Free Republic

Name calling is the last refuge for one losing an argument. Much like a roundhouse punch that hits nothing but air, it’s a final effort in a losing fight. But it’s also been the one reliable punch for Democrats, playing the race card against opponents. Not so much now, however. Shouting, “You’re a racist!” has been the preferred comeback for Democrats on the losing side of an argument. Alternatives to the word racist include Nazi, bigot, fascist, homophobe, sexist, and so on, but racist has the best quick jab-like sting. Sometimes name calling can fall flat, as in calling Supreme...

If reason ruled in politics, the Democratic party would urge its presidential candidates to eliminate the vitriolic posturing from their campaign, and would then begin to concentrate on the only question that matters: Who can beat Reagan? That is different from asking whether Walter Mondale would make a better chief executive than Gary Hart, or whether Hart’s “new ideas” are preferable to Mondale’s old-line liberal values. What troubles me is that, given the rising nastiness, this campaign begins more and more to resemble the terrible script written in 1972, when another new face, George McGovern, was buried by Richard Nixon’s...

[Vanity] Freepers, please provide your own story of what happened during March 1981 when you first heard the news that President Reagan was shot by John Hinckley Jr. I was an Ivy League graduate student at the time, in a technical field, and I was shocked to hear faculty in my engineering department say they were glad that Reagan was shot. Wayne Allyn Root relays a story from Columbia, where all his classmates leaped into the air, cheering wildly, as if the Columbia football team had finally scored a touchdown. [http://rootforamerica.com/the-real-obama-agenda-direct-from-his-columbia-university-classmate/] The Newbuster article referenced above relays some AP and...

I miss Ronald Reagan. Even his harshest critics must admit that he had an unflagging belief in the general goodness of the average human being, a commitment to the American experiment and faith in the ability of most people to make decisions in their own best interests without undue meddling by officious busybodies. Above all, Ronald Reagan -- like a number of other truly great American political leaders from both sides of the aisle -- had the ability to inspire Americans to see the best in themselves and their neighbors. We are stronger as a people, better as a...

In any primary, there are a thousand questions to ask, but the first one – yes, the primary one – must be this: What year is it? No, not just “is this a presidential year or a midterm election,” though that’s important too... But what year is it, historically? That is, is it most analogous to a year we’ve seen before, or is it unlike any prior election, so we shouldn’t bother to see if we can learn from parallels? It is often said that there is nothing new under the sun, that we’re always fighting the same war, that...

Ben Wattenberg died this week at the age of 81. He gave me my first job in Washington, as his research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. (I returned to AEI as a fellow a few years ago, my office just a few doors down from where Ben used to work.) Ben was one of the last star pundits of what might be called the Old Order, before cable news and the Internet transformed the landscape. When everyone was rushing to CNN to shout at each other on "Crossfire," he launched a PBS show called "Think...

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s devastating opinions on same-sex marriage and Obamacare, some conservatives are asking themselves: Has America reached the point when we have become like ancient Rome in its final days, all bread and circuses, that we cannot make our way back to the ideas on which we were founded? Do the actual words of the Constitution matter anymore? Should we give up the fight for limited, constitutional government and simply accept that the left has won? Of course not! Conservatives have never been quitters as two of our greatest heroes—Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan—demonstrated when...

President Reagan's Address at a United States-France Ceremony Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the Normandy Invasion/D-Day - 6/6/84

3:08 video: Governor Scott Walker’s Interview with Young America Foundation Reflects on Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” SpeechGov. Scott Walker: “You can give that speech [Ronald Reagan's "A Time for Choosing"] today, not tell people who it was, just play it, play the audio, and I think people would find it just as compelling today as it was the day he gave it.”[Oct 1964] .................." “President Obama and his allies tend to measure success in government by how many people depend on the government, how many people are on medicare, food-stamp, unemployment. We instead, we the conservatives measure success in...

(Aug 2, 2012) POLISH officials have unveiled a statue of former President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, honouring two men widely credited in this Eastern European country with helping to topple communism 23 years ago. The statue was unveiled in Gdansk, the birthplace of Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement, in the presence of about 120 former Solidarity activists, many of whom were imprisoned in the 1980s for their roles in organising or taking part in strikes against the communist regime. The bronze statue, erected in the lush seaside President Ronald Reagan Park, is a slightly larger-than-life rendering of the...

