Saying goodbye to 'The Gipper': Pat Buchanan shows why Reagan was loved by so many Americans

So Ronald Reagan said of America in his second inaugural address. And so it shall be said of him.

He came from another time and place, Ronald Reagan did, a time long ago when love of country was as natural for a boy growing up in Illinois as was a faith that nothing was beyond the capacity of the great and good people whence he had come.

He had a lifelong love affair with America, with her history, heroes, stories and legends. Now he is now one of those legends.

In life and as an actor, he always relished romantic and heroic roles, whether as the lifeguard who pulled 77 swimmers to safety, the legendary George Gipp of Knute Rockne's Notre Dame or the statesman who walked out of a summit meeting in Iceland rather than compromise the security of the country he was elected to protect.

When America began to tear herself apart over morality, race and Vietnam in the 1960s, the old certitudes he articulated and the old virtues he personified held a magnetic attraction for a people bewildered by what was happening to their country. When he spoke, he took us to a higher ground, above petty and partisan squabbles and divisions, where we could dream again and be a people again.

In the crushing defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, Reagan's speech of blazing defiance vaulted him into the leadership of the conservative movement. And after Watergate, defeat in Vietnam, the Soviet empire rampant and America held hostage, the country, unready for Reagan or conservatism in 1964, took a chance in 1980.

With the help of tough Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve, Ronald Reagan's tax cuts, after they took effect in 1983, ignited a 17-year boom unlike any in the 20th century. America was back.

Reagan's sunny persona, his grace under fire after the attempt on his life, endeared him to his countrymen. When he came out of the anesthesia after the surgery to remove the bullet so near his heart, he looked up at the nervous nurses hovering over him and said, "OK, let's do the whole scene over again, beginning at the hotel."

His refusal to compromise principle, his resolve to restore the morale and might of the armed forces of which he was now commander in chief, converted America to conservatism and created a constituency all his own: Reagan Democrats. I do not know if Ronald Reagan would have cared that they named that building in Washington after him, but he would have loved that big aircraft carrier.

In the 1960s, it was a handicap in a presidential campaign to be a conservative. Republicans shied away from the label a hostile media had equated with extremism. With Reagan, it was an honor. He was never embarrassed or ashamed at being a man of the right.

Every year, he would speak at CPAC. In every State of the Union, he demanded a line be inserted calling for an amendment to the constitution to protect the life of the unborn. He believed God had spared him and that the time left to him was to be spent doing God's work here on earth.

Where other politicians feared to tred on the battlegrounds of philosophy and principle, Reagan rushed in. Nominated in 1980, he demanded a "no pale pastels" platform – and then ran on it.

He had a wonderful sense of humor, and he loved stories. Seconds before going out to face the press in prime-time news conferences 80 million Americans and the whole world would watch, he was still telling jokes. He was devoid of ego and of the boastfulness so common in this capital. "There is no limit to how far a man can go," read a plaque in his office, "so long as he is willing to let someone else get the credit."

What did he achieve? Ronald Reagan let the American eagle soar. He cut tax rates from 70 percent to 28 percent, restored our spirit, rebuilt the armed forces into the most formidable the world had ever seen and led us to bloodless victory in the Cold War. Time declared Mikhail Gorbachev Man of the Decade. America knows better.

Branded by a hostile city as "an amiable dunce," he paid no heed. He was more concerned with what his friends at Human Events wrote than what his adversaries at the Washington Post or the New York Times said.

He was warned that his determination to challenge the Soviet Empire philosophically, and strategically in Afghanistan, Angola and Nicaragua, risked war. Yet this 70-year-old man who began his presidency calling the Soviet Union an evil empire ended it strolling through Red Square arm-in-arm with the last leader of that empire.

A British statesman once said all political lives end in failure. As always, Ronald Reagan is the exception. We shall not see his like again.

It was years after high school, that it began to sink in with me, the problem of ...

First, you get an idea.

Next, you try to write it down.

What you wrote, should be, on that paper, what you "said" in your mind.

Then, you go back and read it.

What you were thinking may be there, or it may not be there.

Even when it is there, for you, it may not be there for the person reading your words --- they will see only portions of your thoughts.

If you know what I am saying ... (he said?!) ... then you will understand me, when I say, now, that I wish teachers had said the above to me, when I was in school, struggling so hard to write anything, inhibited by my inhibitions, basically very shy, and a man of very, very few words.

No teacher, until I was 23 years old, every spent the time to help me learn to craft anything that I was writing.

I knew grammer, 100%. I knew spelling, 100%.

I did not know anything at all, about the writing that teachers were expecting to see, based upon what they pretended to teach ... and most of that, is probably because most of them were trying to indoctrinate me with socialist C.R.A.P. Our writing was judged according to how politically correct were our ideas, and that was in the late 1960's.

