Ronald Reagan, who passed away 7 years ago, would have been 100 today.
Ironically today, Reagan’s spectacular accomplishments and political legacy of reduced government and enlarged liberty are being directly challenged by a representative of the school of politics directly opposed to everything Ronald Reagan stood for and believed. The mismanagement of government by Ronald Reagan’s adversaries has brought the country to a state of economic hardship and has produced a sense of pessimism resembling the era of the late 1970s, shortly before Ronald Reagan’s nomination and successful campaign for the presidency changed everything.
This short video tribute is an excellent reminder of how badly America needed Ronald Reagan then, and how much many of us wish he were here and available to run all over again.
Daniel J. Mitchell posted the above chart from Heritage and offered the following observation.
This is a remarkable image, but let’s start with some disclaimers. There are lots of factors that impact economic performance, and many of them are outside the control of politicians. Moreover, it is impossible to know what would have happened in the past two years or in the early 1980s if Obama or Reagan had chosen different policies.
But even with these caveats, it is difficult to look at this chart and not conclude that Obama’s big government policies are much less successful than Reagan’s small government policies.
Ronald Reagan takes on James Dean in 6:03 video highlights from 1954 GE Home Theater drama “The Dark, Dark Hours.”
Appropriately enough, Ronald Reagan is a physician defending decency, home, and family. James Dean (who would get killed in an accident with his Porsche 550 Spyder a little over nine months later) plays a youthful criminal. 1950s criminality is represented as childishly impulsive, weak, neurotically insecure, and determined to express a transgressive subcultural identity by the use of hipster slang and a loud musical background of progressive jazz. The same dramatization would not be much different today in most respects. The criminal youth, of course, wouldn’t be white and blond. The music wouldn’t be jazz and the modernist patois would be different, but the same kind of childishness and the same sort of futile attempt to obtain respect through violence would work exactly the same way in an updated version just fine.
I remember the scene as Ronald Reagan’s funeral cortege wound its way up the narrow road to his resting place at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. One local woman was filmed by the news cameras holding up a sign which spoke for all of us. It read “WELL DONE.”
Ed Morrissey posted a picture of a Minnesota billboard which makes a telling political contrast. A lot of people, I expect, wish Ronald Reagan was still around and available as a candidate, now that we are living through the second, and even worse, Jimmy Carter presidency.
In evaluating the absurdity of the Nobel Committee’s Peace Prize Award to Barack Obama, as Bruce Walker suggests, it really puts the whole thing into perspective when you look at who didn’t win.
Few spectacles so clearly show the politicization of life than the surreally silly award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama. The Nobel Prize has long been a reflection of the whims of those who run political correctness. …
(For proof, consider) all the people who did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot, the greatest triumph for peace in world history. Pope John Paul II boldly reached out to end the historic distrust between the Catholic Church and Jews; he also showed how passive resistance could work in Poland; he also went around the world preaching peace and love; he also forgave the Moslem who tried to assassinate him. Alexander Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but not for Peace, even though he proved, perhaps more courageously than any man in modern history, that the pen could be mightier than the sword. Konrad Adenauer worked hard for a peaceful Germany at the end of the First World War; he opposed the Nazis and spent time in a concentration camp for that; after the Second World War ended, Adenauer reunited the three western sectors of Germany and reached out to Israel and offered, without being asked, for the Federal Republic of Germany to pay reparations to Israel. None of these magnificent champions of peace won the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Nobel Peace Prize, like the support of Code Pink is based upon ideology and nothing else. So Obama, Gore, Carter, and Wilson have won the Peace Prize, but Reagan, who dedicated his last term in office to ridding the world of nuclear weapons and who actually won a world war without violence, does not. Willy Brandt, a thoroughly unlikable socialist West German chancellor, who left office in scandal, wins the award, while a magnificently noble conservative West German chancellor does not. So two Soviets who buy the rhetoric of the chic left – Gorbachev and Sakharov – win the award, while a much braver and clear voice for peace, Solzhenitsyn, does not?
We should know by now, if we ever needed to know, that the awards, compliments, and honors which the establishment of the world offers is offered only to those who have first paid homage to the ideology of the left. Awards given to communist terrorists, like Le Duc Tho, or anti-Semitic ogres like Jimmy Carter, are no badges of achievement: such awards are evidence of moral surrender.
