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Showing posts with label President Ronald Reagan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label President Ronald Reagan. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

President Reagan's Address on the Fortieth Anniversary of D-Day

Yesterday was the anniversary of President Reagan's death.  Today is the seventy-third anniversary of D-Day.  Honor both by watching this great speech.



Friday, April 11, 2014

Patrick J. Buchanan: What Would Reagan Do?

By Patrick J. Buchanan 

President Reagan was holding a meeting in the Cabinet Room on March 25, 1985, when Press Secretary Larry Speakes came over to me, as communications director, with a concern.

The White House was about to issue a statement on the killing of Major Arthur Nicholson, a U.S. army officer serving in East Germany. Maj. Nicholson had been shot in cold blood by a Russian soldier.

Speakes thought the president’s statement, “This violence was unjustified,” was weak. I agreed. We interrupted the president, who reread the statement, then said go ahead with it.

What lay behind this Reagan decision not to express his own and his nation’s disgust and anger at this atrocity?

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

A Renewed Reagan Conservatism

By Paul G. Kengor
 

Editor’s note: This article first appeared at TheBlaze.com. 
 
A rudderless Republican Party, afraid to assert itself in the face of a rising liberal/progressive onslaught. A confident Democratic Party in the White House, undermining the nation, its economy, and its foreign policy, with timid Republicans feckless in response. A battle for the heart of the GOP and the next presidential nomination among conservative Republicans and liberal Republicans.

Sound familiar? Of course. But I’m not just talking about March 2014. I’m also talking about March 1977, when a genuine conservative Republican named Ronald Reagan surveyed the political landscape and saw something hauntingly similar. Reagan resolved to do something about it, and he laid out that vision 37 years ago, at CPAC, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. What Reagan said in that speech remains crucial for conservatives and the Republican Party today.

Ronald Reagan began speaking at CPAC in 1974, its first gathering. He addressed the faithful 13 times through his final year in the White House. But perhaps his most vigorous defense of conservative thinking came in his remarks delivered on February 6, 1977, his 66th birthday.

Friday, February 7, 2014

Happy Birthday, President Reagan

It has been said that when it is dark enough, one can see stars.  In these dark days for our nation, President Reagan's greatness, optimism, joy and vision shine more brightly than ever.  Perhaps seeing in President Reagan, unconsciously, an image of herself, no one has paid more eloquent tribute to the late President than did Margaret Thatcher on his 83rd birthday (see below).  On this, the 103rd anniversary of President Reagan's birth, let us recall when these two great leaders reversed the decline of their nations, freed half a continent and inspired freedom loving people throughout the world.

The words of Longfellow eloquently describe the legacies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and their great partnership for good:

"So when a great man dies,
  For years beyond our ken,
The light he leaves behind him lies
  Upon the paths of men."  

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace.  Amen. 





Monday, January 20, 2014

Radio Interview with Dr. Paul Kengor: "What Is a Reagan Conservative?"

In case you missed it, Dr. Paul Kengor, executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College, talks with WORLD News Group’s Warren Cole Smith. In this short radio interview, Kengor and Smith discuss what it really means to be a Reagan Conservative.


Dr. Kengor is the author of the newly released book, “11 Principles of a Reagan Conservative.” In the new book, Kengor paints the first comprehensive picture of Reagan’s beliefs. He identifies 11 principles, what he calls his “Reagan Eleven,” that comprised Reagan’s conservatism. To learn more, click on the book below:



Wednesday, January 23, 2013

The End of the Reagan Era?

From The Center for Vision & Values, Grove City College
By Dr. Paul G. Kengor

Editor’s note: A longer version of this article first appeared at American Spectator.

With Barack Obama’s second inauguration, liberals are touting an altogether new epoch: the end of the Reagan era.

Unfortunately, I believe they are largely correct. We are witnessing a period of left-wing ascendance, marked by gay marriage, forced taxpayer funding of abortion, an exploding government class, and big government. As to the latter, Ronald Reagan had declared in his first inaugural: “government is not the solution … government is the problem.” The first Democrat to follow Reagan, Bill Clinton, similarly stated “the era of big government is over.” Clinton’s affirmation was also affirmation of the Reagan era.

Then came Barack Obama. Just days after his 2009 inauguration, Obama proclaimed: “the federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back into life.” He said “only government” could alter our “vicious cycle.”

