Prophetic words from Ronald Reagan.pic.twitter.com/kD6lLNUd6G
— James Melville (@JamesMelville) July 21, 2022
How I miss the only President I ever voted for.
He Saw It Coming
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
The media has always been the enemy, at least in my lifetime. I was privileged to cast my very first vote for president for Ronald Reagan. There was always a disconnect between how the media covered him and the reality of who he was, what he said and what he did. In that sense, he was a lot like President Trump, just without the crass personality. For instance, Trump, with his Middle East strategy of bypassing the Palestinians/terrorists and negotiating directly with real stakeholders, took a page from Reagan. Reagan did something everyone thought was equally crazy. He allowed our highly advantageous system of capitalism to work its magic and simply bankrupt the Soviet Union with defense spending. Both Trump and Reagan defied the conventional wisdom of the State Dept. hacks and withstood the cynical condemnation of the media. Thank God. As far as I’m concerned, they go down as No.’s 1 and 2 as far as all modern presidents. We were blessed to have them.
The Soviet Union wasn’t bankrupt in 1985, though it was allocating resources to its military establishment &c that are characteristic of a country in a general mobilization. It is true that Reagan and Casey made the right wagers at the time.
See Jonathan Haidt. Then as now, the left doesn’t get the right, and their incomprehension is systematic. At the same time, the dominance of the word merchant occupations by the left means the people who do not get it are people who are by default vain about their perspicacity. As successive cohorts of people raised in an era when situation ethics was unknown at street level and personal self-expression was valued only in a very qualified way have retired, the field is taken over by the very unscrupulous and the very histrionic. The result is spectacles like the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.
The Kavanaugh hearings are one sorry event whose palpable implications were felt by the Kavanaugh family and not many others, but they do indicate something by the culture. We have quite a menu of partisan Democrats whose opinions come over the wall. I’ve yet to hear an admission from any of them that Christine Blasey Ford is not someone you would take seriously unless you were weirdly emotionally invested in what she has to say. The reasons you should not are non-sectarian and obvious, but none of these people have ever said a word.