No one said to me, "This is a sheet of metal, and you are going to shape it into an object that has meaning; and, you are going to describe for me, each step and detail to accomplish that. You are to organize all that in steps, that is, paragraphs. Thus, by the end, your theme will be, how to produce an object, and you will have demonstrated how to do that, to everybody who reads your document, now, and in the future."

Probably they did not do that, because my instructors were bullshit artists whose only fashioning was that they fashioned themselves.

We were constantly reminded, that, what we did not know, we should have learned in the previous grades.

So, what was the purpose in being there? I might have asked, but I could not find the words, because I would be challenging the teacher, that is, disrespectful, and I think they knew that and took advantage of it. In addition to which, now, I will also say, that their philosophy obviously set aside the fact that they were not there to teach us how to write. Instead, they were there for, as I began to realize, to indoctrinate us in their philosophy on life as it should be under their favorite flavor of socialism.

If you wanted to get an A, you did as Mike Kinsley did: You wrote voluminously, regurgitating the left wing buzzwords that the teacher spoke in class; and the teacher apparently went for it. Not becaue the teacher was hooked on what you said, but because the teacher cooed over your recruitment in "the long march."

I did not catch onto that trick until 7 or 8 years later, in some history and economics courses in college, in which I would toss a few buzzwords into a paper, here and there ... and yes, it did seem to work quite well.

Mike Kinsey figured out early on, and he made a profession of, "Give 'em what they want, and they'll make you a star."

The academic competition in prep schools, if you wanted to go to the Ivy League, was mostly in that direction.

If you were willing to be "pragmatic" about that profession, you would find the attention that you craved, and he did.

In contrast, my being a guy of few words, I assessed the situation as, "They are trying to make bullshit artists out of us."

You were "in" if you were witty, and you were otherwise "out" and usually suspected of being "conservative."

I was "too uptight," which I knew to be, that I was raised to a standard of self-discipline.

I don't know how else to say it, that I felt that they were trying to get me to say things that I did not believe, that I did not think were true, and even things that I believed were harmful.

I think that an effort must be made, when raising a child to be self-disciplined, to be alert to, given the child, overcoming the tendency to, by that raising, effectly make the child tight-lipped in areas where, in the child's future, especially with their children, they might do a bit better to open up within the family unit, while maintaining their privacy in public.

The "liberal minded" folk tend to think of tight-lipped people as simple minded people, completely overlooking the above, and that, the fellow may be a man of action, and they have underestimated him, almost altogether. They sure did underestimate Ronald Reagan, and they still do underestimate him.

The liberals like to say, that "clearly" (the lead-in buzzword that let's you know that first, it is not "clear," and second, not well thought out by the same liberals) ... "clearly this man is not deep and therefore he must be saying what he is told to say and think."

They are "enlightened;" you are not.

I found then, and since, that "intellectuals" cannot bear applied science, because something other than what is in a favorite book of theirs, will expose them to laws that require in-depth understanding of what they do not know --- usually introducing facts, not entered by man by by God, that refute the same liberals' propaganda.

In addition, they generally do not go to the library and look up anything related to naval shipping and operations, because that would prevent he or she or it, the network liberal media news intellectual, from asking their question in the fashion that they have worked so hard to use in the public eye (and satisfy Marx et al at alma mater), so that it sets a stage by which they can damage the integrity of the man in uniform, whom they are working so hard to embarrass in public.

If you, John, are at the podium, and I ask you a dumb question, I know, as a professional network news reporter, that the probability is, given that you are an honest soul, what happens in your mind, is for a moment, the thought, "How do I explain in brief, the steps that I must, in order to answer that question well enough, so that the public understands how and why, the thinking that is the context necessary, so I answer the public's question."

That takes a lot of training and self-discipline, to make an argument briefly, that almost always requires some education that you know you must convey, yet you know that your inquisitor is not going to let you explain. In a time when also, conservative politics media wonks (advisors) are consuming your money in the name of making you a Sound Bite Star --- for one hop instead of your learning to become a pilot and a pilot instructor.

The professional news reporter knows that they have tripped an overload switch, and they desire to make you fumble with some few words that, in your mind you may think you've got it, the idea, and the expression, but it usually cannot be enough to be ... which is my point here ... understood by the public.

All liberal media personnel are propagandists, that is, they work diligently to convey ideas that use the Marxist-Goebbels-Gramsci Thesarus --- the holy words --- the buzzwords.

Most of those words, if not all, are adjectives.

One way to defeat the left wing nuts' arguments, is to find the adjectives, and start in on them.

That was one of Reagan's tools. He would say something like, "You are trying to convey that I do not care that it is a 'day,' because I do not agree with you that it is a 'bad day,' when, in fact, I firmly believe that it is a 'day,' and contrary to your position, I am determined to make it a 'good day.'"

That pretty much sums up Ronald Reagan's political views and then some.

The left wing nuts are about making the people fear that it will be a bad day, while Ronald Reagan believed that we have the capacity, and it is worthy of ourselves, and it is in our American Heritage to work at making it a good day.

That is the American way of life.

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