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In celebrating Reagan’s 100th, we are including a favorite piece that Mark Steyn wrote about Reagan in 2004.
…the elites were stupid about Reagan in a way that only clever people can be. …
…I once discussed Irving Berlin, composer of “God Bless America”, with his friend and fellow songwriter Jule Styne, and Jule put it best: “It’s easy to be clever. But the really clever thing is to be simple.” At the Berlin Wall that day, it would have been easy to be clever, as all those Seventies détente sophisticates would have been. And who would have remembered a word they said? Like Irving Berlin with “God Bless America”, only Reagan could have stood there and declared without embarrassment:
Tear down this wall!
- and two years later the wall was, indeed, torn down. Ronald Reagan was straightforward and true and said it for everybody – which is why his “rhetorical opportunity missed” is remembered by millions of grateful Eastern Europeans. The really clever thing is to have the confidence to say it in four monosyllables.
…“The Great Communicator” was effective because what he was communicating was self-evident to all but our decayed elites: “We are a nation that has a government – not the other way around,” he said in his inaugural address. And at the end of a grim, grey decade – Vietnam, Watergate, energy crises, Iranian hostages – Americans decided they wanted a President who looked like the nation, not like its failed government. Thanks to his clarity, around the world governments that had nations were replaced by nations that have governments. Most of the Warsaw Pact countries are now members of NATO, with free markets and freely elected parliaments. …
The Telegraph, UK, editors add their comments on Reagan.
Ronald Reagan would have been 100 years old yesterday, and for many of us who remember him there is a twinge of sadness that he is not around to witness America’s celebrations of his centenary. …
During his two terms in office, President Reagan was subjected to relentless, mean-spirited mockery from the Left. These days, however, the verdict of history is pretty clear, and even liberal US politicians are attempting to appropriate his legacy. …no one was better than Reagan at delivering a self-deprecating wisecrack. In 1981, as he was being lifted on to the operating table after being shot, the 70-year-old president looked around at his surgeons and said: “I hope you’re all Republicans.” One-liners don’t come more spontaneous than that. No wonder we remember Ronald Reagan as the Great Communicator.
President Obama is not the only politician to try to hijack the brand, however. Populist Republicans are at it, too (as are self-styled mainstream conservatives here). They flatter themselves. It is not just Reagan’s sense of humour they lack: it is his spirit of tolerance and the calm purpose that lay behind the jokes. President Reagan was not just a communicator – he won the Cold War. It’s hard, not to say impossible, to imagine either Barack Obama or Sarah Palin pulling off such a feat. Let them salute him by all means, but they should jump off the bandwagon.
David Warren hopes the outcome of the current Egyptian revolution is better than the last.
There are two, and only two, credible sources of power in Egypt, at the national level. One is the army, and the other is the Muslim Brotherhood. The former seized power in the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, overthrowing the royal dynasty of that extraordinary Albanian, Muhammad Ali, which had ruled Egypt and Sudan (with unwanted British help) since 1805.
…The western powers very slowly grasped that they had contrived to replace a narcissistic fool with a socialist madman. Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, almost whimsically; in the course of provoking another disastrous war with Israel in 1956; then another in 1967; while enmiring his country in dysfunctional authoritarian bureaucracy. As the West declined to support him any further, he manoeuvred into the Soviet orbit. But such was his charisma, and the resonance of Israel as his rhetorical bete noire, that he was able to embody pan-Arab nationalist aspirations, so well that we remember that defunct ideology as “Nasserism.”
Nasser was no “Islamist,” and for broader reasons the Egyptian army has long been consciously identified with secular rule. It has remained the only effective bulwark against the expanding influence and demands of the Muslim Brotherhood.
…Mubarak’s greatest difficulty has been securing reforms which have included the gradual replacement of incompetent (and usually army-managed) state enterprises with free markets, and the “normalization” of relations with Israel, from behind a rhetorical cover. His very survival in office has been an extraordinary accomplishment, to which Egypt owes what peace and prosperity it has had. …
In the Corner, Andrew Stiles has CBO numbers on the unbelievable and unconscionable increases in government spending under the Obama administration.
The ink was barely dry on House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan’s proposal to set an appropriations ceiling for the remainder of fiscal year 2011 — a move that would save $74 billion compared with the amount initially requested last year by President Obama — before top-ranking Democrats began trashing it.
…From Ryan’s perspective, however, the cuts are only the beginning. “This is just a down-payment by Republicans to get spending under control,” he said in a statement. “House Republicans will continue to tackle the country’s fiscal problems by advancing spending cuts and spending reforms, and by charting a new course with a new budget for the upcoming fiscal year.”
…Now that House Republicans are seeking a return to pre-stimulus levels — and targeting many of these same propped-up federal agencies in the process — Harry Reid thinks its too extreme for his liking. But compared to the spending increases that took place over the past two years, Ryan’s cuts are strikingly modest — and yet only the beginning of what’s required. A closer look at just how much, and how rapidly, some of these federal agencies’ discretionary budgets have ballooned under the Obama administration reveals that well, yes, deep cuts will be necessary if lawmakers are even remotely serious about restoring fiscal sanity to the budget process. …
Michael Barone notes how out-of-touch Obama is with America. Barone points out how oddly antiquated and two-dimensional is Obama’s vision for the country. And the One-Trick President thinks he is going to make the future happen by spending more of your money.
