Posts Tagged ‘Ronald Reagan’
My argument that Ron Paul has outlived his usefulness enrages many a Paulite. What they don’t know, is that I was a Paulite long before most of the current Paulite’s had ever even heard of Ron Paul.
You have to know a little about my past to understand this. I grew up in Show Low, Arizona, a small ranching and timber town in the White Mountains of eastern Arizona. There is a lot less ranching and almost no timbering now, it’s mostly vacation homes and tourism.
I was reared by very conservative parents. My first political memory is seeing tears in my mother’s eyes in 1976 with Carter beat Ford and her saying, “We’re going to be beaten by the Soviets now.” Anti-communism was a staple in our household growing up. The two political magazines that showed up in the mailbox were The New American and National Review (I didn’t learn until years later the massive battle between the John Birch Society and William F. Buckley).
When the U.S. Olympic hockey team beat the Soviets, you would have thought I had won the lottery. I was a kid running around the living room with my fists pumping and you would have thought that we had just defeated Communism in one, fell swoop.
I made phone calls for Reagan in 1980, passed out literature for him in 1984 and then reality hit me in 1988 when I realized that Reagan would no longer be the President.
My parents were very skeptical about George H.W. Bush. His history as a Washington insider was a stark contrast with Ronald Reagan’s populism. As the campaign between Dukakis and Bush went on, I felt more and more that Bush would NOT carryon the Reagan legacy.
I turned 18 in the summer of 1988, and the first vote I cast in my life was for Ron Paul for President in November 1988.
For you younger folk, Ron Paul was the Libertarian candidate for President in 1988. I had read up on him in The New American, and read a couple interviews with him. I didn’t really know much about the Libertarian Party platform (I was registered Republican, as I always have been) but his comments about the role of government, monetary policy (yes, I was an early proponent of getting us back on the gold standard – and I still am), and tax policy were music to me. I glossed over the drug legalization stuff and proudly cast my vote for Ron Paul.
I couldn’t tell whether my mother was proud of me or not. She said Paul was more principled but that it was a “wasted vote.” Was it? Probably. But it had an impact on me, because at the first opportunity I had to participate in this great republic (it’s not a democracy) I cast a vote on principle. And I think it set the tone for every vote I have cast since – including my wasted vote for Ross Perot in 1992, and my wasted vote for the Libertarian Harry Browne in 1996. In fact, I was 30 years old before I cast a vote for a Republican for President.
When I was a Congressional staffer I had a lot of fun chiding Ron Paul’s Congressional staff for not being “true” Paulites. For the 14 years I work in Congress I am the only staffer that I know of that actually voted for Paul for President in 1988.
But his time has passed. If there was anything that struck me coming out of CPAC 2010 this last weekend, it was a feeling that Ron Paul’s fans need to focus less on a 74 year-old mediocre Congressman, and more on how to actually affect real change in the political process.
Ron Paul won the CPAC2010 presidential straw poll thus immediately diminishing the impact that CPAC could have on providing conservatives with some direction on who some of our future national leaders might be. Ron Paul certainly won’t be. I’m not saying that to be critical, it’s just a fact.
More and more average Americans are getting involved in the political process through the Tea Party Patriots and other movements. They are real people, with real lives and most have never been involved in the political process beyond voting. The more they learn about Ron Paul, the less he will appeal to him. His dovish stance on the war on terror and his support for earmarking (the gateway drug to huge spending) won’t wear well with newly inspired activists worried about federal spending and the debt. Either you are a fiscal conservative, or you’re not. Unfortunately, Ron Paul is not at the most basic level.
So, conservatives, tea partiers, libertarians… Americans, let’s find those who stick to fiscal conservatism, limited government and less spending and then support them like the future depends on it, because it does.
(picture courtesy of Dr. Fred Vidal)
Today would have been Ronald Reagan’s 99th birthday. If there was ever a time we needed another Reagan, it is now.
Reagan embodied a concept of America very different than our current President. In his final address to the nation from the Oval office he spoke of the success of America as an example of freedom.
“I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.”
Happy birthday President Reagan. We miss you, we need you.
It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first. – Ronald Reagan
“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!” – Ronald Reagan
“Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the Democrats believe every day is April 15.“ – Ronald Reagan
“We must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings.” – Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan gave two moving speeches on the 40th anniversary of D-Day. The first was at Omaha Beach and the second was at Pointe de Hoc, where Rangers scaled the cliffs to take out machine gun posts. Both are great speeches, but the Pointe de Hoc is the one I like better (probably because it was written by Peggy Noonan). Below is an excerpt of the moving prose, still inspiring 25 years later and 65 years from the day that changed the course of the War and the course of history.
Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs. And before me are the men who put them there.
These are the boys of Pointe de Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.
Gentlemen, I look at you and I think of the words of Stephen Spender’s poem. You are men who in your “lives fought for life…and left the vivid air signed with your honor….”
Forty summers have passed since the battle that you fought here. You were young the day you took these cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys, with the deepest joys of life before you. Yet you risked everything here. Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here? We look at you, and somehow we know the answer. It was faith, and belief; it was loyalty and love.
