Ronald Reagan

Quite a few conservatives were incensed over the photo of President Obama and other officials, including John Kerry and at least one of Cuba’s many vice presidents, standing against the backdrop of a several-stories-tall steel relief mural of Che Guevara. Consequently, quite a few liberals told those conservatives, in effect, to get a life. One of those liberals was Steve Benen, the primary…

The Americans returns tonight with its fourth season debut at 10 PM EDT/PDT. It will pick up after last season’s dramatic ending which 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…

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews was still hard at work making befuddling statements early Wednesday morning following the third installment of Super Tuesday with comments that mocked “neocons” as wanting everyone to go into battle “for Israel” as “blah, blah, blah” while fellow panelist Joy Reid attacked Rubio’s concession speech as unoriginal and mash-ups of Reagan and President Barack Obama.

Michael Lind thinks that movement conservatives are becoming a minor force in American politics, supplanted less by liberal Democrats than by what might be called Trump Republicans. In a Wednesday article for Politico, Lind contended that growing “populist discontent” is bringing about “the gradual replacement of Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan conservatism by something more like European national…

Hillary Clinton broke a cardinal rule of the angry left –saying something nice about a Republican who recently passed away. After she was savaged for saying Nancy Reagan had been out front in confronting AIDS, an angry backlash ensued, and Clinton quickly fell into line. Reporter Amy Chozick really let the leftist insults fly in the longer online version, hitting both the Reagans and Hillary in a…

Appearing as a guest on CNN Friday afternoon to discuss the funeral of former First Lady Nancy Reagan, CNN political commentator Carl Bernstein at one point characterized her position on stem cell research as "to hell with" the "Republican right-wing shibboleth that stem cell research was off limits for religious reasons." Neither Bernstein nor host Brooke Baldwin made a distinction between…

Neal Gabler is an author and cultural critic who may be best known to NewsBusters readers as a longtime panelist on Fox News Watch. On Friday, lefty sites such as BillMoyers.com and Salon ran an article by Gabler in which he argued that for several decades, the mainstream media have greased the skids for movement conservatism and the Republican party. For example, Gabler asserted that after…

Has Al Hunt ever heard of de mortuis nil nisi bonum? Apparently not. On the day she was laid to rest, Hunt found it necessary to repeatedly assert that Nancy Reagan "was not a good mother." Interviewed by John Heilemann on today's With All Due Respect, here was Hunt: "she was a formidable person. Sometimes unpleasant, not a great mother, but she loved her Ronnie and had great political instincts…

If you’re a conservative brainiac, contends New York magazine’s Chait, something’s been nagging at you, especially since Donald Trump started riding high in the polls: the realization that so many of your fellow right-wingers are dumb. “The conservative movement’s tightening grip over the Republican Party has coincided with its elevation of leaders incapable of explaining their policies cogently…

Vox editor-in-chief Klein doesn’t often look back fondly at the good old days of the conservative movement, but he did so in a Sunday post inspired by the death of Nancy Reagan. Klein thinks conservatism was at its best in the 1980s, for which he gives considerable credit to the First Couple of the era. Klein wrote that the “political genius” of the Reagans “was to shape the pessimistic, angry…

Offering her memories of the late Nancy Reagan on Monday’s CBS Evening News, 60 Minutes correspondent and former White House reporter Lesley Stahl voiced her approval for how the late First Lady often pushed husband and President Ronald Reagan “to stop talking as much as he was on the social issues” like the abortion and the Second Amendment.

On Friday's Real Time show on HBO, host Bill Maher repeatedly accused Republicans of exploiting racism for political advantage as he asserted that the GOP "made a Faustian deal with the racist devil" and went on to repeat an old debunked claim that Ronald Reagan began his 1980 presidential campaign at the site of a racially motivated murder. He went on to compare the GOP to a house which has…

Former First Lady Nancy Reagan died today. The Associated Press's Christopher Weber, in an otherwise predictably passive-aggressive obituary, got one thing right: "The Reagans' mutual devotion over 52 years of marriage was legendary." How nice of him to acknowledge that now. The fact is that while it was visible during Ronald Reagan's presidency, everyone with eyes to see could recognize the…

As former Newsweek editor-in-chief Evan Thomas appeared as a guest on MSNBC Sunday to discuss former First Lady Nancy Reagan's passing, host Chris Matthews and Thomas used Presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon to chastise the current Republicans for being too unwilling to compromise. After Thomas asserted that Reagan and Nixon "are rolling over in their graves" and recalled that Nancy…