Barack Obama, like all American politicians, likes to portray himself as future-oriented and open to technological progress. Yet the vision he set out in his State of the Union address is oddly antique and disturbingly static.
“This is our generation’s Sputnik moment,” he said. But Sputnik and America’s supposedly less advanced rocket programs of 1957 were government projects, at a time when government defense spending, like the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, drove technology.
…And then there is transportation. “Within 25 years,” Obama said, “our goal is to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail. This could allow you,” he said breathlessly, “to go places in half the time it takes to travel by car. For some trips, it will be faster than flying.”
…If you put together Obama’s resistance to just about any serious changes in entitlement spending with his antique vision of technological progress, what you see is an America where the public sector permanently consumes a larger part of the economy than in the past and squanders the proceeds on white elephants like faux high-speed rail lines and political payoffs to the teacher and other public-sector unions. Private-sector innovation gets squeezed out by regulations like the Obama FCC’s net neutrality rules. It’s a plan for a static rather than dynamic economy. …
We have Debra Saunders, in the San Francisco Chronicle, with an excellent article on how money is being wasted on green subsidies.
After receiving at least $43 million in aid from the state of Massachusetts, Evergreen Solar announced last month that it would be closing its manufacturing plant in Devens, Mass., laying off its 800 workers and moving its manufacturing operations to China.
Warning: These are the “green jobs” that President Obama has touted as part of his “winning the future” agenda.
The problem isn’t that Obama wants to direct federal dollars toward research for alternative energy. It is in the national interest to have affordable options when oil sources are depleted.
The problem is that Obama thinks green jobs are the answer to the anemic economy recovery. And he clings to that belief in the face of contrary evidence.
…With the unemployment rate at 9.4 percent, Washington should be looking to create jobs that aren’t going to run to China. Or, as Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, told the New York Times, “If the president really were serious about job creation, he would be working with us to develop American oil and gas by American workers for American consumers.”
American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Steven F. Hayward likes to ask people which state has the lowest unemployment rate. The answer is North Dakota, with an unemployment rate of 3.8 percent. “The reason is they’ve had a huge oil and gas boom,” Hayward explained. …
The Investor’s Business Daily editors report on a federal judge finding the Interior Department in contempt. The Interior Department has refused to comply with the federal court’s injunction on the drilling moratorium: the government bureaucrats are running a de facto moratorium by dramatically decreasing the number of oil permits issued.
Energy Policy: An administration that has no respect for Congress, the courts or the Constitution has been found in contempt for reissuing a drilling moratorium that a U.S. district judge found overly broad.
The Obama administration’s trouble with the courts has continued with a judge’s ruling last week that the Interior Department’s reinstating of a drilling moratorium followed by a de facto moratorium via an overly restrictive permitting process constituted contempt.
…In June, Martin Feldman of the Eastern District Court of Louisiana struck down Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s original moratorium, saying it was overkill based on flawed reasoning. …
…So the administration went back, rearranged a few words and a few deck chairs, and reissued its moratorium. That one was officially lifted in October, although the permitting process…has had the effect of continuing the moratorium.
Feldman was not amused. “Each step the government took following the court’s imposition of a preliminary injunction showcases its defiance,” the judge said in his ruling. “Such dismissive conduct, viewed in tandem with the reimposition of a second moratorium . .. provides this court with clear and convincing evidence of its contempt.”…
Kimberley Strassel details how the first piece of Obamacare was repealed.
Mark this date: On Feb. 2, 2011, a Democratic Senate killed the first piece of the health-care law it passed less than a year ago. Bowing (finally) to reality, 34 Democrats rushed to be among the 81 senators who axed the bill’s odious 1099 tax reporting requirement.
Let the ObamaCare dismantling begin.
…The 1099 provision was a new requirement that businesses report to the IRS annual purchases from any contractor above $600. The provision targeted 40 million businesses and other organizations, crushing them under a costly bookkeeping mandate. But hey, desperate Democrats needed funds to pay for their $1 trillion healthathon. By closing this “loophole,” they claimed, the IRS could commandeer a whole $17 billion in previously uncollected taxes.
…If the GOP is to dismember ObamaCare, it must pressure Democrats into helping. That’s what Republicans did this week. Next up for debate will be other odious elements: the individual mandate, taxes on kids’ braces, restrictions on health savings accounts, cuts to Medicare. The GOP will highlight each one and then ask 2012 Democrats what they are willing to defend. …
In Contentions, Alana Goodman has another example of how perverse and cancerous the liberal elite has become.
President Bush was forced to cancel a visit to Switzerland, where he was slated to be the keynote speaker at a Jewish Zionist charity gala next week, because he risked getting arrested for torture, Reuters is reporting:
Human rights groups said they had intended to submit a 2,500-page case against Bush in the Swiss city on Monday for alleged mistreatment of suspected militants at Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. naval base in Cuba where captives from Afghanistan, Iraq and other fronts in the so-called War on Terror were interned. …
And it isn’t just foreign NGOs involved in this. Human Rights Watch reportedly helped draft the criminal complaint, which claims that Bush is guilty of war crimes because he admitted to ordering the waterboarding of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.
Yes, this is the kind of nonsense human-rights groups are wasting their time on. President Bush can’t attend a Swiss charity event, but Hamas leaders can fly to Switzerland for meetings with government officials without fear.