Ron Reagan, son of the late president, continues to get attention because of speculation in his new book that his father may have begun experiencing Alzheimer’s Disease during his presidency. Ron cites two examples where his father seemed confused or forgetful, one as early as 1984 and another from 1986. Ron’s speculation ignited a...
This February 6, 2011 marks the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birth. Reagan died June 5, 2004 at the ripe old age of 93. Ironically, throughout that long life, he had been a model of fitness. If not for Alzheimer’s disease, it is quite possible we might be watching news clips of an elderly Reagan...
February 6, 2011 marks the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth. In a telling development, Republicans around the country have begun holding Reagan Day dinners, as they’ve long traditionally done every February for Abraham Lincoln. This is yet another spontaneous display of affection for Reagan. Having written so much on the man, I get...
Of course, it’s customary at year’s end to share our favorite news items from the year past. As someone who teaches and writes about history, I tend to focus on historical things I fear are lost to American education. So, my enduring “news item†of 2010 falls under the category of historical outrage, though...
On the heels of a recent Sunday magazine profile of Glenn Beck, The New York Times published a roundtable discussion among six scholars on the issue of President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson has become a popular Beck target, and has suddenly emerged as a hot topic in our current politics. “I hate Woodrow Wilson!” shouted...
The people of Poland got an early Christmas present this year. It’s bittersweet but long awaited, and indeed a gift of sortsâ€â€and from an unlikely source: Russia. In Moscow, the State Duma, Russia’s legislature, passed a statement conceding Soviet responsibility for the Katyn Woods massacre, one of the 20th century’s worst war crimes. The...
It could be Bill Clinton (1994) all over again. Barack Obama’s move should not only help the economy dramatically, and spare taxpayers more ludicrous levels of obscene taxation to bail out a profligate federal government, but, in the end, it could save his presidency.
North Korea is not an easy issue. I’ve dealt with it since the early 1990s, beginning at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. I had few answers then, and I still have few today. It also is not a partisan issue. For over 60 years, Democrat and Republican presidents alike have suffered the...
It has been almost 50 years since Milton Friedman, Nobel economist, released his classic, Capitalism and Freedom. The book has slowly slipped from my course syllabus, not to mention that of the political elite. And why not? What Friedman said is now obvious. Surely, Americans, given the indisputable superiority of the free market over...
It was 35 years ago this summer that the conservative movement found itself in a defining moral struggle not with the liberal Left but with the establishment wing of the Republican Party. Here was the context: Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn had published his majestic Gulag Archipelago, blowing the whistle on the brutality of the...
Over 70 Christian leaders and denominational heads have signed a letter saying that questions about the religious philosophy of the president of the United States should be ignored and suppressed by the major media.
This week marks 65 years since the United States dropped the atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945, President Harry Truman delivered a “rain of ruin†upon Hiroshima, Japan, with Nagasaki hit three days later, killing 100,000 to 200,000.Truman’s objective was to compel surrender from an intransigent enemy that refused to halt its naked aggression....
Call it another Twilight Zone moment; another ignominious contribution to the “you-can’t-make-this-up” category. First, Mao Tse-tung was honored by oblivious New Yorkers, with their Empire State Building aglow in red and yellow last October to commemorate the birth of Red China. Mao’s nearest rival for trophy of top mass murderer in history was Joseph...
Historically, social justice has meant different things to different people, and equally so today, where the term remains as frustratingly elusive as ever. Like the very progressives that champion the term, the definition seems to evolve based on progressives’ ever-evolving purposes. Most exasperating is that many who speak the language of social justice really...
I’ve never participated in a Tea Party rally. My natural habitat is a classroom or behind a keyboard. That said, I’ve had a lot of contact with Tea Party people, and, of course, I hear the angry charges from those doing their worst to discredit the movement. For what it’s worth, here are some...
I was in Washington last week, meaning I was able to observe, on-site and up close, the reaction to President Obama’s remarkable switch in leadership in Afghanistan from the bizarre General Stanley McChrystal to the excellent General David Petraeus. The action certainly got news coverage, absorbing all the headlines. Most conservative sources decried the...
This week veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas announced her sudden “retirement.†The source was an insight shared by Thomas outside the White House during a Jewish-American Heritage Month celebration. Asked about her feelings toward Jews and Israel, the 89-year-old conscience of the White House press corps opined that the Palestinian people “are occupiedâ€Â...
In November 2008, just after the historic election of Barack Obama, I wrote a piece titled, “Pro-Life Death?†I noted that America’s choice of Obama as president and, equally important, of a massive liberal majority in Congress, constituted the death of the pro-life movement as we know it. That is, the pro-life movement had...
Progressivism is all-the-rage nowadays, with liberals having jettisoned the “liberal†label for the less maligned tag of “progressive.†This is tactical as much as philosophical. It’s fascinating that Hillary Clinton, for instance, recently proclaimed herself a “progressive.†I wrote an entire book on Mrs. Clinton, and never once saw her describe herself as progressive....
I knew the time would come. America’s public schools and ideologically monolithic universities have spawned a generation woefully uninformed in the most elementary facts about free markets, socialism, and communism. Personally, after teaching this material for years, I’m getting an inordinate number of questions about communism in particular, as that word is bandied about...
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