Reacting to the rise of Donald Trump, National Review’s Rich Lowry recently called on the Republican Party to get over its inordinate attachment to Ronald Reagan and his legacy. He suggests Reagan’s heirs must devise new policies to broaden the GOP’s appeal, and (implicitly) take down Trump.
Meanwhile, such conventional Republican candidates for president as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio still lovingly invoke Reagan’s name nearly a quarter of a century since he left office. In Rubio’s words, it is “time for the children of the Reagan Revolution to assume the mantle of leadership.”
By this he means, of course, people like himself, and not his nemesis Donald Trump who has a history of supporting Democrats, and can therefore be assumed not to be a “movement conservative,” and therefore, not a Reaganite.
Moreover, the “children of the Reagan Revolution” revile Trump for his opposition to the things they love the most—open borders, fast track trade deals, and military intervention overseas, which they habitually imply Reagan would have supported.Well, I worked for Ronald Reagan, and Reagan stood for none of those things.
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The establishment is in a dither over Trump lest the rebellion he is leading presage the end of everything it holds most dear—open borders (paving the way for the disappearance of the old United States and its replacement by “the world’s first global society,” in the words of the late publicist Ben Wattenberg), our endless series of optional, illegal wars that bear scant relation to any discernible US interests, the subversion and overthrow of foreign governments, including secular ones in Moslem countries that protect Christian minorities, and wretched trade deals that enrich the oligarchy while leaving the rest of the nation in the lurch.
Meanwhile, sovereign debt is $20 trillion and we have $200 trillion in unfunded liabilities.
Memo to Rich Lowry: the GOP’s problem is not Reagan and his legacy—it is the noxious brew of policies it is wedded to.
Still less is the party’s problem Trump—our only political leader who understands that we cannot go on like this.In focusing like a laser on establishment policies millions of Americans find intolerable—open borders, fast track and endless wars—he has become their tribune. That is why he is winning. And that is why I suspect that if my old boss Ronald Reagan were with us now, he would not be averse to the prospect of a Trump victory in November.
Category: Quotes of the Day
Quote of the Day
Michael Brown’s death, whatever the grand jury decided, is an irreversible tragedy, horrible for his mother and father.
But what happened last week was not a tragedy but a national disgrace, a disgusting display of adult delinquency.
Monday night we witnessed in Ferguson a rampage of arson, shooting, looting and vandalism, with police and National Guard ordered not to interfere. Stores and shops, the investments of a lifetime for their owners and the livelihood of their employees, were firebombed and pillaged as police looked on.
For a week, mobs blocked highways, bridges and commuter trains from New York to Oakland. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade was disrupted. On Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year, moms and their kids at malls had to climb over unruly protesters to do their Christmas shopping. The civil rights of law-abiding Americans were systematically violated.
And where were the president and his attorney general?
Neither Barack Obama nor Eric Holder has yet to stand up and declare, unequivocally, that, in America, the full force of law will be used to halt, prosecute and punish those guilty of mob violence, no matter the nobility of the “cause” in which it is being committed.
America is a democratic republic, a free society of 320 million. That society and that republic will not survive if a precedent is set that masses of people can organize and attempt to shut it down when what happens within that system displeases them.
Make no mistake. The Ferguson riots of recent months were like neighborhood cookouts compared to Watts in ’65, Detroit and Newark in ’67, and Washington, D.C., and a hundred other cities after the 1968 assassination of Dr. King. But the reaction of our political, media and moral elites seems even more irresolute than that of the liberals of the 1960s.
Only three weeks in office, Eric Holder called us “a nation of cowards.” Observing his and his boss’ performance in the wake of the Ferguson riots and other rampages, the same word comes to mind.
Quote of the Day
Comes via David Cloud’s Friday Church News Notes:
DID YOU OBEY 1 TIMOTHY 2:1-4 TODAY? (Friday Church News Notes, May 9, 2014, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) – I am convinced that if the Lord’s Bible-believing churches would earnestly, regularly, and often pray for the nation, great things could happen. This is true for any nation, but here I am referring specifically to America. We are in dire straights. There is no wisdom in high places. If we would stop leaning on the arm of the flesh (e.g., political activity, conservative talk radio, Fox News, complaining and fretting) and instead cast ourselves fervently upon the arms of the Almighty, we might see real supernatural change for the better. Could we not have some special prayer meetings just for this purpose? Could we not pray with fasting? At the very least, could we not bring this matter before God at every meal and in every church service? Is our liberty and our grandchildren’s liberty not worth the effort? Sure, the signs of the end times are everywhere, but the mystery of iniquity has been working for 2,000 years and the reigns of the times are in God’s hands, not the devil’s. Jehovah is the God of the times and the seasons (Daniel 2:20-21). He is the One who “now letteth” or restrains the devil’s program (2 Th. 2:7), and He can restrain as long as He pleases and as much as He pleases. Do we believe that God’s hand has gone slack in these apostate times? “I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; For kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty. For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour; Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:1-4). “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14). “Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not” (Jeremiah 33:3).
Quote of the Day
Reagan was an anti-Communist to his core, having fought them in the Screen Actors Guild in the 1940s. But he was never anti-Russian, and wanted always to keep the channels open. He ended his presidency as he had hoped, being cheered while strolling through Red Square with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Ronald Reagan never wanted to be a war president, and there were no wars on Reagan’s watch. None. The Gipper was no neocon.
Patrick J. Buchanan writes the real reason why the GOP is failing
Quote of the week:
To understand why and how the Republican Party lost Middle America, and faces demographic death, we need to go back to Bush I.
At the Cold War’s end, the GOP reached a fork in the road. The determination of Middle Americans to preserve the country they grew up in, suddenly collided with the profit motive of Corporate America.
