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In Contentions, Jason Maoz discusses Ronald Reagan’s pro-Israel and pro-Judaism convictions.
Ronald Reagan, who would have been 100 this Sunday, had an instinctive affinity for Jews and Israel. As an actor who spent decades in the heavily Jewish environment of Hollywood and who counted scores of Jews among his friends and colleagues, he moved easily in pro-Israel circles. Both as a private citizen and as governor of California, he was a familiar sight and a favored speaker at various functions for Israel.
“I’ve believed many things in my life,” Reagan states in his memoirs, “but no conviction I’ve ever had has been stronger than my belief that the United States must ensure the survival of Israel.”
…Beyond the Middle East, the plight of Soviet Jews was bound to strike a sympathetic chord with someone as unbendingly anti-Communist as Reagan.
…The Reagan administration was instrumental in gaining the release in 1986 of prominent Jewish dissident Natan Sharansky, imprisoned for nine years on trumped-up treason charges. Sharansky has written of his reaction when, in 1983, confined to a tiny cell in a prison near the Siberian border, he saw on the front page of Pravda that Reagan — much to the ridicule and outrage of American and European liberals — had labeled the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”
As Sharansky describes it:
“Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan’s “provocation” quickly spread throughout the prison. We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth — a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us. I never imagined that three years later I would be in the White House telling this story to the president. … Reagan was right and his critics were wrong.”
Rich Richman adds a footnote to the story of Reagan And Sharansky.
… What few people knew, because Reagan had intentionally kept it secret, was that his first effort to free Sharansky had been undertaken back in 1981, when he wrote a handwritten letter to Brezhnev. He attached the script of the letter to his diary, and it was published in The Reagan Diaries after his death. …
Steven Hayward notes the irony of GE’s current sales campaign.
General Electric is right to celebrate their connection with Ronald Reagan, as they are doing with a splashy ad campaign. It was during Reagan’s years traveling the nation for GE in the 1950s that he developed his political views, and much of his rhetorical skill, as is recounted well in Thomas Evans’s book, The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism. …
…According to Federal Election Commission records, in 1980 GE’s political action committee gave $2,000 to the Reagan campaign, but gave Carter’s campaign . . . $3,000.
…Above all one wishes that GE today were less of a rent-seeking company jumping on the “green energy” bandwagon for government mandates that help them sell otherwise uncompetitive products such as windmills. Reagan wouldn’t have thought that was bringing good things to life.
Richard Epstein explains qualities that made Ronald Reagan great.
…Leadership cannot thrive on nuance or uncertainty. It depends on unshakable commitments to sound principles.
That is where Ronald Reagan excelled as a president. On the domestic front, Reagan insisted that the essence of a free society rested on these key building blocks: individual freedom, personal security, limited government and states’ rights. …
…The values articulated will in the end become presumptions that should yield in time to prudent exceptions. But the key insight is that free society has to start with the right presumptions. It must reject the absolute power of the state to impose whatever laws it conjures up in the name of community and the common good. …
…Forthright pronouncements also defined Reagan’s triumphs in foreign affairs. He knew in his bones that the want of inner conviction disarms any president engaged in international diplomacy. Moral relativism in international affairs is not a sign of intellectual discernment. It is a sign of moral weakness. Lots of hard political issues come in all shades of gray. But by the same token, the words for which Ronald Reagan is most remembered drew sharp contrasts. In March 1983, he called the Soviet Union “an evil empire.” Speaking at the Brandenburg Gate in June 1987, Reagan stated his major premise: “We believe that freedom and security go together.” This was followed by his direct challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev, his Russian counterpart: “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Which Gorbachev did by November 1989.
These simple declarative sentences define the man and his massive achievements. They are what all Americans should remember about Ronald Reagan on Sunday’s centennial of his birth. He knew that in politics, as in life, Dooley Wilson had it right. The fundamental things do apply. Ronald Reagan was a great president because he stood for what is great and enduring in the human condition.
The administration still thinks the Sputnik rhetoric is inspiring, Jonah Goldberg has this reply. We highlight Goldberg’s discussion of the laughable energy efficiency of China.
…Apparently, our Sputnik moment requires that we launch an updated arms race with China, but instead of bombs and tanks, we must build windmills and brew the government moonshine we call ethanol.
No metaphor can withstand too much scrutiny. But Obama’s effort to recast America’s plight as a replay of the last Sputnik moment fails in every intended regard.
