A Very Reagan Fourth of July

"Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but Democrats believe every day is April 15th"

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."

"An almost unbroken 50 years of deficit spending has finally brought us to a time of reckoning. We have come to a turning point, a moment for hard decisions. I have asked the Cabinet and my staff a quetion, and now I put the same question to all of you: If not us, who? And if not now, when? It must be done by all of us going forward with a program aimed at reaching a balanced budget. We can then begin reducing the national debt."

--Second Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985.

Ronald Reagan , President, 1981-1989

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Ronald Reagan - Born February 6, 1911

"Always remember that you are Americans,
and it is your birthright to dream great dreams
in this sweet and blessed land,

truly the greatest, freest,
strongest nation on earth."

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Barack Obama, Shape-Shifter

By Alan Caruba

With the advent of the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birthday on Sunday, it was perhaps predictable that Time Magazine would photoshop a picture of Obama and Reagan as if they were standing together. “Why Obama (Hearts) Reagan” was the cover line.

Obama would have been twenty years old when Reagan took office and, of course, he not only never met Reagan, but he was no fan of his conservative policies.

In a stinging rebuttal to the Time cover, Sean Linnane, a blogger at Stormbringer, noted that, in Obama’s memoir, Dreams of My Father, Obama wrote “When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn’t answer them directly. Instead, I’d pronounce on the need for change. Changes in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds…”

One of those “dirty deeds” involved hastening the fall of the Soviet Union; the mother ship of all liberals and crypto-communists.

No surprise that Obama couldn’t answer his classmates “directly” because Obama had been against many of the policies of Reagan and Bush before he was for them. He has virtually replicated Bush’s Mideast policies and now it appears he is going to make the same errors with Egypt as Jimmy Carter did with Iran.

Obama has been on the cover of Time Magazine so many times that they ought to change the name of the magazine to Obama. Back in 2009, a cover showed him as the reincarnated Franklin Delano Roosevelt, offering America a New Deal.

FDR’s New Deal stretched out the Great Depression that began in 1929 over ten years until the U.S. declared war on Japan and Germany in 1941. His Social Security program has been looted by Congress and now is on the brink of insolvency along with the later Medicare program. The Supreme Court threw out elements of FDR’s stimulus programs as unconstitutional. Yes, history can and does repeat itself.

When Obama announced his run for the Democratic Party nomination, he did so on the steps of the Old State Capitol in downtown Springfield, Illinois to launch his campaign on Feb.10, 2007. The conscious effort to identify with Abraham Lincoln was and remains a part of the constant “packaging” and “branding” of Obama.

So we have Obama as Lincoln, Obama as FDR, and now Obama as a fan of Ronald Reagan just in time for the latter’s birthday centennial.

Obama is the ultimate Star Trek “shape-shifter.” Depending on the place and the circumstances, Obama consciously seeks to present himself as a reflection of whomever he is addressing.

A quick search of Google images will produce a photo of Obama wearing a yarmulka (skull cap) while standing at the Wailing Wall in Jeruselem, placing a small written prayer in it as is the custom for Jews!

Millions of words have been written and uttered to describe who and what Obama is, but aside from being a dedicated Marxist intent on destroying the United States with intolerable debt, unrelieved unemployment, and naked support for powerful unions, Obama does not appear to have many core values other than the empowerment and enrichment of Barack Hussein Obama.

The role of Time Magazine and other mainstream media in this manipulation of the American public’s perception of Obama is obscene.

Obama, however, has a problem. Americans have rejected Obamacare. The House has voted to repeal it. And Senate Republicans are getting help from disaffected Democrats in dismantling it. His “green” policies for electric cars, high speed rail, and power generation by wind and solar are a laughingstock.

On the world stage, he is seen as a weakling and friend of Islam to the detriment and endangerment of Israel, the most steadfast ally of the U.S. in the mideast.

All this Hollywood-style imagery that Obama has depended upon for so long no longer works as it did during the giddy days of his campaign for the presidency. His speeches ring hollow on the ears of all but his most besotted supporters.

Long after he’s gone from the public stage, people will be asking who was Obama? And who is Obama?

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Celebrating Reagan

By Alan Caruba

This year marks the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birth on February 6, 1911, but I want to celebrate the anniversaries of his first and second inauguration, January 20, 1981 and January 21, 1985. Just as Reagan transitioned from being a liberal and a Democrat, his presidency did the same for me.

What remains a mystery to me is how America could rocket from the success of the Reagan presidency and that of George H.W. Bush, Reagan's Vice President, to the depths of Bill Clinton’s scandals.

For those with short memories, Americans followed Reagan/Bush with a president who engaged in a tawdry encounter with a White House intern, who lied under oath, was disbarred, but whose personal popularity and a cynical Congress allowed him to escape impeachment.

Reagan was elected in part as a rejection of the weak presidency of his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, who until the election of Barack Obama, has been regarded as the worst president since the end of World War Two.

Unlike Obama who has never lost an opportunity to denigrate America, Reagan never lost an opportunity to lift up our spirits and to celebrate the nation. He said, “Whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears; to your confidence, rather than your doubts.”

