Ronald Reagan

Book Reviewer: America ‘More Polarized’ Because ‘Reagan Brought Right-Wing Politics Into the Mainstream’
By Tom Johnson | June 21, 2015 | 2:02 PM EDT

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). Roosevelt enacted structural reforms to protect the most vulnerable members of society, [whereas] Reagan systematically set about dismantling those reforms.”

Moreover, argued O’Donnell, Reagan influenced today’s politics for the worse. O’Donnell calls him “the author of many of our current predicaments as a nation and a society…The government-is-the-enemy mind-set that pervades the right today comes to us from Barry Goldwater via Ronald Reagan. As our roads, bridges, and schools fall apart around us, we have them to thank.”

Dan Rather Blames Watergate, Reagan Years for GOP’s ‘Strong Turn to the Right,’ Size of 2016 Field
By Curtis Houck | June 18, 2015 | 3:58 PM EDT

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.

AP's Josh Boak Does Bogus 'Fact Check' on Jeb Bush's 4 Percent Growth Goal
By Tom Blumer | June 17, 2015 | 11:41 PM EDT

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 goal, namely 2016 presidential candidate and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush's belief that the U.S. economy is fully capable of achieving annual growth of 4 percent — even though it's been done before nationally, and was accomplished in the Sunshine State during Bush's own tenure.

CBS Plays Up GOP Candidates 'Getting Slammed By the Musicians'
By Matthew Balan | June 17, 2015 | 8:50 PM EDT

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?"

WP Writer: Far-Right Shift Drove Out 'Conservatives' Like Chafee from 'Shrunken GOP Tent'
By Clay Waters | June 5, 2015 | 11:55 AM EDT

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?

Blogger: Conservatives ‘Stole Civility, Decency, Rationality and Democracy…While Limbaugh Distracted the Masses’
By Tom Johnson | May 31, 2015 | 1:04 PM EDT

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 up a man who would defend and attack the same ideas and politicians Reagan defended.” That man-prop was Rush Limbaugh.

“Reaganism shifted wealth upwards…and the folks behind the Limbaugh project didn’t want the gravy train to end,” wrote Tucker. “What better way to keep the good times going than by hiring Limbaugh to promote Reaganism into the 1990s and beyond, while rhetorically butchering anyone who disagreed with the 40th president’s wayward economic policies? Limbaugh was simply the vagrant recruited to distract the cops while the thieves looted the bank.”

Critic: In the 1980s, Letterman’s Style of Comedy ‘Probably Helped Neuter the American Left’
By Tom Johnson | May 18, 2015 | 6:07 PM EDT

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 Tuesday in Salon, “the irreverent irony ‘Late Night’ brought to the table probably helped neuter the American left…The helpless bemusement behind it certainly became -- for anyone aiming at social or political or economic change -- a dead end.” In Timberg’s telling, laughter, rather than activism, became the “default response” to “the stupid stuff thrown to us by cheap consumerism and the Reagan-Thatcher takeover.”

Blogger Jonathan Chait: Thanks to Reagan’s Moderation and Bush’s Unpopularity, GOP Has No ‘Usable Past’
By Tom Johnson | May 14, 2015 | 2:26 PM EDT

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) George H. W. Bush “betrayed Reaganism”; and 3) George W. Bush suffered a “second-term collapse into deep unpopularity” despite “govern[ing] in a more consistently conservative fashion than Reagan had.”

On Maher, Crystal Delights in Telling Anecdote Placing Reagan in Hell
By Brent Baker | May 9, 2015 | 3:02 PM EDT

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.

FX’s The Americans Wraps Up Season With KGB Agents Distraught at Reagan’s ‘Evil Empire’ Speech
By Brent Baker | April 25, 2015 | 9:47 PM EDT

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 Wallace.

AP's Crutsinger Ignores Recession Red Flag, But Has Obsessed Over Potential Recessions During GOP Administrations
By Tom Blumer | April 24, 2015 | 10:52 PM EDT

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 described as "a key category that serves as a proxy for future business investment" — came in with yet another minus sign. That category's 0.5 percent decline, though noted, had far more significance than Crutsinger gave it.

Rand Paul vs. Media: Humor Tips From Reagan and JFK
By Jeffrey Lord | April 11, 2015 | 3:01 PM EDT

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.