…For starters, America is vastly more energy efficient than China and has been getting better at it for years. Since the oil shock of 1973, America’s economy has nearly tripled and the population has more than doubled but we only use about 20 percent more oil than we did then. Meanwhile, China — thanks largely to its insatiable appetite for coal — is far less green. In 2006, according to the Heritage Foundation, China and America had generally the same greenhouse emissions, by 2009 China’s were 50 percent greater.
Ironically, China achieves abysmal numbers like these precisely because it pursues the sorts of policies Obama says we need more of: bureaucratic micromanagement, costly subsidies, arbitrary timetables, political goals that are unrelated to the market and unhinged from the science. China is hardly the leader in technical, scientific, intellectual or artistic innovation. That’s where we’re still No. 1 and that’s why authoritarian China is trying to copy our economic model as best it can without adopting our political system. …
Noemie Emery writes that Obama is missing his opportunity to be a great president.
…It turns out Obama does have a big job, just not the one he signed on for. Presidents become great when they fit the times and the mood of the moment, which is Obama’s great problem.
He can give up his dream of expanding the government, and become great by addressing the problem and saving the safety net by making it viable. Or he can cling to his mission, and fail.
…With… the tsunami of debt rolling toward the country — he is pretending it doesn’t exist. In his State of the Union, he proposed still more spending, all on nonessentials.
…It was as if FDR gave a speech in 1940 on foreign affairs, and ignored Nazi Germany while he touted our friendly relations with Canada. This is not the way men of destiny act. …
In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Janet Daley says what many conservatives are thinking.
The editors of ConservativeHome USA have taken a deep breath and uttered the unsayable: the only real media star on the Republican stage is not a serious contender for the presidency. Publishing a compendium of comments from highly regarded commentators and Republican party figures, it makes a case for facing the truth that Sarah Palin cannot be regarded as presidential material, particularly at a time of such economic peril and global instability.
What it does not say (but does imply) is that the party would do real damage to its own reputation by nominating her. It would appear both desperate and unserious – a deadly electoral combination. I had a good deal of time for the Palin phenomenon when she was John McCain’s surprise choice of running mate: she seemed to represent the voice of an America which was too often treated with contempt by the political class and, after all, this was the vice-presidency we were talking about. The virulent attacks on her from the liberal establishment reminded me uncannily of that mix of misogyny and snobbery which had been thrown at Margaret Thatcher, and if only for that reason, I was inclined to defend her.
But enough is enough. She is not another Thatcher – nor is she another Reagan. …Given her star quality and wide support, she could be a plausible king-maker and power broker for some more credible candidate. Some of my senior Republican friends are disappointed that Governor Chris Christie has decided not to run this time around, and fear that the party may not be able to find a big enough figure in time. But developing the profile of a relative unknown would be better than going with a super star who would burn out spectacularly under fire.
In the Daily Beast, Howard Kurtz reviews Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir, Known and Unknown.
…In Known and Unknown, which was purchased by a reporter at a Washington bookstore in advance of its official release, Rumsfeld offers a muscular, uncompromising defense of his tenure, the military operations he helped direct in Afghanistan and Iraq and the president he served. He settles his share of scores, most notably with Colin Powell, Condi Rice, Dick Armitage and the media. While he acknowledges some missteps along the way, Rumsfeld also chastises high-ranking Democrats and insists—as does George W. Bush—that even if he had known in 2003 that Saddam did not possess weapons of mass destruction, the former defense secretary would still have favored going to war. …
…The book retraces familiar ground—the U.S. intelligence estimates in 2002 that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons—with Rumsfeld arguing that “recent history is abundant with examples of flawed intelligence that have affected key national security decisions and contingency planning.” This, of course, was the mother of all intelligence failures…
…Rumsfeld takes direct aim at Colin Powell in recounting the former general’s famous U.N. speech in February 2003, laying out the administration’s case that Saddam indeed possessed a stockpile of banned weapons. “Over time a narrative developed that Powell was somehow innocently misled into making a false declaration to the Security Council and the world,” Rumsfeld writes. He seems particularly offended that Powell has said that some in the intelligence community knew “that some of these sources were not good,” “didn’t speak up,” and “that devastated me.”
Rumsfeld fires back that the secretary of State had once been “the most senior military officer in our country” and no one else in the administration had “even a fraction of his experience” on intelligence matters. “Powell was not duped or misled by anybody, nor did he lie about Saddam’s suspected WMD stockpiles. The president did not lie. The vice president did not lie. Tenet did not lie. Rice did not lie. I did not lie. The Congress did not lie. The far less dramatic truth is that we were wrong.” …