The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge — and pray God we have not lost it — that there is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt.
You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One’s country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. All of you loved liberty. All of you were willing to fight tyranny, and you knew the people of your countries were behind you.
It’s Memorial Day, one of the most sacred of days to remember the sacrifices made for our freedom. On a day like today, I like to read the words of one of the most inspiring communicators of our time, Ronald Reagan. When you read his words, you realize that we haven’t had anyone like him since – and probably never will.
What follows are remarks he made at a Memorial Day Ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery on May 26, 1986.
Today is the day we put aside to remember fallen heroes and to pray that no heroes will ever have to die for us again. It’s a day of thanks for the valor of others, a day to remember the splendor of America and those of her children who rest in this cemetery and others. It’s a day to be with the family and remember.
I was thinking this morning that across the country children and their parents will be going to the town parade and the young ones will sit on the sidewalks and wave their flags as the band goes by. Later, maybe, they’ll have a cookout or a day at the beach. And that’s good, because today is a day to be with the family and to remember.
Arlington, this place of so many memories, is a fitting place for some remembering. So many wonderful men and women rest here, men and women who led colorful, vivid, and passionate lives. There are the greats of the military: Bull Halsey and the Admirals Leahy, father and son; Black Jack Pershing; and the GI’s general, Omar Bradley. Great men all, military men. But there are others here known for other things.
Here in Arlington rests a sharecropper’s son who became a hero to a lonely people. Joe Louis came from nowhere, but he knew how to fight. And he galvanized a nation in the days after Pearl Harbor when he put on the uniform of his country and said, “I know we’ll win because we’re on God’s side.” Audie Murphy is here, Audie Murphy of the wild, wild courage. For what else would you call it when a man bounds to the top of a disabled tank, stops an enemy advance, saves lives, and rallies his men, and all of it singlehandedly. When he radioed for artillery support and was asked how close the enemy was to his position, he said, “Wait a minute and I’ll let you speak to them.” [Laughter]
Michael Smith is here, and Dick Scobee, both of the space shuttle Challenger. Their courage wasn’t wild, but thoughtful, the mature and measured courage of career professionals who took prudent risks for great reward — in their case, to advance the sum total of knowledge in the world. They’re only the latest to rest here; they join other great explorers with names like Grissom and Chaffee.
Oliver Wendell Holmes is here, the great jurist and fighter for the right. A poet searching for an image of true majesty could not rest until he seized on “Holmes dissenting in a sordid age.” Young Holmes served in the Civil War. He might have been thinking of the crosses and stars of Arlington when he wrote: “At the grave of a hero we end, not with sorrow at the inevitable loss, but with the contagion of his courage; and with a kind of desperate joy we go back to the fight.”
All of these men were different, but they shared this in common: They loved America very much. There was nothing they wouldn’t do for her. And they loved with the sureness of the young. It’s hard not to think of the young in a place like this, for it’s the young who do the fighting and dying when a peace fails and a war begins. Not far from here is the statue of the three servicemen — the three fighting boys of Vietnam. It, too, has majesty and more. Perhaps you’ve seen it — three rough boys walking together, looking ahead with a steady gaze. There’s something wounded about them, a kind of resigned toughness. But there’s an unexpected tenderness, too. At first you don’t really notice, but then you see it. The three are touching each other, as if they’re supporting each other, helping each other on.
I know that many veterans of Vietnam will gather today, some of them perhaps by the wall. And they’re still helping each other on. They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam — boys who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home, boys who were dodging bullets while we debated the efficacy of the battle. It was often our poor who fought in that war; it was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march. They learned not to rely on us; they learned to rely on each other. And they were special in another way: They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of duty. They had the wild, wild courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age; they stood for something.
And we owe them something, those boys. We owe them first a promise: That just as they did not forget their missing comrades, neither, ever, will we. And there are other promises. We must always remember that peace is a fragile thing that needs constant vigilance. We owe them a promise to look at the world with a steady gaze and, perhaps, a resigned toughness, knowing that we have adversaries in the world and challenges and the only way to meet them and maintain the peace is by staying strong.
That, of course, is the lesson of this century, a lesson learned in the Sudetenland, in Poland, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, in Cambodia. If we really care about peace, we must stay strong. If we really care about peace, we must, through our strength, demonstrate our unwillingness to accept an ending of the peace. We must be strong enough to create peace where it does not exist and strong enough to protect it where it does. That’s the lesson of this century and, I think, of this day. And that’s all I wanted to say. The rest of my contribution is to leave this great place to its peace, a peace it has earned.
Thank all of you, and God bless you, and have a day full of memories.
“I think the best possible social program is a job.” –Ronald Reagan
“Because ours is a consistent philosophy of government, we can be very clear: We do not have a separate social agenda, a separate economic agenda, and a separate foreign agenda. We have one agenda. Just as surely as we seek to put our financial house in order and rebuild our nation’s defenses, so too we seek to protect the unborn, to end the manipulation of schoolchildren by utopian planners, and permit the acknowledgment of a Supreme Being in our classrooms just as we allow such acknowledgments in other public institutions.” –Ronald Reagan