The Fortune 500 wanted to close factories in the USA and ship production abroad — where unions did not exist, regulations were light, taxes were low, and wages were a fraction of what they were here in America.
Corporate America was going global and wanted to be rid of its American work force, the best paid on earth, and replace it with cheap foreign labor.
While manufacturing sought to move production abroad, hotels, motels, bars, restaurants, farms and construction companies that could not move abroad also wanted to replace their expensive American workers.
Thanks to the Republican Party, Corporate America got it all.
Head on over to Pat’s site and read why “The GOP lost middle America.” It is sad, but true, account about what really happened to that Grand Old Party.
Quote of the Day
To our modern moral and cultural elites, it is those who condemn the values of GLAAD who are the enemies of decency and progress who ought to be fired and blacklisted to prevent their poisonous views from being disseminated.
In the Hollywood of the late 1940s, Communism was persona non grata. In the 21st century, biblical Christianity is persona non grata.
No, this is not the America we grew up in. And it is becoming less so.
According to a CNN poll last week, while belief in God and the divinity of Christ is still shared by two-thirds of Americans, that share — older, more Republican, less educated — is falling.
Worldwide, too, Christianity at Christmas 2013 seems in a long retreat. Receding slowly in America, and moribund in Europe, Christianity is undergoing merciless persecutions in Africa and the Middle East — from Nigeria to the Central African Republic to Egypt, Syria and Iraq.
Compared to these folks suffering martyrdom for the faith, we have it easy here.
So, Sursum Corda. Lift up your hearts. And Merry Christmas.
Quote of the Day
Will someone explain exactly what business it is of the United States which economic union Ukraine chooses to join, or not join?
Even as we are pushing Kiev toward the EU, conservative and populist parties are rising across Europe to get their countries out of the EU, including in Britain where the Tories are demanding a vote.
John (“We are all Georgians now!”) McCain was also in Kiev threatening sanctions if the government clears its main square of squatters the way we cleared Zuccotti Park of Occupy Wall Street.
The demand that Ukraine be gentle with its demonstrators was issued as the U.S. was lifting sanctions on Egypt’s army, which this year arrested President Mohammed Morsi, jailed thousands of Muslim Brotherhood, and mowed down hundreds in Cairo’s streets in an action John Kerry described as “restoring democracy.”
What hypocrites we must seem to the world.
Now, President and Mrs. Obama and Vice President Biden have, on the high moral ground that Russia has outlawed LBGT propaganda, declared they will not attend the Sochi winter Olympics.
Yet, are we not courting Iran? Did not Obama bow to the king of Saudi Arabia? When was the last time they had a gay pride parade in Riyadh, Tehran, Mecca or Qom?
How can a nation as polarized morally and paralyzed politically as ours lead the world? It cannot. The people sense what the elites cannot see.
The American Century is over. Time to restore the republic.
Quote of the Day
If Iran is deceiving us and is hell-bent on breaking out of this deal and making a dash to a bomb, we will know about it months if not years before Iran ever tests a device, let alone builds a bomb, miniaturizes it and marries it to a delivery system.
We would have more than enough notice to abort any test and neutralize Iran’s nuclear program. And the nation would unite behind action, were it seen that Iran had lied to us to buy time to build and test a bomb.
But if the Republican Party leads Congress in imposing new sanctions, and the Iranians walk out, and the NATO-Russia-China coalition breaks up, and a chance for peace in the Persian Gulf seems to have been thrown away, the GOP will pay the price. And rightly so.
Quote of the Day
In real life, the guy who looks you in the eye and promises that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan, period” can be expected to tell you, cross his heart, the Benghazi massacre was caused by an anti-Muslim video, and that everything possible was done to save Americans under siege. He can also be expected to run an administration that assures you, even as things fall apart, that the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate, largely secular organization committed to democracy; that Obamacare is not a tax and will dramatically reduce your premiums while cutting spending; that we are experiencing the most transparent administration in history; that the criminally reckless Fast and Furious program was begun by the Bush administration; that the president has cut spending and debt even as he piles trillions more on our tab; that he has excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs; or that an “interim agreement” that explicitly allows Iran to enrich uranium — and that anticipates a final accord establishing a permanent uranium “enrichment program” for Iran — somehow does not recognize an Iranian right to enrich uranium and so portend a revolutionary jihadist regime possessed of nuclear bombs.
Though never desirable, presidential fraud might be tolerable if this were 1995 again. But it is not — our times are grave. Unlike the days of the Clinton bender, the question is not how the president is going to survive another fine mess he’s gotten himself into. The question is how we are going to survive this president.
Quote of the Day.
I find it pathetic that so few journalists in what we euphemistically call “the mainstream media” know this, care about it or abide by it.
This is one of many reasons America is losing its liberty.
The presidency, the Congress and the Supreme Court are rarely at odds with each other in any meaningful way. Government grows way beyond its constitutional limits daily despite the checks and balances that were ingeniously put in place by our founders to prevent that tendency.
And, worse yet, the media don’t expose this lawlessness. Rather, they cheerlead it.
When was the last time you heard, read or saw someone in the press – outside of WND, an institution specifically established to serve with conviction the central role of a free press in a free society – expose unconstitutional growth and power grabs by the federal government?
It’s hard to remember, isn’t it?
How did journalism lose its way?
Like most other cultural institutions in America, it was taken over, subverted, undermined and sabotaged by an ideology that simply doesn’t believe in constitutionally limited government, that simply doesn’t believe people are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that simply doesn’t believe in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that simply doesn’t believe in self-government.
You can seek national salvation in politics for the next 100 years, but it won’t come unless you comprehend the full picture of what went wrong in America – and how its enviable vision was betrayed.