Tag Archives: Ronald Reagan

national news

Speaking in the first person … singular

President Obama can take credit for a lot of good things that have happened while he’s been living and working in the White House.

But as the short video attached to this blog post indicates, he seems all too willing to take all the credit.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/06/01/obama_under_my_leadership_the_united_states_is_the_most_respected_country_on_earth.html

Readers of this blog know that I’ve been a strong supporter of Barack Obama’s work to fix what was ailing the country when he took office. I hope those who’ve read it over the years also will understand that I bristle when he keeps using the first person singular pronoun when he speaks of the good things that have occurred.

The president took some questions at the White House and, by gosh, he did it again. He kept using the words “I” and “me” and “my” when referencing the positive accomplishments of the presidency.

“On my watch” the United States is the most respected nation on Earth, he said. “I” fixed the auto industry, he said. “I” got the country working again, he added.

Mr. President, you are part of a team that, yes, you assembled. But you all have worked together to do these things. Isn’t that correct?

President Nixon had an equally annoying habit of referring to himself in the third person. “The president” has the power to do certain things that others don’t have, he would say. Nixon’s use of the third person became prevalent during the Watergate scandal and it chapped my hide royally every time I heard him say it.

I recall something President Reagan once said. I am paraphrasing it here, but he said something about not caring “who took the credit” for positive outcomes. On the flip side, I recall him saying that “mistakes were made” during the Iran-Contra scandal that embarrassed him and his team — as he lapsed into that maddening passive-voice verbiage so common among politicians who refuse to take full responsibility for the policies that go wrong.

It’s fine for the current president to take credit as well for the plus side of his time in office. I just wish he’d be willing to acknowledge publicly, out loud, so everyone can hear it, that it’s a team effort.

How about a little more “we,” “us,” and “our,” Mr. President?

 

media news

Fox News’s power is overrated

I want to share this link with readers of this blog.

It comes from Jack Schafer, senior media writer for Politico. com and it offers an interesting analysis of the power that Fox News has — or doesn’t have — on the rest of the media and the voting public.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/fox-news-liberals-118235.html?hp=t1_r#.VWNDQFLbKt8

Schafer’s analysis is most interesting in that he relies heavily on the thoughts of a known political conservative — Bruce Bartlett — to make the case that Fox’s actual power overrated.

Bartlett has served as a key policy guy for Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and remains devoted to his political principles. He believes Fox is hindering his party’s effort to advance and to return to the White House. Fox News, he contends, is appealing to the narrowest wing of the GOP.

Schafer notes an element of Fox’s strategy that I found quite interesting: “One thing Bartlett gets absolutely right in his critique is how Fox seized on the repeal of government censorship of the airwaves (also known as the Fairness Doctrine and the equal-time rule) to create a news outlet that would cater to the country’s underserved conservative audience. You don’t have to be a Fox fan to credit the network with reintroducing ideological competition to the news business, which began to fade at the midpoint of the 20th century.”

I don’t watch Fox News routinely. Maybe I should. It leans away from where I lean; I suppose the older I get the more vulnerable I feel when my blood pressure elevates as the veins in my neck start throbbing. For that matter, I am having trouble watching MSNBC these days, but for a vastly different reason: MSNBC’s predictable liberal slant has become boring.

Schafer takes note of “reliably liberal” New York Times columnist Frank Rich’s assessment of Fox News: “The median age of a Fox viewer is 68, eight years older than the MSBNC and CNN median age, and its median age is rising. ‘Fox is in essence a retirement community,’ Rich writes, and a small one at that! ‘The million or so viewers who remain fiercely loyal to the network are not, for the most part, and as some liberals still imagine, naïve swing voters who stumble onto Fox News under the delusion it’s a bona fide news channel and then are brainwashed by Ailes’s talking points into becoming climate-change deniers,’ he writes.”

The bottom line is that Fox News isn’t the political juggernaut its viewers think it is.

This is a most interesting analysis. Take a look.

 

national news

Obama finds friends in GOP

Republicans have made it their mission — a lot of them, anyhow — to trash Barack Obama as some sort of wacked-out Marxist/socialist who is intent on the destruction of the country that elected him as president of the United States.