“My dream is that you will travel the road ahead with liberty’s lamp guiding your steps and opportunity’s arm steadying your way. What I’d really like is to go down in history as the President who made Americans believe in themselves again.”

In his first inaugural speech, Reagan said, “It is time for us to realize that we are too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams.”

The contrast between the Reagan presidency and that of the current occupant of the office is vast. Reagan understood the American can-do spirit. He celebrated a culture in which striving for wealth was understood to be a worthy goal. Obama believes being wealthy is a sign of exploiting others and of greed. He made it clear during the campaign that he wanted to be President in order to distribute the wealth of individual working Americans.

That’s straight out of the Communist Manifesto and, apparently, too many were simply not listening, dazzled by the notion of electing the first Black President.

In his first election, Reagan won by a significant majority of the popular vote, 44 million to Carter’s 36 million, despite a third party candidate, John Anderson, who won 6 million votes. He swept the electoral vote, 489 to 49, bringing with him 33 Republican Representatives and 11 Senators. Under Reagan, Republican control of the Senate returned for the first time since 1945.

Obama’s first and hopefully last term has already recorded a historic turnover of power in the House to Republicans and a diminishing of Democrat power in the Senate in response to his policies.

The conservative movement in America rose from the ashes of Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 to Lyndon Johnson. In retrospect, it was the same torrent of liberal legislation under LBJ and the expansion of the war in Vietnam that deeply offended Americans. Elected to end the war in Vietnam, Richard M. Nixon would disgrace himself with the Watergate scandal.

To date, Obama’s presidency marks the most dramatic and traumatic lurch toward naked socialism since the days of Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

It was the liberal legislation rammed through Congress by Sen. Harry Reid and Speaker Nancy Pelosi that led to the rise of the Tea Party movement and a rejection of Obama’s agenda. The new Congress knows it is charged with repealing or defunding Obamacare, a vast expansion of Medicare and Medicaid. Both represent the socialist agenda of the Democrat Party that has brought the nation to the brink of insolvency.

The most casual look back over the years since the end of the Truman administration shows Americans lurching back and forth between scandals and weakness, between the leadership of Eisenhower and Reagan, to the current President who has increased the national debt more than all the previous presidents combined.

Americans, however, never truly abandoned their belief in an ever-growing federal government as the provider of all their needs. Indeed, even under Reagan, the federal government grew in size.

We arrive at the Reagan centennial as a nation burdened by an intrusive government, a history of entitlement programs dating back to FDR, massive civil service unions, and too much spending that has left the nation facing the largest debt in its history. We might as well have been drunk for the last eight decades.

“Any government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take everything you have!" warned Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States (1801-1809).

Too many generations of Americans have not paid heed to that fundamental truth, the essence of conservatism. The time to reverse threats to our Constitution and to the future as a nation is now.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Chris Christie's Jersey Attitude

By Alan Caruba

It’s the curse of having sat through too many local town council meetings and too many speeches by politicians; it’s taking notes as they speak because you want to keep what’s said fresh in mind. Regular folks don’t do this, but anyone who has spent any time as a reporter will tell you it is a hard habit to break.

So, on Tuesday, January 11, I found myself taking notes as New Jersey Governor, Chris Christie, gave his first constitutionally required State of the State speech. He will be back in February with a speech about his budget. It was delivered to the members of the New Jersey Senate and Assembly, mostly Democrats; all of whom had learned in the previous year that the Governor was a jolly, fat buzz-saw who just loves a good fight.

Gov. Christie was preceded by two of the worst Governors in current times, Jim McGreevey who discovered he was gay after he put his boyfriend on the payroll and the whispers in the statehouse became a raging storm. He was followed by Jon Corzine, a limousine liberal. Together they increased taxes and fees 115 times in eight years! In a single term in office, Corzine raised taxes $9 billion!

I am New Jersey born and bred. I have traveled to nearly every other State in the Union with the exception of Alaska, Maine and Vermont. Do you really think I would ever leave a state that was the fictional home of Tony Soprano and the actual birthplace of Frank Sinatra? You gotta be kidding me! Forgetaboutit!

Two days after Gov. Christie took office, the state treasurer informed him that Corzine had left him and everyone else in New Jersey with a $2.2 billion deficit! Did he immediately raise taxes to cover it? No. Instead, he and the treasurer scoured the budget and found $2.2 billion in projected spending. What he did next stunned a state legislature almost as profligate as California’s. He impounded the $2.2 billion by executive order.

Goodbye old world order in New Jersey. Hello Chris Christie new world order in the Garden State. As Gov. Christie put it, to create real change, “you’ve got to show a little attitude.” If there is one thing New Jerseyans have and love, it is attitude!

So it should come as no surprise that, when Gov. Christie turned 18 and was eligible to vote, he voted for Ronald Reagan. In a talk in November at a Goldwater Institute event, he recalled how “then-Governor Reagan spoke to me. He talked about smaller, less intrusive government that was going to open up our country to exploit the entrepreneurial spirit that has always built and made it a unique place.”