Peggy Noonan commemorates the installation of “The Only Statue That is Smiling” in the Capitol Rotunda, one of Ronald Wilson Reagan.
You are there.” The rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, that great, sandstone-walled, light-filled hall ringed with statues of the great of American history—Jefferson, Washington, proud Andrew Jackson in his flowing cape, Eisenhower, U.S. Grant, his eyes surveying the terrain as if he sees something out there in the wilderness. It’s 11 a.m. Wednesday, June 3, 2009, and Ronald Reagan marches in, surrounded by his peers. Actually his newly installed statue is unveiled there, in a ceremony attended by officials of both parties (including the speaker of the House and the leaders of the minority), his wife, Nancy, and a few hundred of his friends, appointees, staffers and cabinet members. It was standing room only.
Mr. McConnell had a good speech. Rather than recite a history lesson, he said, he’d note that in the 1980s, when the world said America was over, America said not quite, and when they said freedom was yesterday, America said I don’t think so. Reagan “stood taller than any statue.”
The colors were presented. The U.S. Army chorus sang the national anthem so beautifully, with such harmonic precision and depth, that some dry eyes turned moist, including those of the crusty journalist to my right. Congressmen hear choirs sing patriotic songs all the time and grow used to it. The rest of us do not and are stirred. Tourists walk through the Rotunda and think to themselves that they’d die for the signs and symbols of this place. Lawmakers experience the Rotunda as a connecting point between House and Senate that’s too often clogged by overweight tourists in shorts from Bayonne. We need term limits. When the music no longer moves you, you should leave. When you cannot leave, you should be pushed.
James Baker, who served as Reagan’s Treasury secretary, was elegant in his remarks. To Mrs. Reagan he said, “You created that secure space from which he ventured forward to change the world.” And, “If anyone deserves to be in Statuary Hall it is Ronald Reagan,” a “principled pragmatist” who would fight for the right, push hard, get the best deal possible, accept it at a crucial moment, “declare victory and move on.” The Reagan that Baker presented was a romantic who lived in the real. The nation said goodbye to him when he lay in state in the Rotunda five years ago, but he stands now “a silent sentry in its hallowed halls.”
Mrs. Reagan had a bit of a one-minute masterpiece. Her face said it all. It was her first time in the Rotunda since her husband lay in state. History had come to endorse what she and her husband’s supporters long thought: that he was great. “The statue is a wonderful likeness of Ronnie, and he would be so proud.” And at the end she said, simply, “That’s it,” and the crowd erupted in applause. She turned, helped pull the big blue drop cloth down, and there he was. That was his posture, that was the way he held his arms as he walked, that was the two button suit. The Gipper will be the only statue in the rotunda that is smiling.
Byron York published a nice tribute to Ronald Reagan recently in the Washington Examiner. The GOP would be well-advised to ignore people named Bush and to return to fidelity to the legacy of Ronald Reagan.
You drive up a steep, rough and winding road to reach Ronald Reagan’s ranch in the Santa Ynez mountains. For eight years, from 1981 to 1989, this place north of Santa Barbara was the Western White House; Reagan spent nearly a year of his time in office here. Now, what he called Rancho del Cielo is pretty much deserted.
But the ranch, tended by a lone caretaker, is still much like it was when Reagan was alive. It’s not open to the public; these days, the old adobe house and 688 surrounding acres are owned and carefully maintained by the conservative Young America’s Foundation. The group doesn’t have the staff or resources to conduct public tours, but they were kind enough to take me on a visit one afternoon last week.
The first thing that strikes you as you approach the house is how modest it is. The main part of the building was constructed in 1871. Even after Reagan added a couple of rooms when he bought it in 1975, the whole house only measured about 1,500 square feet. …
The house is nestled on the edge of a mountainside meadow. It’s idyllic, but if you drive about five minutes away, you’ll find another spot on the property, at the top of a hill, where the president could have built a new home, perhaps an impressive monument to himself, with fabulous views of the Pacific to the west and the valley to the east. Instead, Reagan preferred the little house by the meadow.
Walking around the ranch, you can’t help thinking about the current Republican party and its relationship to Reagan.