So, what does the president do? He locks arms with Republican members of Congress and decides it’s really all right to support a free-trade agreement with a dozen Asian nations — which runs counter to where the base of his Democratic Party stands, or so it appears.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/trade-bill-clears-senate-hurdle-118178.html?hp=t4_r

The GOP-led Senate has just shut down a filibuster that had stalled the fast-track legislation to get the free trade agreement approved and sent to the president’s desk.

Obama’s major allies in this deal happen to Republicans. The Senate was acting chaotically as senators scrambled between discussion groups to hammer out some kind of deal.

What’s up with that?

I happen to believe in a freer trade than what we’ve had for so long. The world is shrinking and nations or even continents no longer can shield themselves from influences of other nations and continents.

So the free trade agreement likely now will get approved. It will end up on the president’s desk. He’ll sign it.

I’m hoping to see a lot of Republican lawmakers — along with centrist/moderate Democrats — standing with the president when he puts pen to paper.

It’s a scene we haven’t witnessed too much during the Obama administration, but which used to be a regular occurrence during the past presidencies of, say, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Government works better when both parties can find common ground. So help me, it works almost all the time.

 

 

national news

Not exactly Felix and Oscar, however …

The Hill calls them Washington, D.C.’s newest “odd couple.”

They are Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Barack H. Obama, the Democratic president of the United States of America.

McConnell has been saying nice things about the man he once pledged to make a “one-term president.” The one-term notion didn’t work out, as Obama was re-elected in 2012. But hey, life goes on.

Washington’s new odd couple: McConnell and Obama

I rather like the idea of these men becoming “friends,” even if it’s a relationship of convenience.

They aren’t the first national political leaders to link arms and find common ground in an Oscar Madison-Felix Unger sort of way.

Let’s go back to the 1960s, when Democratic President Lyndon Johnson and Republican Senate Leader Everett Dirksen teamed up to help enact the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts. How about when Republican President Ronald Reagan and Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill would bash each other in public, but then toast each other over whiskey after hours? Democratic President Bill Clinton and GOP Speaker Newt Gingrich worked together to balance the federal budget. Republican President George W. Bush and Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy found common ground in pushing education reform through Congress.

See? It can be done, ladies and gentlemen.

McConnell and Obama are on the same page regarding international trade. The president, in fact, is finding his stiffest opposition coming from the left-wing base of his own party. But he’s got a pal on the other side of the aisle.

The arrangement doesn’t surprise some Capitol Hill hands. “It validates what McConnell has been saying for the last six and a half years. If the president wants to join us on something that’s good for the country, we will work with him. This is an example of that,” said Don Stewart, McConnell’s spokesman.

Well, for what it’s worth, some of us out here in the Heartland are surprised.

And pleasantly so, at that.

 

national news, Uncategorized

Should we set John Hinckley free?

Allow me to answer the question posed in the headline.

Yes, sort of.

John Hinckley has been housed in a psych ward since a jury found him innocent by reason of insanity after he shot President Ronald Reagan, White House press secretary James Brady and two law enforcement officers in March 1981.

Brady — nicknamed The Bear by the press corps — died a year ago from the grievous head wound he suffered at Hinckley’s hand.

http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/05/12/406175445/reagan-shooter-john-hinckleys-lawyers-say-hes-ready-to-be-free

Hinckley’s lawyer says he’s ready to be set free. And even the government prosecutors suggest he is able to be released from the hospital. The feds, though, say he needs constant supervision and must be monitored closely.

I concur with the feds’ assessment, although if I were King of the World, I’d be reluctant to let him out.

Why? Well, the man sought to murder the president of the United States. He wounded him with a gunshot wound in the chest and as we would learn after the chaotic day the president could have died from the wound had the bullet lodged an inch or so toward the president’s heart.

What’s more, a jury ruled that Hinckley was insane when he committed the crime. How many people usually go from being insane to, well, sane?

I am one who doesn’t trust John Hinckley to never do something so crazed again.

That’s why if he gets out of the psych ward he needs careful and never-ending scrutiny.

 

media news, national news, political news

Afflicting the comfortable no longer in vogue?

