Townhall Theater: All Reagan, All the Time
To misquote a "Saturday Night Live" bit from the Reagan years, "Our top story tonight: former President Ronald Reagan is still dead."
Gary Aldrich
Reagan was a great president because he wasn't a pot-smoking, porn-enabling hippie, like Clinton.
Child pornography and drug use were not priorities for Attorney General Janet Reno or the Clinton administration. As a result, these and other societal scourges proliferated. Everyone knows that sexual child abuse and rape occur as a direct result of watching sexually explicit, and often violent, material.
Everyone knows this, because scientific studies have proven that if you show sexually explicit material to a test subject, he will inevitably go out and abuse a child or rape somebody.
But while Reno and Clinton mouthed words about saving women and children, they had other ideas of how to proceed. While Reno fiddled, spending time fretting about overzealous Christians in Waco, the porn dealers regrouped, and started peddling their trash on the Internet.
Yes, David Koresh was just an overzealous Christian who took Christ's exhortations to stockpile weapons and have sex with children a bit too much to heart.
But you have to admit that there was very little Internet porn during the Reagan years.
Rebecca Hagelin
Ronald Reagan was the second coming of Jesus, pretty much. Plus, he was "one of the world's greatest leaders," as demonstrated by his farsighted plan to use space lasers to shoot down enemy missiles, which "is now the law of the land.
It was Ronald Reagan who declared there is no moral equivalence between our political and social systems and those in communist countries ... and that we ought to stop acting as if there is. That's what ended the Cold War. It led him to call the Soviet Union an "Evil Empire," and to tell Mikhail Gorbachev, "Tear down this wall."
Yup, calling the USSR an "Evil Empire" is what ended the Cold War. Believe it or not!
Michelle Malkin
Ronald Reagan inspired an 11-year-old Michelle to become a pundit by telling irrelevant stories in a SOTU address. Plus, his "twinkling eyes and unabashed patriotism" reminded young Michelle her of her Grandpa -- but Grandpa Reagan was even better than Lolo 'Zario because Reagan was American instead of one of those brown-skinned foreigners who think they should get American citizenship just because they fight our wars.
I do know that on a chilly night in January 1982, the president ignited a young heart. It was my "Ronald Reagan moment" -- an indelible moment when the exceptional goodness of America, and the boundless capacity of ordinary Americans to do extraordinary things, came alive. The flame endures.
Ronnie would be so proud.
Maggie Gallagher
Maggie claims Reagan was the JFK for her generation, in that he slept with blonde movie stars in the White House. But she admits that he didn't do everything he should have as president, such as failing to order the deaths of most members of the Supreme Court.
Some things Reagan never achieved. The vision of smaller, limited government remains just a vision. No significant rollback of any government has happened in my lifetime. Despite Reagan's appointments, the Supreme Court remains unapologetically sexually liberal, relentlessly committed to remaking society along the lines of sexual revolution: unlimited abortion, gender indifference, elevating sex to the dignity of a constitutional right, the redefinition of marriage, an unlimited pursuit of pornographic pleasure -- all these have become for too many, thanks to the courts, the ultimate meaning of that precious word "freedom."
Yes, an unlimited pursuit of pornographic pleasure is what the Supremes are all about -- I too blame Reagan for this.
Brent Bozell
The liberal media is saying nice things about the Reagan, and this makes Brent really mad, since it's NOT FAIR that he can't criticize them for maligning the dead. So, he makes do with pointing out that they said mean things about Reagan back in the '80s, before Brent was a paid media whiner. And they even said mean things about the '80s, thus proving that they hated Reagan, which is despicable of them, since he isn't even buried yet.
It would have been nice to have a less vicious press corps when Reagan was able to enjoy it. Instead, the usual storyline was like a political cartoon, heavy on vitriol and light on accuracy. Newsweek's "conventional wisdom" box summarized the 1980s as "Greedy Yuppies screwed homeless. Big party on deck of Titanic."
Kathleen Parker Ronald Reagan graciously died at just the right time to distract us from Abu Ghraib, which was pretty swell of him. Plus, he was a really hot father figure.
