Times Magazine cover story by political correspondent Jim Rutenberg, "A Dream Undone -- Inside the 50-year campaign to roll back the Voting Rights Act," is a 10-part, 10,000-word doorstop (issued with the baleful threat "The first in a series") comparing current attempts to stop voter fraud as a return to Jim Crow, with particular focus on North Carolina. Rutenberg also relayed more Times misinformation about Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign and his appeal to "states rights" in Mississippi.
By Scott Whitlock | July 31, 2015 | 4:41 PM EDT
Liberal MSNBC anchor Lawrence O'Donnell on Thursday night slammed Ronald Reagan, sneering that he was the "Donald Trump of his time." O'Donnell asserted that, just like Trump and Sarah Palin, Reagan was a liar on subjects like Medicare. Comparing Reagan to Trump, O'Donnell insulted, "One of the loudest opponents of Medicare was actor Ronald Reagan, who was then the Donald Trump of his time, a celebrity with no governing experience and very forceful opinions about government."
By Scott Whitlock | July 29, 2015 | 5:24 PM EDT
According to Larry King on Tuesday, the modern Republican Party is so conservative that it would reject Ronald Reagan. The former CNN anchor interviewed struggling Democratic candidate Lincoln Chafee. After King wondered "what happened to your party, you old party," the former Republican sneered, "It moved south. Back in the '60s, President Nixon had what they called the southern strategy." King concluded on his show carried on the Russian RT network: "In fact, that party now might even reject Nixon and Reagan."
Salon Writer: The Cosby Show ‘Enabled Some of the Ugliest Reagan-Era Fantasies’ About Race and Class
By Tom Johnson | July 12, 2015 | 2:26 PM EDT Amid mounting evidence of Bill Cosby’s depraved behavior, many have changed their minds about Cosby the person. Should they also reconsider, for very different reasons, their affection for his megahit sitcom, The Cosby Show? Lefty writer Chauncey DeVega thinks so. In a Sunday article for Salon, DeVega opined that the series “lied to its white viewers about the nature of racism, white supremacy, and white privilege” and “enable[d] the colorblind white racist fiction and delusion that anti-black racism is a thing of the past.”
The Huxtables, claimed DeVega, were “an African-American version of the model-minority myth, one of the favorite deflections and rejoinders of white racists in the post-civil rights era, where there are ‘exceptional’ minorities and the rest are failures because they do not work hard, are lazy, and complain too much about white racism. While unintentional, ‘The Cosby Show’ enabled some of the ugliest Reagan-era fantasies.”
By Brent Baker | July 10, 2015 | 2:09 AM EDT
Reviewing Reagan: The Life, by historian H.W. Brands, USA Today White House reporter Gregory Korte recited tired anti-Reagan cliches favored by liberals as he complained about “some notable omissions” in the book. In his piece which appeared in the “Life” section of Thursday’s newspaper, Korte regretted that “Brands makes no mention of Reagan’s 1980 ‘states rights’ speech in Philadelphia, Miss.” and, Korte rued, “Also missing: Any mention of the apocryphal ‘welfare queens,’ the epidemic in homelessness during his presidency, or hot-microphone threats to start bombing Russia in five minutes.”
By Tom Blumer | June 30, 2015 | 2:46 PM EDT
In a column at ForeignPolicy.com, a former Obama administration defense official who "served as a counselor to the U.S. defense undersecretary for policy from 2009 to 2011" has asked: "Can Gay Marriage Defeat the Islamic State?"
Rosa Brooks, who "is a law professor at Georgetown University," is serious. Her earnestness and deep ignorance are especially troubling, because it's clear that there are many people who "think" just like her who are still in the Obama administration and at the State Department (See: John Kerry's slow-motion sellout in Iranian negotiations).
Blogger: Bernie Sanders As Vice President ‘Would Finally Put the Corpse of Reaganism Into the Ground’
By Tom Johnson | June 28, 2015 | 12:58 PM EDT 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-President, the progressive answer to Dick Cheney.”
Tucker sneered that “a Clinton-Sanders ticket would, of course, put the American right on suicide watch” and asserted that if the two were elected, it would “finally put the corpse of Reaganism into the ground once and for all. Sanders is the living refutation of Reaganism, and the Vice Presidency would provide an effective bully pulpit to push back against the false arguments made by those who still worship the false idol who was the 40th president of the United States.”