Obama had repudiated Reagan, and the electorate would again reward him four years later. What Obama called for in 2009 seems to be the new American spirit in 2013.

But is it? Well, the answer is complicated.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Why Ronald Reagan Towers Above Barack Obama as a World Leader

By Nile Gardiner

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: standing up to the Evil Empire
Today marks the 25th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s famous “tear down this wall” speech delivered before the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on June 12, 1987. It is a reminder not only of President Reagan’s oratorical brilliance but also of his steadfast leadership on the world stage. For the Gipper was a president who, together with Margaret Thatcher, brought down the might of the Soviet Empire, liberated hundreds of millions from Communist tyranny, and restored US leadership after the decline of the Carter years and the Vietnam era. Reagan was uncompromising in his opposition to the Soviet Union and his defence of freedom, driven by his belief in American exceptionalism and the unique role the United States must play in standing up to tyranny and advancing the cause of liberty.

For Ronald Reagan in 1987, West Berlin was the frontline in the war against Communism, a city the Russians had tried to strangle in 1948. He was determined to see the wall that divided Berlin’s three million inhabitants brought down, and the biggest symbol of Communist tyranny smashed to the ground. In his speech in Berlin, Reagan memorably declared

In the 1950's, Khrushchev predicted: "We will bury you." But in the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind-too little food. Even today, the Soviet Union still cannot feed itself. After these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor.
…. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
Two decades later, for Barack Obama in 2008, Berlin was little more than a hubristic campaign stop where he could bask in the worship of adoring German youth en route to the White House, introducing himself as “a fellow citizen of the world.” A year on, as president, he could not even be bothered to attend the city’s celebrations commemorating the 20th anniversary of the downfall of the Berlin Wall in 2009, which National Review Editor Rich Lowry appropriately described at the time as “the most telling nonevent of his presidency.”

In so many respects Reagan’s firm leadership in the 1980s towers over that of Barack Obama today. It would be hard to imagine President Obama delivering an address with the power and moral conviction of President Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech. While Obama has apologised for his nation, Reagan stood tall for American greatness. While Obama has sought accommodation with some of America’s key adversaries, Reagan vowed to defeat them. While Obama is cutting US defence spending, closing several US bases in Europe, and scaling back American global power, Reagan believed in peace through strength, and rebuilding America’s military might.

Ronald Reagan will always be remembered by the people of Berlin and millions more across eastern and central Europe as the steadfast leader who fought for their freedom and refused to back down in the face of a brutal enemy that had oppressed a continent for nearly half a century. It is thanks to his vision and determination that the Soviet Empire was brought to its knees. As his closest friend and ally Margaret Thatcher put it in her eulogy to Reagan at the Washington National Cathedral in 2004:
Others prophesied the decline of the West. He inspired America and its allies with renewed faith in their mission of freedom… 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.

Nile Gardiner is a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst and political commentator. He appears frequently on American and British television, including Fox News Channel, CNN, BBC, and Fox Business Network.


Thursday, January 26, 2012

Gingrich and Reagan

In the 1980s, the candidate repeatedly insulted the president.

Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich in the Oval Office
By Elliot Abrams

In the increasingly rough Republican campaign, no candidate has wrapped himself in the mantle of Ronald Reagan more often than Newt Gingrich. “I worked with President Reagan to change things in Washington,” “we helped defeat the Soviet empire,” and “I helped lead the effort to defeat Communism in the Congress” are typical claims by the former speaker of the House.

The claims are misleading at best. As a new member of Congress in the Reagan years — and I was an assistant secretary of state — Mr. Gingrich voted with the president regularly, but equally often spewed insulting rhetoric at Reagan, his top aides, and his policies to defeat Communism. Gingrich was voluble and certain in predicting that Reagan’s policies would fail, and in all of this he was dead wrong.

Read the rest of this entry at National Review Online >>


Monday, November 21, 2011

Reagan Statue Unveiled in Warsaw


A statue to former US president Ronald Reagan, who is highly respected in Poland for having helped hasten the fall of the Iron Curtain, was unveiled by Communist-era opposition icon Lech Walesa in Warsaw yesterday. 
A statue of former US president Ronald Reagan has been unveiled in Poland
He did not mention ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, in power from 1985 to 1991, and far less well-regarded in Moscow's former stamping ground than in Western Europe.