Ronald Reagan

"Donald Trump was up at a podium, saying that America had gone weak and was headed for disaster," but here's the twist, Michael Daly wrote this Super Tuesday at the Daily Beast website, "This was 1987 and Trump was denouncing the course of the country as set by President Reagan, who was famously known for being the nicest of guys."

Scatology has typically been out of bounds in mainstream-media political commentary. (Not in all political commentary, of course. For example, actor John Cusack once called former actor Ronald Reagan “a criminal who used the Constitution as toilet paper.”) Nonetheless, Michael Tomasky went there in a Wednesday column trashing Senate Republicans for refusing to consider any Supreme Court…

Ronald Reagan’s admirers called him the Great Communicator, but to his detractors he was more like the Great Demonizer, crystallizing hostility toward groups ranging from the poor to left-wing protesters at UC Berkeley. In a Sunday post, Esquire's Pierce argued that Donald Trump has a similar talent for focusing outrage, and because of it, he’s attracting the same kind of supporters that Reagan…

Appearing as a guest on Sunday's Reliable Sources, CNN presidential historian Douglas Brinkley claimed that President Ronald Reagan "used to fabricate stories," and alluded to a story about the Holocaust as an example. After fellow guest James Fallows of The Atlantic recalled possible holes in stories told by GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, lamenting that voters do not seem to care,…

Chris Matthews, for all his faults, has a rather encyclopedia knowledge of modern political history. So it's rather puzzling that during MSNBC coverage this afternoon he insisted that Ronald Reagan, like 1952 New Hampshire primary winner Dwight Eisenhower and likely 2016 New Hampshire primary winner Donald Trump, didn't get into politics until middle-age. While it's true he didn't seek elective…

The kids in The Family Circus blame their misbehavior on gremlins with names like Ida Know and Not Me. The Week’s Damon Linker believes grown-up conservatives do something similar when they deny what Linker sees as the plain truth: that they run the Republican party. In a Tuesday column, Linker contended that the right-wing “counter-establishment” that first gained a share of power in 1981 now “…

“Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” is a well-known tune from the Golden Age of Broadway. A Friday Salon article made it sound as if a song about how today’s conservatives feel could be called “Besieged, Badgered and Beleaguered.” In a piece pegged to Sarah Palin’s endorsement of Donald Trump, Andrew O’Hehir opined that the right “has become exactly what it has long accused the left of being,…

Appearing as a panel member on Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, author and former Newsweek editor-in-chief Jon Meacham made a crack suggesting he would prefer dog excrement for President over GOP candidates Ted Cruz or Donald Trump, as host Maher asked panel members which of the two Republican frontrunners they would pick if they had no other choice. Meacham also tied former President…

You could have set your watch to it. When a leftist local, gubernatorial or presidential regime enters its final year after demonstrating its corruption, incompetence and inexcusable disrespect for law and procedure to that point, someone in the press will directly or indirectly excuse them by saying that the entity that person is running is "ungovernable," or that "its best days are behind it…

Politifact, the leftist propaganda mill disguised as a "fact-checking" web site, always has its "Pants on Fire" matches at the ready for conservatives and Republicans. This is remarkable, given that it has never given any Hillary Clinton statement or campaign assertion a "Pants on Fire" evaluation. The one example it cites falsely claims to "involve" her, but has nothing to do with anything she…

On Friday's Erin Burnett OutFront on CNN, during a segment devoted to discrediting President Ronald Reagan's conservative credentials and painting modern Republicans as far right, host Erin Burnett proclaimed that Republicans "would hate that guy," and joined with CNN presidential historian Douglas Brinkley in suggesting that Democrat Hillary Clinton's views on some issues are closer to Reagan's.

During the 1980s, a favorite talking point of liberals was that President Reagan tended to confuse movies with reality. In a Friday article, Zack Beauchamp accused a current Republican presidential candidate, Ted Cruz, of doing something similar, and alleged that the GOPers who took part in Thursday’s prime-time debate stand for a “view of the world [that] is as much a work of fiction as” Michael…

After having spent seven and a half minutes on Tuesday trumpeting President Obama’s executive actions on gun control, CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley eventually turned his newscast to the 2016 election and invoked Ronald Reagan in lecturing Republicans that “he wouldn't recognize the melee just four weeks before Iowa.”

Establishment press pundits often wring their hands over how supposedly far to the right the Republican Party and conservatives in general have moved since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, that flaming moderate, to the point of claiming that Reagan would never be accepted by today's "wingnuts." They seem to actually believe this amusing nonsense. In a classic example demonstrating where the real…