Soviet Communism, the dark tyranny that controlled nearly 40 nations and was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 100 million victims during the 20th century, suddenly collapsed 20 years ago without a shot being fired. In just two years--from 1989 to 1991--the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union disintegrated, and Marxism- Leninism was dumped unceremoniously on the ash heap of history. There was dancing in the street and champagne toasts on top of the Brandenburg Gate. For 40 years, the United States and the West had been following a policy of containment, détente, accommodation. Ronald Reagan decided it was...

Tomorrow is the 71st anniversary of D-Day, but today is the 11th anniversary of the death of Ronald Reagan.

Editor's note: The following is the speech, delivered on June 6, 1984, that President Ronald Reagan gave 31 years ago today in Normandy, France -- the 40th anniversary of D-Day. The text was provided by the Ronald Reagan Library and Museum. "We're here to mark that day in history when the Allied armies joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For 4 long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue....

-as a nation, anyway But with stupidity and ingratitude in fashion -and meritocracy out of style-  who has time to hear about Reagan's towering success? Some of us in this country do still honor Ronald Reagan's memory -and heed the lessons of his glowing example, i.e. Ted Cruz- and yesterday, Fri June 5th was the 11th anniversary of The Gipper's passing- hard to imagine missing another politician the way I do this very, very great man. Sure wish he was here to talk some sense into our wayward nation...  and smack the beatniks, losers, and communist agitators upside the head. Nancy Reagan places flowers on Ronald...

Well folks, for about four years I haven't written anything, except a few movie reviews and some scripts. I had a strong calling to give up (I thought permanently) writing books. All that time, however, it kept nagging at me that the biography treatments of Ronald Reagan just were not satisfying. So, I feel "released" now to begin a new book project, perhaps my final book: a biography of our greatest 20th century president. I have already written a script that Arc Entertainment/Victory Pictures (who did the Palin movie) have agreed to produce called "The Lifeguard: Ronald Reagan and his...

My daughter asked me my opinion on an article she read in Vanity Fair attempting to debunk the presidential record of Ronald Reagan. I happily responded. The writer of the piece is veteran liberal commentator Michael Kinsley, who used to be a regular on William F. Buckley Jr.'s "Firing Line" and CNN's "Crossfire." It's not as though he appeared out of nowhere, studied the evidence anew and shared a novel theory. He's been dissing Reaganomics for decades along with other Democrats and liberals, whose only recourse is to distort the Gipper's phenomenal record. Why is this even relevant, you ask?...

Making it to the White House will shift prejudices not only in America, but far beyond. Hillary Clinton was on my mind even before word came of the death of Mario Cuomo. The former governor of New York will be remembered by those who have long forgotten, or never knew, his record running that state chiefly for his oratory and his knack for an enduring phrase. Eight minutes spent on YouTube watching his 1984 rebuttal of Ronald Reagan’s depiction of the US as a “shining city on a hill” will not be wasted. It was Cuomo who memorably told us:...

"This was the greatest vote, the greatest margin and the greatest percentage (61 percent) that any President had ever drawn from the American people; we shall live long before we see its like again," the inventor of the modern campaign chronicle, Theodore H. White, wrote after Lyndon Johnson's lopsided triumph over Barry Goldwater in 1964. In fact we would see its like again twice in the next 20 years, and from the Republican side, as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan swamped their opponents in 1972 and 1984, respectively... Those gripped by either despair or euphoria over the 2004 election might...

Washington (AP) A Gallup Poll taken for Newsweek magazine puts the Democratic Mondale-Ferraro ticket ahead of President Reagan for the first time in a major public opinion survey. The poll, taken as the Democratic convention was winding up on Thursday and Friday and after the candidates had received extensive primetime television coverage, found the team of Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro endorsed by 48 percent of those polled. Forty-six percent of the respondents said they favored the Republican ticket of Reagan and Vice President George Bush, while 6 percent said they were undecided about who they wanted to win the...