Ronald Reagan

Rick Santorum The Frontrunner In The Presidential Race: A Nightmare Scenario!

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Imagine the impossible: After ELEVEN frontrunners in the Republican Presidential race, we finally have former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania as the present frontrunner.

This is a literal nightmare, as Santorum would take us back socially to the 1950s; economically to the Gilded Age or 1920s; and would send troops and bomb Iran on his first day in office.

Rick Santorum would try to outlaw contraceptives; outlaw all abortions under all circumstances; reverse “don’s ask, don’t tell” in the military; promote theocracy in America, with his fanatical religious convictions; set out to wipe out most of the New Deal and Great Society; promote the end of any regulation of corporations and banks; promote the interests of the oil industry at the expense of the environment; cut taxes on the wealthy much more than even the Bush tax cuts; and promote military intervention all over the world in the name of American “exceptionalism”!

And there is more, enough to make us wish for George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism”, or the time of Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford or Richard Nixon!

This country would be so damaged and divided, more than ever before, and make us long for the “good old days” of earlier Presidents, who no matter how controversial they were, were never as extreme and fanatical as Rick Santorum would be.

Rick Santorum is a mental case, a danger to the stability and advancement of America, and those who wish he was the Republican nominee, thinking it would be easy for Barack Obama to defeat him, had better think twice and wish that he NOT be chosen, as one can never know for sure how those citizens among us who are emotional and ignorant and overtly “religious”, might not see Rick Santorum as their “Jesus Christ” who can save the country!

This potential for a Santorum Presidency is the most dangerous threat to our future since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, even surpassing the candidacy of Barry Goldwater in 1964, and we must hope that Mitt Romney is able to overcome this challenge, as no matter what one thinks of Mitt, at least we know he is sane and stable, and no threat to the future of the nation, were he to occupy the White House in 2013.

Presidential Empathy And Emotional Connection With The American People

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There are so many talents, abilities, and skills required for a person in any occupation or field of work to have success, and the same is so for the American Presidency.

We have had Presidents who, despite many other talents, abilities and skills, were simply unable to show empathy and emotional connection with the American people. Instead, they came across as aloof, distant, plastic, and unable to relate to the “common man”!

Among those Presidents who failed to demonstrate empathy and emotional connection with the American people would be the following:

William Howard Taft
Woodrow Wilson
Warren G. Harding
Calvin Coolidge
Herbert Hoover
Lyndon B. Johnson
Richard Nixon
Jimmy Carter
George H. W. Bush
George W. Bush

Among those Presidents who had the ability to display Presidential empathy and emotional connection were the following:

Theodore Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Harry Truman
Dwight D. Eisenhower
John F. Kennedy
Gerald Ford
Ronald Reagan
Bill Clinton
Barack Obama

Does Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, or Ron Paul have these abilities? The answer is ABSOLUTELY NOT, and this will make it more difficult for any or them to serve in the Oval Office in a time of great human suffering due to the economic collapse since 2008.

Newt Gingrich: The Demagogue, The Bully, The Narcissist, Revealed Again!

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Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has been shown to be a full scale demagogue, and Mitt Romney showed Gingrich’s hypocrisy again and again in last night’s debate, leading to the belief that Romney has recovered from his defeat in very conservative South Carolina, and now is more likely than ever to be the GOP nominee.

Gingrich is a demagogue on the level of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon; he is a bully; he is a narcissist par excellence; he is a man without any morals, ethics or scruples, except his own aggrandizement!

Newt Gingrich is willing to victimize the poor; he is willing to behave as a racist; he is willing to lie without any shame; he is willing to stir up anti Islamic hatred; he is willing to stir up trouble in the Middle East by claiming that Palestinians do not exist; he is willing to sacrifice wives as disposables for his own ambitions; and he is willing to use incendiary language against the President of the United States, and in so doing, encourage lack of respect for the person holding the office, in a way that no other President has EVER been treated!

The people he has worked with in the Republican Party and in Congress have turned against him, and the conservative ideologists have mostly abandoned him, with the major exception of Michael Reagan, Ronald Reagan’s adopted son, and conservative talk show host.

It cannot be soon enough for Newt Gingrich to be removed from the attention of the national news media. Maybe Florida will be the place of his “Waterloo”, and if so, NOT soon enough, as he makes the word “politician” a dirty word, which it should not be!

Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Margaret Thatcher, And Ronald Reagan Mythology

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It is a well known fact that Ronald Reagan has been mythologized by conservatives and Republicans to be an icon, a God like figure.

Therefore, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney are competing to try to show themselves to have been supportive and worked with Ronald Reagan during his Presidency, when the record is extremely clear that both men during and after the Reagan Presidency were constantly critical of Reagan and his domestic, economic and foreign policies on a regular basis. It makes one wonder how ANY Republican could back either Gingrich or Romney,and also why Michael Reagan, the President’s adopted son, is so in favor of Gingrich, when most conservatives are running away from him.

But also, there is the image out there that former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was extremely close to Reagan during the 1980s, but now a new book shows just the opposite, how often Thatcher and Reagan clashed on many issues, particularly in foreign policy.

So the voters of Florida and elsewhere are being lied to on a regular basis by both Gingrich and Romney, and they are making fools of themselves in their quest for votes. Their pandering to Cuban American voters about their intentions to rid Cuba of Fidel Castro has led to the Cuban dictator, now age 86, commenting that the GOP Presidential race involves candidates who are both “ignorant and idiotic”!

One does not have to endorse Castro to say, that on this matter, he is absolutely correct!

One Year To Inauguration Day!

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Three years ago today, Barack Obama took the oath of office as the 44th President of the United States.

One year from today, we will see the inauguration of a President–at this point, one of five men.