“He talked about less spending, so that less money would come to Washington and more money would stay with the people who knew how to spend it best. He talked about a government that didn’t regulate every little bit and piece of your life.”

“And he talked about lowering taxes so that people could feel the economic freedom that comes from not having a government in your pocket every 15 minutes.”

Christie’s State of the State speech reflected the values that Ronald Reagan espoused and, in this centennial year of his birth, I think he would have loved every word of it. “I believe in a culture of truth,” said Gov. Christie. The voters liked what they heard and happily replaced Corzine with a man who had gained recognition by putting corrupt New Jersey politicians in jail.

On Tuesday Gov. Christie told the assembled legislators, “We cannot spend money we don’t have.” Do I dare hope that Chris Christie will someday run for President?

The latter part of his State of the State speech was a dissection of how retrograde the state teacher’s union is and why the state’s pension and benefits system had to be changed because it was hideously under-funded by billions and because he wanted to ensure that policemen, firemen, and other civil service employees would actually have a pension when they retired.

Last year he spoke to an initially hostile meeting of firefighters. By the time he got through they all crowded around him, eager to shake his hand and get their picture taken with him. Christie is no ordinary politician. “This isn’t about politics,” he said, “This is about their lives.”

He is passionate about reforming the school system in New Jersey and would, one suspects, take delight in crushing a teacher’s union that exists for nothing other than political power. Last year, when he urged New Jersey voters to demand 4% to 5% pay cuts, 59% of the school budgets were defeated.

Ronald Reagan stood six foot, two inches tall. He had literally been a movie star! Chris Christie is short. He is fat. And he is completely comfortable with that. He is a good public speaker and when he speaks, you know he really means what he says.

He’s not some cookie-cutter version of Ronald Reagan, his inspiration. He is Gov. Chris Christie and New Jersey is loving every minute of it.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Some of My Favorite Billboards

The following billboards began to pop up shortly after it became obvious to most people that Obama was some kind of terrible mistake that a majority of the voters made in 2008. This being America, they began to express themselves in many ways from town hall meetings to mass marches on Washington, D.C., to some wonderful billboards.

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A Conservative Victory for Now

By Alan Caruba

The date was March 20, 1981 and Ronald Reagan who had taken the oath of office for his first term just two months earlier was addressing a joint meeting of the American Conservative Union, Young Americans for Freedom, the National Review and Human events.

It was a very different era. Many of the youth in the audience were members of Generation X, born 1965 through 1980, and Reagan would be in office as Generation Y debuted in 1981 through 1995. Spanning those generations was one that would fill out the present demographic of today’s senior citizens, a critical voting bloc; one that can recall Reagan’s values and hopes to see them restored.

The Soviet Union still loomed large as a threat to freedom, exporting communism wherever it could. The other threat of Islamic fundamentalism would begin to exert itself with a suicide bombing of Marines in Beirut, Lebanon, but Reagan was undaunted. He would see the Berlin Wall fall and with it the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union.

That evening the audience was buoyant with hope that decades of liberal governance could begin to be reversed. None suspected that the electorate would embrace a little known Arkansas Governor in 1993 and that the ills of a universal healthcare plan would be raised yet again to be signed into law by 2010. More than half of all Americans want it repealed.

Reagan said, “The conservative movement in twentieth century America held fast through hard and difficult years to its vision of the truth. And history must also say that our victory, when it was achieved, was not so much a victory of politics as it was a victory of ideas, not so much a victory for any one man or party as it was a victory for a set of principles---principles that were protected and nourished by a few unselfish Americans through many grim and heartbreaking defeats.”

Perhaps no defeat has been so heartbreaking as the public lapse of memory and judgment, the election of an avowed socialist, Barack Hussein Obama. Still, his repudiation has come quickly. Reagan is the spiritual father of the Tea Party movement because he believed in “a respect for law, an appreciation for tradition, and regard for the social consensus that gives stability to our public and private institutions.”

He added, “These civilized ideas must still motivate us even as we seek a new economic prosperity based on reducing government interference in the marketplace.”

In hindsight, we know that government interference in the marketplace, particularly the housing market, is the reason why the U.S. economy collapsed in 2008, propelling Obama into office.

Prophetically, Reagan said, “We must remove government’s smothering hand from where it does harm; we must seek to revitalize the proper functions of government, but we do these things to set loose again the energy and the ingenuity of the American people.”

The America he envisioned was a place where “a free and energetic people can work out their own destiny under God.”

Barack Obama, quoting the Declaration of Independence, cannot even bring himself to mention God. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…”

For Reagan, the conservative goal was “to restore to their rightful place in our national consciousness the values of family, work, neighborhood, and religion” and he warned that it will not be achieved “by those who set people against people, class against class, or institution against institution.”

That was and is a perfect description of Barack Obama and a Democratic Party that knows no other way of governing and has no faith in the people.

Reagan never lost faith in the American people even though, for a while, they have been forgetful of the past, backsliding from the goals set by the Founding Fathers, robbed and wronged, but who are ready to rise again and restore America.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

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