Free Republic

[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...

In 1979, after a long campaign of political pressure applied by the Carter administration in the United States, the Shah of Iran fell to the Islamic Revolution, ending a tradition of monarchic rule that had persisted in Iran for thousands of years since the rule of Cyrus the Great. The stage was set for the rise of the Ayatollah, and the establishment of a theocracy in Iran that, today, most Iranians do not even want. But what if none of that had ever happened? While a momentous departure from actual history, it is not nearly so far-fetched as it sounds....

The Democratic warhorse Dianne Feinstein is warning that Bernie Sanders’ campaign against Hillary Clinton could turn the party’s convention in Philadelphia into the kind of disaster that erupted in Chicago in 1968. “It worries me a great deal,” she tells CNN. I can understand why. I was there. Covering the Democrats’ 1968 convention for one of America’s greatest newspapers, the Anniston (Ala.) Star, I saw a bitterly divided party, riven by the Vietnam War and Jim Crow, met with violence in the streets. The convention finally handed up, in Vice President Hubert Humphrey, one of the finest liberals in history....

The political scientist who applies the ‘rational choice’ theory of economics to voters says there was a method to the GOP’s primary madness. Go to the source:

The nation's Republicans are working against the clock to answer two key questions: Can conservative Ronald Reagan possibly attract enough independent and Democratic votes to win in November? "Reagan is the opponent of choice for Carter," says I. A. Lewis, director of the Los Angeles Times Poll, a point on which most analysts agree. "But Reagan can reach across and cause mischief in the Democratic constituency," Mr. Lewis says. "Reagan appeals to blue collar, working-class voters. He can win Democratic votes..."

Ronald Reagan would be familiar with some of the challenges facing Donald Trump lately. Imagine an establishment-busting presidential candidate rolling up the primaries but polling 20 points behind the presumptive Democratic nominee. The controversial Republican front-runner is considered so radical that the party establishment eyes a brokered convention, perhaps to nominate a failed candidate from the previous election. Sound familiar? Welcome to March 1980. In retrospect, Ronald Reagan’s presidency seems inevitable, but the prevailing wisdom in the Republican Party 36 years ago was that he was leading the party to certain defeat. Going into the 1980 race, some Republican leaders...

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...

The brouhahas over billionaire Donald Trump show how broadcasters favor easy, juicy stories about powerful people’s bad words over harder, less sexy ones about their bad deeds. This is a teachable moment for the mass media. Failing to take Trump seriously could set a dangerous precedent for future candidates with fresh ideas, looking to shake up the controlling status quo. The Huffington Post, which carries my column, announced that it is excluding Trump from its political coverage and instead filing all stories about the man leading the Republican field, according to the most recent polls, under entertainment. If they existed...

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?...