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John Fund writes that many who are celebrating Reagan’s life aren’t Americans.
…Some of the celebrations won’t be held in America but rather in Eastern European countries where many people credit Reagan with playing a key role in their liberation from communism. “A good number of people we’re dealing with were in prison or threatened during Reagan’s presidency,” says John Heubusch, executive director of the Reagan Presidential Foundation. “They’re very emotional about this.”
I met several of those people at Sunday’s birthday gathering at the Reagan Library. Balazs Bokor, Hungary’s consul general in Los Angeles, regaled me with tales of his country’s plans. They include a major international conference on Reagan’s role in world affairs, the unveiling of a statue and a proclamation in his honor. Prague also plans to build a statue, while Krakow is preparing a special Catholic mass to honor both Reagan and Pope John Paul, his partner in anti-communism. In addition, Grosvenor Square, the current site of the U.S. Embassy in London, will see a statue raised in Reagan’s honor.
“Ronald Reagan was a figure who inspired many in Eastern Europe to hope they would someday be free,” says Horst Schakat, a former political prisoner in East Germany who now lives in California. “When he said the Soviet Union was an ‘evil empire,’ that resonated with so many average people in Eastern Europe while at the same time unnerving their illegitimate leaders.”
Nile Gardiner, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, gives a Brit’s view of Reagan.
It is heartening to know that a statue of Ronald Reagan will be unveiled in London’s Grosvenor Square on July 4th this year to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth. It is hard to think of a president who loved Britain more than President Reagan, a great leader who embodied the spirit of the Anglo-American Special Relationship. And it was his alliance with Margaret Thatcher that ultimately brought down the seemingly invincible might of the Soviet Empire, and defeated an evil, totalitarian ideology in the shape of Communism that had placed its boot firmly on the throats of hundreds of millions of people across Eastern and Central Europe for nearly half a century.
As Lady Thatcher noted in her tribute to President Reagan, at his memorial service in Washington National Cathedral in June 2004:
When his allies came under Soviet or domestic pressure, they could look confidently to Washington for firm leadership, and when his enemies tested American resolve, they soon discovered that his resolve was firm and unyielding. … With the lever of American patriotism, he lifted up the world. And so today, the world – in Prague, in Budapest, in Warsaw and Sofia, in Bucharest, in Kiev, and in Moscow itself, the world mourns the passing of the great liberator and echoes his prayer: God bless America.
“The Gipper” will always be remembered as one of the greatest presidents in American history, and in my view the greatest of the 20th Century…
John Fund has an interesting article about a book that had a tremendous impact on Reagan.
…When Reagan was 11, his mother gave him an inspirational novel called “That Printer of Udell’s,” the story of a young man who combines a belief in “practical Christianity” with Horatio Alger-like grit. Reagan biographer Edmund Morris noted in a 1999 interview in the American Enterprise magazine that the novel’s central character, Dick Falkner, is “a tall, good-looking, genial young man who wears brown suits and has the gift of platform speaking and comes to a Midwestern town just like Dixon, Illinois, and figures out a workfare program to solve the city’s social problems. He marries this girl who looks at him adoringly with big wide eyes through all his speeches, and eventually he goes off with her to represent that shining city in Washington, D.C.”
Years later, Reagan was uncharacteristically revealing about himself in a 1984 letter to the daughter-in-law of Harold Bell Wright, the author of “That Printer of Udell’s.” He noted that all of his boyhood reading “left an abiding belief in the triumph of good over evil,” but he singled out Wright’s work for having “an impact I shall always remember. After reading it and thinking about it for a few days, I went to my mother and told her I wanted to declare my faith and be baptized. . . . I found a role model in that traveling printer whom Harold Bell Wright had brought to life. He set me on a course I’ve tried to follow even unto this day. I shall always be grateful.”
…For Ronald Reagan, the heroes he admired and the hero he aspired to become demonstrated what individuals in a free society like America were capable of achieving. The essence of Ronald Reagan’s personal American Dream was that the next generation should always strive to be better than the previous one. There’s no mystery about that part of Ronald Reagan’s legacy.
Charles Krauthammer discusses the possible outcomes in Egypt. He ends with a hopeful scenario.
