Archives for November 2015

The American people adored Ronald Reagan, a fact author Craig Shirley says was proven in the national outpouring of grief following Reagan’s death in 2004, ignored by the liberal elite and co-opted by shrewd Democrats who figured they would join Reagan since they couldn’t beat him.

Shirley is the author of three volumes on Reagan, the latest of which is “Last Act:  The Final Years and Emerging Legacy of Ronald Reagan.”  His prior books chronicled Reagan’s insurgent challenge to President Gerald R. Ford in 1976 and his historic victory over President Jimmy Carter in 1980.

Reagan’s landslide wins in 1980 and 1984 were evidence of the public’s affinity for Reagan, as was the convincing victory of his vice president, George H.W. Bush, in 1988.  But Shirley says the entire nation saw it in June 2004, after Reagan’s death from Alzheimer’s-related pneumonia at the age of 93.  From California to Washington and back, hundreds of thousands of Americans paid their respects in person.  Millions more did so while watching the events from home.

Shirley says the week crystallized how much the liberal elite detested Reagan and how much the people admired him.

“The elites always criticized him, derided him, loathed him, attacked him.  The American people, by and large, learned not only to support him but a lot of them actually grew to adore him because he was in touch with the American people unlike any president since John Kennedy and, before, that, Franklin Roosevelt,” said Shirley.

The reason was not complicated.

“He got the support of the American people because he was part of the American people.  He was the quintessential American.  He was’t elitist.  He wasn’t out of touch.  He was, in many ways, his own one-man focus group,” said Shirley.

During the Reagan presidency, the media and Democrats relentlessly criticized Reagan for being a nuclear cowboy and for an economic agenda they branded as favoring the rich.  Upon Reagan’s death, however, Shirley says the liberal elites and politicians had very different pubic reactions to Reagan.

For the academics and the press, nothing changed.

“The media elite, academia, those people never understood Reagan, never understood his appeal, would actually resort to making up things about him,” said Shirley.

But, curiously, elected Democrats were much more kind, and Shirley says the reason went far deeper than public figures being reluctant to speak ill of the dead.

“A lot of Democratic politicians, (then-Michigan Gov.) Jennifer Granholm and others, were very, very praiseworthy.  The reason is because they saw up close and personal the rise of the Reagan Democrat.  They knew that Reagan had forged a cultural and psychological bond with these voters,” said Shirley, who says Democrats were keenly focused on not offending those constituents who helped to trigger the Reagan Revolution.

“They were still Democrats but they were culturally conservative and had grown as a political phenomenon, the most important political phenomenon in the history of American politics since the rise of the New Deal,” said Shirley.

Rather than demonize Reagan after his death, Democrats even embraced some aspects of his record.  Shirley says that’s a far cry from the way the Clinton administration tried to divorce itself from any connection to Reagan during the boom of the 1990’s.

“Isn’t that interesting?  The Clintons derided the decade of the 1980’s as a decade of greed and yet the very same economic underpinnings that fueled the growth of the 1990’s, which came about after Gingrich took control of Congress, was not called a decade of greed.  Isn’t that curious?” said Shirley.

President Obama has invoked Reagan on multiple issues, from pushing for increased spending for transportation to legalizing millions of people in the U.S. illegally.  As fewer and fewer Americans remember the Reagan years, Shirley says it’s vital for us to know the real legacy and what is being distorted for political purposes.

“Go back and filter the truth.  Find out the unvarnished, the real truth about Reagan on immigration and things like that.  He wasn’t for open borders.  He wasn’t for amnesty,” said Shirley.

Reagan did legalize some three million illegal immigrants in 1986 in exchange for stringent border security that never happened.  As the immigration and amnesty debate rages today, Shirley says you have to understand the context in which Reagan agreed to the immigration deal.

“The ’86 immigration bill came at the height of the Cold War.  He wasn’t about to hand Gorbachev a giant public relations bonanza by forcibly evicting people from this country at a time where he was speaking out to Gorbachev to free the people of his country and the Soviet-dominated countries of the Warsaw Pact and the Baltics,” said Shirley.

As a result of Reagan’s dealings on immigration and a tax hike that should have been offset with major spending cuts that never materialized, critics of today’s conservative movement suggest that Reagan may not even be welcome in the party today.

“The only people who make that argument are liberals in the Republican Party or moderates in the Republican Party or establishmentarians.  I don’t know any conservative who says, with a straight face, that Ronald Reagan wouldn’t be welcome today in the Republican Party.  Of course he would,” said Shirley.

