Ronald Reagan

By the late summer of 1977, Jimmy Carter had been president for only a few months, but if you knew which way the cultural and political winds were blowing, he seemed unlikely to win a second term. That’s because on May 25 of that year, Star Wars had opened, and its colossal success both foreshadowed and helped to revive a mindset that carried Ronald Reagan to the White House. That’s the word from…

Starting with the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, several mass shootings have brought about considerable debate regarding restrictions on access to firearms for the mentally ill. D.R. Tucker argued last Sunday that denying guns to “deranged individuals” should have been a special cause for conservatives long before -- specifically, since March 1981, when John Hinckley tried to assassinate…

Offering his initial thoughts on Tuesday’s GOP presidential debate on the 11:00 p.m. Eastern edition of CNN’s AC360, CNN political commentator and Hillary Clinton super PAC head Paul Begala complained that Republicans possess “dominant emotion” of “fear” that they’ve somehow used to instill fear in Americans following recent terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. 

“There'll be scary ghost stories,” sang Andy Williams on a Christmas album of long, long ago. In a Monday post, Esquire’s Pierce suggested that “ghost stories” of a sort -- “obvious lies,” as he also put it -- have become part and parcel of Republican campaigning, and that “as with so many things, this all began with Ronald Reagan.” Pierce argued that Donald Trump is “the logical end product of…

On Wednesday, the Associated Press's Josh Boak added to the wire service's collection of weak "Getaway Day" business journalism by declaring that new-home sales "recovered in October." No they didn't. The seasonally adjusted annual rate of 495,000 units reported by the Census Bureau was the fourth-lowest monthly level seen this year, even well below the 521,000 and 545,000 reported in the…

During a discussion of Wednesday's interview with GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush on New Day, CNN's John King gave a glimpse into the negative mindset of media liberals toward former President George W. Bush such that they have difficulty paying any sort of compliment toward him without having to insert a qualifier like "whatever you think about him."

Previewing last Monday’s episode of FX’s Fargo, set in 1979, I highlighted a promotional clip in which a man declared “I’m not shaking” Ronald Reagan’s hand because Reagan “made a movie with a monkey. It wouldn’t be dignified.” In fact, the November 9 episode presented Reagan as a charismatic figure whose “shining city on a hill” speech, at a campaign stop in Minnesota, moved the man to tears.…

The obvious pull quote of the day from President Obama's contentious press conference in Antalya, Turkey is this statement: "What I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership or America winning or whatever other slogans they come up with ..." Obama then claimed that any ideas coming from those who believe in such a notion have "no relationship to what is…

The war of words between Bill O’Reilly and George Will over the long-term effects on Ronald Reagan of the 1981 assassination attempt amounts to a loose thread that could eventually cause the unraveling of conservatism, argued Sean Illing in a Friday article. Illing opined that “conservatism, as a governing philosophy, continues to resonate because of Reagan’s perceived success” -- “perceived”…

It’s often noted that Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, just as Democrats had lost five of six before that. Dems snapped out of it thanks to a Bill Clinton-led tack towards the center, but Michael Tomasky predicts that the GOP will stay to the right in 2016, thereby extending its slump. After Michael Dukakis’s defeat in 1988, observed Tomasky…

Chris Matthews has voiced over a new MSNBC Hardball promo which, among other things, hails the late Ted Kennedy as a paragon of statesmanship, a "great" "leader" a "lion" who "keep[s] me going non-stop."

A promo run at the end of last week’s Fargo, to plug tonight’s (Nov. 9) new episode on FX, showed Ronald Reagan, in 1979, shaking hands at a campaign stop as a character out of his earshot declared: “I’m not shaking his hand.” Asked why not, the man explained: “Because the man made a movie with a monkey. It wouldn’t be dignified.”

It was an '80s flashback in the New York Times Sunday book review. Serge Schmemann attacked a new book about Russian dictator Vladimir Putin by Garry Kasparov. Schmemann seemed to take personally Kasparov's criticism of Barack Obama and his celebration of Ronald Reagan. Schmemann gave all the credit to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: "...ultimately it was Gorbachev, more than any American or…

On Friday's Real Time on HBO, host Bill Maher aimed venom at a number of conservative public figures as he referred to Uncle Ben's rice in a racially tinged joke about Dr. Ben Carson, and asserted that it is President Reagan's fault that many middle aged white Americans have personal problems that lead them to drunkenness, heroin addiction, and early death, as the HBO host tagged them "Trump…