Ronald Reagan

The New York Times Magazine cover story by political correspondent Jim Rutenberg, "A Dream Undone -- Inside the 50-year campaign to roll back the Voting Rights Act," is a 10-part, 10,000-word doorstop (issued with the baleful threat "The first in a series") comparing current attempts to stop voter fraud as a return to Jim Crow, with particular focus on North Carolina. Rutenberg also relayed more…

Liberal MSNBC anchor Lawrence O'Donnell on Thursday night slammed Ronald Reagan, sneering that he was the "Donald Trump of his time." O'Donnell asserted that, just like Trump and Sarah Palin, Reagan was a liar on subjects like Medicare. Comparing Reagan to Trump, O'Donnell insulted, "One of the loudest opponents of Medicare was actor Ronald Reagan, who was then the Donald Trump of his time, a…

According to Larry King on Tuesday, the modern Republican Party is so conservative that it would reject Ronald Reagan. The former CNN anchor interviewed struggling Democratic candidate Lincoln Chafee. After King wondered "what happened to your party, you old party," the former Republican sneered, "It moved south. Back in the '60s, President Nixon had what they called the southern strategy." King…

Amid mounting evidence of Bill Cosby’s depraved behavior, many have changed their minds about Cosby the person. Should they also reconsider, for very different reasons, their affection for his megahit sitcom, The Cosby Show? Lefty writer Chauncey DeVega thinks so. In a Sunday article for Salon, DeVega opined that the series “lied to its white viewers about the nature of racism, white supremacy,…

Reviewing Reagan: The Life, by historian H.W. Brands, USA Today White House reporter Gregory Korte recited tired anti-Reagan cliches favored by liberals as he complained about “some notable omissions” in the book. In his piece which appeared in the “Life” section of Thursday’s newspaper, Korte regretted that “Brands makes no mention of Reagan’s 1980 ‘states rights’ speech in Philadelphia, Miss.”…

In a column at ForeignPolicy.com, a former Obama administration defense official who "served as a counselor to the U.S. defense undersecretary for policy from 2009 to 2011" has asked: "Can Gay Marriage Defeat the Islamic State?" Rosa Brooks, who "is a law professor at Georgetown University," is serious. Her earnestness and deep ignorance are especially troubling, because it's clear that there…

Presidential nominees sometimes choose one of the candidates they defeated during primary/caucus season as their running mate for the general election. In that tradition, the Washington Monthly's D.R. Tucker recommends that Hillary Clinton, assuming she’s the Democratic nominee, name Bernie Sanders to the ticket, adding that Hillary “would have to signal that [Sanders] would be something of a co-…

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).…

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.

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…

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?"

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?

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…

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…