Ronald Reagan

On the plus side, here you have an example of a liberal not blaming George W. Bush for, well, whatever. Instead, this specific left winger, radio talker Thom Hartmann, is going with the liberal fallback position - It's All Reagan's Fault.  To earlier generations of leftists, Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy also proved useful as all-purpose boogeymen who could be cited repeatedly in vain…

Craig Shirley, author of several large tomes on Ronald Reagan's political history, is merciless on Real Clear Politics toward MSNBC star Chris Matthews and his new book on "Tip and the Gipper." This isn't a book about Reagan or Tip O'Neill, he writes. "It is the history of Chris Matthews before he became the Chris Matthews we see on cable television today. It falls into the category of micro…

The old Norm McDonald joke was “Germans love David Hasselhoff.” The liberal talk radio equivalent is “Thom Hartmann really hates Ronald Reagan.” On Thursday afternoon’s show, Hartmann blamed Reagan for this whole Tea Party trend of “anti-American crazies who hate our government,” with that unpatriotic hatred somehow including veterans of every war, and George Washington, who “signed the…

The best-selling author Tom Clancy died at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital at the age of 66 after a brief illness. Our condolences go to Clancy’s family. Foxnews.com reports Clancy’s career was jump-started by President Reagan saying he couldn’t put down “The Hunt for Red October.” (Historian Tevi Troy confirms this.) For liberals, Clancy’s name became synonymous with rah-rah patriotism…

As NewsBusters previously reported, Tea Party Congressman Raul Labrador (R-Id.) on Sunday's Meet the Press made a fool of MSNBC's Chris Matthews over his lack of knowledge regarding how many times the government shut down when his former boss Tip O'Neill was Speaker of the House. As it turns out, the Washington Post also mocked Matthews for his ignorance last Thursday in a piece deliciously…

On Monday’s edition of The Colbert Report on Comedy Central, fake conservative Stephen Colbert mocked the “fan-fiction foreign policy” of Reagan admirers. He ran clips of Bill O’Reilly telling James Carville that Reagan would have gone to war in Syria, and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen saying Reagan "would stand up to this...he would say chemical use was unacceptable." Then Colbert claimed Reagan…

Earlier this evening at NewsBusters, Tim Graham noted that the Washington Post gave space, in an item entitled "Reagan Historians to Decry 'Ahistorical Caricature' as Racist in 'The Butler' Movie," to refute the false portrayal of the Gipper in that film. One more anecdote should be added in rebuttal to counter the "Reagan was a racist" lie. I'm referring to an event in 1982. Note that the…

Kudos to the Outlook section editors at The Washington Post for allowing presidential historians Steven Hayward, Paul Kengor, Craig Shirley, and Kiron Skinner to address how the movie “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” is inaccurate and unfair about Reagan, who they say proved his lack of bigotry in Dixon, Illinois, in Hollywood, and in the White House. They recalled a 1983 reception for the National…

Well, if you can't say anything good about how your guy's foreign policy is going, you can at least try to trash one of his predecessors so your guy doesn't look so bad. That would appear to be the idea behind David E. Sanger's attempt at the New York Times today to falsely inform readers that the two towering leaders of the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, angrily disagreed over…

Michael Reagan appeared on Fox & Friends to elaborate on his argument that the new film "Lee Daniels' The Butler" reinvents history to make Ronald Reagan a racist. Fox showed a clip of Jane Fonda's Nancy Reagan telling the butler that she would talk (backward) Ronnie into letting the butler be a guest at a White House state dinner instead of a servant.

This past July’s dismal jobs report was no outlier. Job gains during the Obama recovery have been slow at best. If monthly job gains going back to 1946 are ranked in order of best to worst, the difference between job growth during the first four years of economic recovery under President Ronald Reagan and Obama is astounding. Total job growth during the first four years of the Obama recovery…

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough has been making some fairly conservative arguments on his program as of late. On Thursday’s Morning Joe, for instance, he took his liberal guests to task, blasting Politico’s Jim VandeHei and The New York Time’s Steve Rattner for characterizing the House GOP as a do-nothing, radical conference. Scarborough insisted that Republicans have stood for the same…

With Grover Norquist’s help, Bill Maher once again made a fool of himself Friday evening. In the middle of an HBO Real Time discussion about ObamaCare, the host seemed shocked to hear that Bob Dole isn’t a real conservative leading Norquist to derisively comment to former Congressman Connie Mack (R-Fl.), “He doesn’t understand the difference between Reagan and Dole” (video follows with…

On the Friday, June 21, PoliticsNation on MSNBC, host Al Sharpton brought up former President Ronald Reagan giving a speech in 1980 near the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights activists were famously murdered in 1963. Referring to then-candidate Reagan's first speech after the Republican convention which he delivered at the Neshoba County Fair a few miles from…