The great frustration for die hard Reagan supporters is that Republicans have been unable to elect or even nominate another candidate cut from the Reagan mold.  Shirley says it’s unfair to look at the current crop and try to determine who could be the next Reagan.  He says we’ll never know until that person is actually president.

“As I tell audiences, Ronald Reagan wasn’t Ronald Reagan before Ronald Reagan was Ronald Reagan.  And by that I mean that very few, if any, actually saw his greatness before he was great.  In the long history of the American presidency, there’s only one man who was thought would be a great president before he was president and that was George Washington,” said Shirley.

Different admirers of Reagan point to different accomplishments as most significant during his eight years in office.  Shirley says Reagan had his own answer to that question.

“The two things that he cited as being the most important was, one, the restoration of the American economy, which created 19 million new jobs.  Second was restoration of America’s morale,” said Shirley.

He says Reagan saw those as vital ingredients towards accomplishing his top goal.

“He believed that America operated on a higher moral plane than any other country in history.  He assumed the presidency in that fashion and he knew that to defeat the Soviets he had to have a strong economy.  And to have a strong economy he had to raise America’s morale,” said Shirley.

As the years roll along, Reagan’s history will be written less by those who lived it and more by reporters and academics who largely disparage Reagan.  Shirley says the challenge is to fight back against revisionism wherever it rears it’s head.

“Fortunately, there’s a group of Reagan historians and biographers who have demonstrated a willingness and ability and sometimes courage to push back against disinformation about Ronald Reagan.  George Santayana once said that, ‘History is a pack of lies agreed upon, written by people who weren’t there.’  The history of Ronald Reagan is too important to be lied about or written by people who weren’t there,” said Shirley.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review cheer the election of a conservative governor in Kentucky, the GOP holding the Virginia Senate and voters rejecting liberal initiatives in Houston and Ohio.  They also groan as TransCanada asks for its Keystone XL pipeline request to be to be postponed and they slam the Obama administration for its endless delay in deciding on the pipeline.  And they unload on the Department of Education for forcing an Illinois high school to allow a male who “identifies” as a female to dress and shower with the girls on his team.

The Department of Education is demanding that an Illinois school district allow a boy who identifies as a girl and plays sports on a girls team to have full access to the locker room and showers with the girls on the team.

“Some things are so profoundly stupid that the fact is it’s hard to respond to something like that,” said Liberty Counsel Chairman Mathew Staver, who has also been in the news recently as the lead counsel for Rowan County Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis

The federal government’s decision follows a 2013 legal challenge to Township High School District 211 that the boy filed through the American Civil Liberties Union.  The district allowed the unnamed male to play on the girls team since he identifies as female but refused to allow him to dress and shower with the girls.

“All students deserve the opportunity to participate equally in school programs and activities — this is a basic civil right,” Assistant U.S. Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon said in a statement Monday.

The school district has 30 days to reach a settlement with the boy.  Failure to accommodate him could result in the district losing federal Title IX funding.

The district issued a statement in disagreement with the Department of Education ruling, saying its top concern was protecting the privacy of its students.

“We do not agree with (the DOE’s) decision and remain strong in our belief that the District’s course of action, including private changing stations in our locker rooms, appropriately serves the dignity and privacy of all students in our educational environment,” the statement read in part.

Staver says the district is exactly right.

“To say that this is a basic civil right for a young boy to use a girls shower room and restroom is absolutely absurd.  Certainly, these girls deserve privacy.  They deserve respect.  No one would expect that while they’re in the shower, a boy is going to come into the same shower that they’re in,” said Staver.

He says an already slippery slope just got got much more slick.

“This is just looking at objective reality and saying it’s something completely different from what it really is.  This is a bad precedent by this Department of Education and certainly it’s coming from the very top at the president’s level.  I think it sends a bad precedent and I think it places children at risk in these schools,” said Staver.

Staver says the absence of logic can only lead this nation in one direction.

“I think it’s headed to complete anarchy.  I mean this whole gender identity is just a complete abolition of objective reality of the natural created order.  Whether people like it or not or whether they want to admit it or not, there are two sexes.  There are males and females.  There’s men and women.  There’s boys and girls.  That’s just the way it is,” said Staver.

“There’s not boys who can think they’re a woman and therefore become a woman and vice versa,” added Staver.

While the transgender movement contends it is interested in equal rights, Staver says the whole movement is an act of rebellion.

“This is absolute objective reality, just completely thrown aside.  At the end of the day, it an absolute rebellion against our Creator, who created you and I in His image and He created male and female,” said Staver.