There’s a saying that a free press’s key mission is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

At the risk of sounding like a whiny baby who never got invited to one of these gigs, allow me now to say that the Washington Correspondents Dinner is a disgrace to the high-minded mission that the D.C. press corps is supposed to fulfill.

Check out this essay about what’s become of this annual event:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/white-house-correspondents-dinner-117287.html?ml=po#.VT2bCFJ0yt8

There’s something more than mildly offensive about seeing reporters and their dates parading along a red carpet, a la the Oscars, Tonys, Emmys and the ESPYs.

Those of us who toiled out here in the Heartland — aka Flyover Country — always have thought there ought to be a natural tension between the power brokers and those who cover them, reporting on their dealings to the “unwashed masses” who depend on journalists to tell them the truth.

Here’s how Patrick Gavin describes the event that occurred over the weekend: “What started off decades ago as a stately formal celebration of the best of presidential reporting has morphed into a four-day orgy of everything people outside the Beltway hate about life inside the Beltway—now it’s not just one night of clubby backslapping, carousing and drinking between the press and the powerful, it’s four full days of signature cocktails and inside jokes that just underscore how out of step the Washington elite is with the rest of the country. It’s not us (journalists) versus them (government officials); it’s us (Washington) versus them (the rest of America).”

Boy, howdy. I couldn’t have said it better.

The D.C. press corps has become something of an echo chamber, where journalists parrot each other’s views and simply cannot wait to be seen in the company of the famous and the powerful. In their own minds, that seems to fit the description of the people who cover government.

I loved Gavin’s note that unlike some of the other dinners — such as the Gridiron — where presidents occasionally are absent, POTUS’s attendance at the correspondents dinner seems to be required. Gavin writes:  “The last president to skip it was Ronald Reagan in 1981 and — let’s cut him some slack — he bailed because he had just been shot.”

The press’s mission to afflict the comfortable now seems almost quaint. How can it do so when the comfortable include the very journalists who keep slapping the backs and yukking it up with the folks they are sent to cover?

I much prefer the tension that is supposed to exist between the media and the government. It keeps everyone — reporters and their sources — a little more honest.

 

International news

Obama set to meet Castro

President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro are going to attend a meeting together this weekend.

They’ll shake hands. They’ll talk to each other. They’ll likely exchange an idea or two about the changing relationship between their two countries. And much of the world will be hanging on every look, gesture and spoken word.

Is this a big deal? Yes. But perhaps not for reasons that some have given for it.

Obama, Raúl Castro get ready for historic meeting

This won’t be a meeting between equals. Obama is head of state of the world’s pre-eminent military and economic power. Castro heads a third-rate, Third World nation that folks once thought posed some sort of threat to the United States of America.

Cuba never really did pose that threat. What danger existed essentially evaporated right along with the Soviet Union in 1991. Still, U.S. and Cuban relations remained frozen in time.

That’s changing now that Obama and Castro have agreed to proceed toward normalization. The economic, travel and diplomatic embargoes are going to end in due course. Cuba will get to become an actual neighbor of the United States.

The leaders will meet at the Summit of the Americas. They shook hands briefly at a memorial service for the great Nelson Mandela a couple of years ago. This meeting is supposed to signal the start of a new relationship.

Yes, critics chide Obama for ignoring Cuba’s human rights issues. Sure thing. As if we don’t have diplomatic ties with other nations around the world with dubious human rights reputations. Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Pakistan, the People’s Republic of China — they all come to mind. I believe it was President Reagan who followed what was called a policy of “constructive engagement” with South Africa when that nation was operating under its apartheid policy that denied its black majority any rights of citizenship.

This meeting is long overdue. The Cuban Missile Crisis has receded into history. Raul Castro’s brother, Fidel, has retired from his lifetime job as president, is in frail health and appears to no longer be the commanding presence in the island nation.

The time arrived long ago for the nations to establish a formal relationship.

It’s good that Barack Obama and Raul Castro are going to that important step together.

national news

Sarah Brady fought gun-control fight valiantly

If anyone deserved the right to believe in gun control, it had to be the wife of someone wounded grievously by a madman firing a handgun at the president of the United States.