…The Egyptian military, on the other hand, is the most stable and important institution in the country. It is Western-oriented and rightly suspicious of the Brotherhood. And it is widely respected, carrying the prestige of the 1952 Free Officers Movement that overthrew the monarchy and the 1973 October War that restored Egyptian pride along with the Sinai.
The military is the best vehicle for guiding the country to free elections over the coming months. Whether it does so with Mubarak at the top, or with Vice President Omar Suleiman or perhaps with some technocrat who arouses no ire among the demonstrators, matters not to us. If the army calculates that sacrificing Mubarak (through exile) will satisfy the opposition and end the unrest, so be it.
The overriding objective is a period of stability during which secularists and other democratic elements of civil society can organize themselves for the coming elections and prevail. ElBaradei is a menace. Mubarak will be gone one way or the other. The key is the military. The United States should say very little in public and do everything behind the scenes to help the military midwife – and then guarantee – what is still something of a long shot: Egyptian democracy.
In the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Toby Harnden discusses the differences between Reagan and some of the Dems and Republicans who are currently lauding him.
…There is little doubt that Reagan would have been dryly derisive of Obama’s policies and presidency. “Government is like a baby,” Reagan once quipped. “An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”
Obama, by contrast, views government as a kindly nurse and the people as the baby. According to his mindset, the people should submit to those in government who know better and whose role is to make decisions and control the purse strings.
…Although Obama has been paying lip service to American greatness in recent months, he made it clear in his first two years in office that he saw the United States as a flawed nation with much to apologise for and dismissed the notion of American exceptionalism as mere patriotism. …
John Stossel has an excellent article that helps us to understand the magnitude of the problem that politicians have created by overspending. And even more importantly, Stossel offers an interesting solution of budget cuts that leads to a budget surplus this year. He gives some final options that highlight just how irresponsibly the politicians have been behaving.
…As the bureaucrats complain about proposals to make tiny cuts, it’s good to remember that disciplined government could make cuts that get us to a surplus in one year. But even a timid Congress could make swift progress if it wanted to. If it just froze spending at today’s levels, it would almost balance the budget by 2017. If spending were limited to 1 percent growth each year, the budget would balanced in 2019. And if the crowd in Washington would limit spending growth to about 2 percent a year, the red ink would almost disappear in 10 years.
As you see, the budget can be cut. Only politics stand in the way.
Kimberley Strassel reviews Donald Rumsfeld’s new book, and Rumsfeld’s perspective on some issues.
…History, meet Mr. Rumsfeld’s view. With today’s release of “Known and Unknown”—the 78-year-old’s memoir of his tenure as defense secretary under George W. Bush and Gerald Ford, his years in the Nixon administration and his three terms as an Illinois congressman—”Rummy” is offering his slice of history. As befits a man who has spent decades provoking Washington debate, his chronicle is direct and likely to inspire some shouting.
The usual Rumsfeld critics (including some in the Bush family circle) are rushing to categorize it as a “score-settling” account, but that’s a predictable (and tedious) judgment. At the heart of Mr. Rumsfeld’s book is an important critique of the Bush administration that has been largely missing from the debate over Iraq. The dominant narrative to date has been that a cowboy president and his posse of neocons went to war without adequate preparation and ran roughshod over doubts by more sober bureaucratic and strategic minds.
…Mr. Rumsfeld tells me that he sees his 815-page volume as a “contribution to the historic record”—not some breezy Washington tell-all. In his more than 40 years of public service, he kept extensive records of his votes, his meetings with presidents, and the more than 20,000 memos (known as “snowflakes”) he flurried on the Pentagon during his second run as defense secretary. Mr. Rumsfeld uses them as primary sources, which accounts for the book’s more than 1,300 end notes. He’s also digitized them so readers and historians can consult the evidence first-hand at www.rumsfeld.com. …
We have enjoyed John Tierney’s myth-busting stories about garbage and resource scarcity. In his latest, Tierney looks at discrimination against conservatives in the social sciences.
…Discrimination is always high on the agenda at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference, where psychologists discuss their research on racial prejudice, homophobia, sexism, stereotype threat and unconscious bias against minorities. But the most talked-about speech at this year’s meeting, which ended Jan. 30, involved a new “outgroup.”
It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.
“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.
“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.” …