As for the Illinois case, Staver urges the district to resist the demands from Washington.

“I think the school should not abide by this ruling.  The school is placing all the other students at risk, placing the parents at risk when they send their young girl to a school,” said Staver, who says any right-thinking parent should be appalled by such a policy spreading across the nation.

“How would you feel if boys could come into the girls locker room.  Imagine that if when you were in school that boys could just walk into the girls shower room while they’re showering and in a stage of undress.  That is opening up the door to absolute abuse and harm that will be afflicted on these young girls.  This is wrong,” said Staver.

And he says parents should act and act quickly.

“Parents ought to protest to the ceiling at the next school board meeting.  They ought to demand some responsible action by the school board that governs this.  If they don’t get the action, then they ought to pull their children from school and put them in a different school,” said Staver.

He has some long-tern advice as well.

“They ought to vote these people out of office.  They ought to not take this sitting down silently.  The future of their children.  The sanctity and well-being of their sons and daughters and grandchildren is at stake,” said Staver.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review cheer MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough for pointing out that every one of the top network television news positions is held by a liberal and has been for 50 years.  They sigh as the Republican candidates turn frustration over the CNBC debate into a circus of endless demands.  And they slam New York Times “conservative” columnist David Brooks for saying he will move to Canada if Trump wins.

The Obama administration is actively lining up corporate America to champion his controversial climate agenda that he hopes to push through a United Nations summit in the coming weeks, and businesses are jumping aboard by the dozens, either out of profit motive or to avoid punitive action from the White House.

Back in June, a Daily Caller article reported that Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett was using both sticks and carrots to woo big businesses onto the climate change bandwagon.

In a column for Conservative Review, energy expert and crony capitalism watchdog Dr. Tom Borelli says corporate leaders are only too eager to join forces with Obama.

“Eighty-one companies have signed onto a White House climate change pledge, where each company volunteers to take certain actions to reduce carbon dioxide emissions,” said Borelli.

Some firms signing onto the Obama climate plan are focused on renewable energy and see a major windfall in profits headed their way if carbon dioxide standards are slashed in the U.S.  Others have different incentives.

“There’s a group of food companies that have also signed on.  I believe some of these companies, specifically Coca-Cola and Pepsi, are really just trying to align themselves with the administration because they fear at any one moment the progressives will start talking about a tax on sodas,” said Borelli, who says this is the latest episode of Obama taking aggressive steps to get what he wants.

“He wants a worldwide global treaty and then he’s going to try to enforce that on companies, if not directly through law then through intimidation and through public pressure,” added Borelli.

The bad news for corporations, according to Borelli, is that their obedience will only get them so far.

“You think government will be your friend but eventually you’ll end up turning on the company as well.  The bell will toll for them,” said Borelli.

Even if that didn’t happen, Borelli says Obama and big business have gone a long way down a dangerous road.

“Probably the most dangerous legacy he’s going to leave us is this corporatist state, where big business and big government align themselves temporarily for a policy goal,” said Borelli.

He says Obamacare is a “prime example.”

“Initially, pharmaceutical companies were against HillaryCare back in the ’90’s and lobbied against it.  With Obama, they lobbied for it because they got specific breaks they wanted,” said Borelli, who is confident the health care industry is already regretting its support for Obamacare.

“Now there’s talk of Obama reversing some of the promises he made and there are no promises far out into the future.  Companies should be aware when they align themselves with big government, big government can and always will turn on them,” said Borelli.

Obama is planning to treat any UN deal as an executive agreement and bypass Senate scrutiny. much as it did with the Iran nuclear deal.

Borelli says no one should expect Congress to take major steps to stop Obama’s unilateral action.  He says real change is up to the American people at the ballot box.

“It’s going to be up to everyday Americans looking forward to the next elections to try to get really true conservatives in that will rein in government, that will rein in this corporatist state that we’re involved in these days and, more urgently, rein in this global cooperation, where we’re starting to sell our sovereignty down the road,” said Borelli.

However, Borelli says Obama’s strategy for imposing his climate agenda makes it much easier to reverse, if the right people get elected.

“We can start to roll back some of these regulations, especially that the EPA has been issuing against the coal industry and every other manufacturer.  It’s going to take a little time but a lot of what Obama’s doing through his pen and his phone and through his executive branch can be rolled back,” said Borelli.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are cautiously pleased with House Speaker Paul Ryan’s vows to champion conservative solutions and stay away from immigration while Obama is in office.  They also slam Bill Gates for suggesting we need to abandon the free market to address climate change.  And they pay tribute to the late Sen. Fred Thompson.