Reagan was the human face of paternalism in a good sense. He oozed masculinity and manly virtues.
As everyone seems to have a Reagan story, I'll tell mine. Back in 1980, I was a cub reporter and the unlikely author of a thrice-weekly political column during the run-up to South Carolina's first-ever Republican convention. I got to see a lot of Reagan as he toured the state, and I wound up at one point in a Charleston hotel room with him, Mrs. Reagan and a couple of others.
And that menage a cinq was the best sex Kathleen ever had.
Jonah Goldberg
Jonah is sick and tired of the media claiming that Reagan was a pragmatist. Actually, Reagan was Rowdy Roddie Piper, fighting alien yuppies in They Live. Or maybe he was actually "the best bouncer in the business. His nights are filled with fast action, hot music and beautiful women. It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it."
By the time this column sees daylight, it's unlikely that there will be many original nice things left to say about Ronald Reagan. To summarize why I admired the Gipper: He was put on earth to do two things: kick butt and chew gum, and he ran out of gum around 1962. The rest is commentary.
Ben Shapiro
Ben credits Ronnie for creating a world where Ben doesn't have to line up to buy gas, and where the rich don't have to pay taxes. So, Ben honors him by watching Kings Row.
Biographies didn't explain the unique relationship between Reagan and America. So I turned to Reagan's past, his film career. I watched Reagan's greatest performance in "Kings Row." His portrayal of Drake McHugh is honest and convincing -- so convincing, in fact, that I wondered whether Reagan was playing Drake or himself. Drake, like Reagan the politician, is an optimistic, happy-go-lucky, determined and blunt character. Either Reagan was an incredible actor, or he was playing himself on screen.
And if Reagan was playing himself on the screen, this proves that he was a great president, because in Kings Row his legs were amputated, and yet Reagan never let this stop him from kicking butt when he ran out of gum.
Ben also visited the Reagan Library, and saw other people there. And, per Ben, "Each mourner believed in Ronald Reagan because of his representation of and belief in the idea of American exceptionalism." Ben sees this as a good thing.
In an America where our morality and the superiority of our way of life are questioned from within, the reaction to President Reagan's passing should renew our hope. Mourners for Reagan are foundations for America's future.
I lived through the Reagan years -- and if the future means a return to self-righteous jerks, as exemplified by like Ben, then I'm praying the rapture comes quickly.
Linda Chavez
Linda recalls St. Ronnie's love of making plump, middle-aged women jump as he drove down the streets.
As we drove along, large crowds gathered to cheer the president, who never stopped waving to those who'd come out to see him, even as he continued his conversation with my husband and me.
"Watch this," he said, as he caught the eye of a plump, middle-aged woman standing on the side of the road. She leaped off her feet, as light as a gazelle. "It doesn't matter how old or how big they are, they always leave the ground when you look right at them," he said, smiling. "It's not me they're seeing. It's the president of the United States. It means a lot to them. They'll be telling their grandchildren about the day they saw the president."
It was vintage Ronald Reagan, whose humility and kindness never ceased to amaze me.
They should put that on his headstone: Ronald Reagan: He Looked At the Little People.
William F. Buckley
Buckley, who claims to know Ronald Reagan well, interviews himself. He suspects he is lying, but can't trip himself up.
Q: Did he offer you a job when he became president?
A: Yes/No. I had written him during the campaign that I didn't want a job. He answered back that he was disappointed: "I've had it in mind to appoint you ambassador to Afghanistan." Big joke, the Soviet Union having just taken over there. But in correspondence thereafter he always referred to me as "Mr. Ambassador," and the week before leaving the White House he wrote to commend me on the Soviet withdrawal -- "and you did it," he wrote, "without leaving Kabul for a minute." Good-humored fantasies played long with Ronald Reagan.
Yes, that was just one of Ronnie's little game -- Reagan really knew that Buckley had no time to fight actual Commies because he was too busy editing the most important conservative magazine on Earth. No, wait, that's Buckley's good-humored fantasy.
So, that's today's Townhall -- the last word in Ronald Reagan commentary and reminiscences. Until tomorrow's Townhall.
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