The advocate was Sarah Brady, the wife of the late White House press secretary James Brady, who was shot in the head by John Hinckley — who sought on March 31, 1981 to assassinate President Reagan. Sarah Brady died today at the age of 73.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/sarah-brady-gun-control-advocate-dies-at-73/ar-AAapGeK

Hinckley ended up being acquitted by reason of insanity and he’s spent his time in a hospital ever since.

Meanwhile, Sarah and James Brady became advocates for gun control. James Brady died in August of complications relating to the terrible head wound he suffered.

The Bradys had become enemies of gun-rights advocates, such as the National Rifle Association, which occasionally took great delight in vilifying them for their sincere views on the firearm control.

They had reason to believe as they did. They insisted courageously in the face of intense criticism that the Constitution’s Second Amendment guarantee of firearm ownership did not preclude additional controls being placed on the sale and purchase of weaponry.

That didn’t matter to the NRA or to other firearm-owners-rights groups.

They saved lives. “In the history of our nation, there are few people, if any, who are directly responsible for saving as many lives as Sarah and Jim,” said Dan Gross, the president of the  Brady Campaign and Center to Prevent Gun Violence, in a statement.

Sarah Brady was a ferocious advocate for what she believed. May she now rest in peace.

International news, national news, political news

Foes 'all too willing to test us'

Here’s a tiny part of what former Texas Gov. Rick Perry said before a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

“Here’s the simple truth of our foreign policy: Our allies doubt us and our adversaries are all too willing to test us. No one should be surprised, no one should be surprised that dictators like Assad would cross the president’s red line because he knows the president will not even defend the line that separates our nation from Mexico.” 

http://www.texasmonthly.com/burka-blog/perry-compares-middle-east-troubles-texas-border

Did you get what he’s inferring here? Perry is possibly going to run for the Republican nomination for president of the United States — again — in 2016. To make the case to GOP voters, he must lambaste the president from the other party.

I understand how it works. Democrats do the same thing to Republican presidents as well, as U.S. Sen. Barack Obama demonstrated when he won the presidency in 2008.

But is this “testing” of U.S. power and prestige limited to just this president?

Let’s see: President Richard Nixon was tested when Arab nations executed an oil embargo in 1973, causing near-panic at gasoline service stations throughout this country. President Ronald Reagan was tested in 1983 when terrorists blew up the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, killing 241 of our young Marines. President George H.W. Bush was tested in Panama when the dictator Manuel Noriega kept looking the other way while drugs were pouring into this country from Panama. President George W. Bush certainly was tested when terrorists flew those hijacked jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11.

Yes, Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were tested too. Carter faced the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979-80  and Clinton had to deal with those warlords in Somalia.

Testing of U.S. presidents has been the norm perhaps since the end of World War II, when this nation emerged from that global conflagration as the world’s pre-eminent military and economic power.

It goes with the territory. It’s part of the president’s job description.

 

political news

'Born in the U.S.A' hardly a campaign theme

Bruce Springsteen makes great music and some of his songs have become American anthems — of sorts.

Should politicians running for public office use a particular song, “Born in the U.S.A.,” to somehow proclaim the nation’s greatness?

Highly debatable. Yet former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who’s thinking of running for president next year, strode onto a stage to that particular song.

As the blog attached by John Fea notes, Perry needs to think carefully about using this song as a campaign theme.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/02/14/why_rick_perry_should_think_twice_before_he_makes_born_in_the_usa_his_theme_song_125604.html

It’s not exactly a love song to the United States of America, as Fea points out.

The lyrics tell a story of a Vietnam War veteran’s heartache when he returns home and can’t get a job. His country didn’t take very good care of him. Springsteen sings about his “brother” who died in battle and how the love of his life is left with just a picture of him.

Fea notes that President Reagan in 1984 sought to wrap himself in the lyrics of the song, apparently believing they paid tribute to our great nation. They don’t — at least not in any traditional sense.

But as the blogger notes, Republican presidential candidates are going to pattern their own themes after The Gipper, perhaps even mimicking President Reagan’s misplaced salute to song lyrics that don’t mean quite what they think they mean.

Be careful, Gov. Perry.

It’s a great song, to be sure. Is it the stuff about which you should frame your campaign? Think again.