Tomorrow’s South Carolina Primary may decide who will be challenging Barack Obama in November.

One has to wonder where is the leadership, the statesmanship, of the opposition party, that they cannot come up with anyone on the level of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, or George H. W. Bush. This is not saying that all of the above had records in office approaching perfection, but compared to Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, they appear as a long lost Republican leadership.

And of course, to wish for the likes of past Republicans such as Nelson Rockefeller, William Scranton, George Romney, and Henry Cabot Lodge, among others, all of whom sought and failed to win their party’s nomination, is to expect too much in today’s political climate!

The Issue Of Presidential Sexual Scandals And The Candidacy Of Newt Gingrich

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The controversy surrounding former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s private life has multiplied, with the revelation by his second wife of Newt’s desire for an “open marriage”, so that he could carry on an affair with the woman who became his third wife, since his second wife disagreed with his desire for an open marriage. This issue arose when the second wife was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, just as the move by Newt to divorce his first wife came when she was diagnosed with cancer.

Have Presidential candidates and Presidents before now been involved in sex scandals? Of course, the answer is yes, but only becoming public knowledge and controversy in the past 25 years with the candidacies of Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, Rudy Guiliani, and Newt Gingrich, and the planned but aborted candidacies of Mark Sanford and John Ensign.

Have Presidents had affairs in the past, in or out of office? Of course yes is the answer, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Buchanan, James Garfield, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton, that we are aware of. But ONLY Bill Clinton was revealed to be involved in such scandals before he was elected, and during his Presidency, as news and gossip on other Presidents was kept well hidden from the news media and the general public.

Have Presidents or Presidential candidates ever been divorced? The answer is yes, although only Ronald Reagan has been elected. But Adlai Stevenson, Bob Dole, John Kerry, and John McCain all were married for the second time when they ran for the White House.

Has any candidate ever been married THREE times, and openly cheated on his first two wives, other than Newt Gingrich? The answer is NO, and the hypocrisy of Newt Gingrich is that he pursued the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998-1999 while pursuing his own affair outside of marriage.

No President or Presidential candidate has openly pursued the idea of a “open marriage”, although one could argue that Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton, at the least, seemed to accept such a concept in the sense that they knew their husbands were involved in cheating and did not choose to break up their marriages.

Other First Ladies and wives of Presidential candidates MAY have silently agreed to their husbands committing adultery and staying married, but that is all speculation at best.

The point is that the second wife of Newt Gingrich, in revealing the “open marriage” idea of her former husband, made it clear that Newt had said that Callista, the third wife, had no problem with “sharing” Newt.

So what this means is that IF Callista Gingrich becomes First Lady, we will have the first acknowledged believer in an open marriage, who has no concept of a problem with adultery. In the past, there were choice words for such a woman, which will not be used here. It indicates the likelihood of an “open marriage” between Callista and Newt from the beginning of their marriage, and the excellent possibility that there would be sex scandals in the White House, something we do not need to occur, or to learn about.

In a country in which many “religious” people claim to believe in the sanctity of marriage, and the importance of “family values”, to have Newt and Callista Gingrich in the White House would be a mockery of the concept of marriage and loyalty, and a degradation of the Presidency as an institution.

And for conservatives, such as Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh to ignore this, and to support Newt, indicates the total hypocrisy of the Right, which was only too eager to remove Bill Clinton from office on moral grounds.

One Term Presidencies: Seven Significant Leaders Not Appreciated

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Tomorrow marks one year to the inauguration of the next President of the United States, and the question arises whether Barack Obama will become another one term President.

Historically, those who have been one term Presidents and lost re-election have tended to go down in history as “losers”, “failures”, and as “insignificant” in American history.

But nothing could be further from the truth. Consider the following cases:

John Adams–one of the most significant Founding Fathers in the Revolution and Federalist Eras, but defeated by Thomas Jefferson in the first political party struggle.

John Quincy Adams–brilliant in diplomacy before his Presidency as one of our greatest Secretaries of State, and exceptional as a Congressman for nearly 18 years after his Presidency, fighting against the evil of slavery, but losing to Andrew Jackson.

William Howard Taft–much underrated President who also served later as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, but losing to Woodrow Wilson, and even ending up behind his promoter, Theodore Roosevelt, who ran on a third party line, the Progressive Party, the greatest third party performance in American history.

Herbert Hoover–acknowledged as great humanitarian as aide to Woodrow Wilson during World War I, and as Secretary of Commerce under Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, but paralyzed by the Great Depression and slow to react to the massive crisis it presented.

Jimmy Carter–Despite major accomplishments in office, particularly in foreign policy, lost reelection to Ronald Reagan because of the Iranian hostage crisis, but pursued commitment to fighting disease and promoted diplomacy and free elections after his Presidency, and won the Nobel Peace Prize.

George H. W. Bush–very talented as Ambassador to China, United Nations Ambassador, and head of the Central Intelligence Agency before his Presidency, but despite his victory in the Gulf War, he was defeated due to the economic recession and the third party candidacy of Ross Perot, and lost to Bill Clinton.

Another one term President who chose NOT to run for re-election, of course, had a very successful term of office. James K. Polk gained the Oregon Treaty with Great Britain, giving America the Pacific Northwest states, and waged war with Mexico, gaining California and the Southwest states. Worn out by his labors, he chose not to run, and died 103 days after retirement, the shortest retirement period of any President in American history.

So the whole concept that one term Presidents do not matter is shown to be totally incorrect.

Holy War In Play: Social Conservatives Against Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, And Separation Of Church And State!

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Social conservatives have always been a problem for the Republican Party since the rise of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and the Moral Majority, Christian Coalition and their associated groups, including large numbers of Tea Party Movement activists.

Insisting that separation of church and state are not the beliefs of the Founding Fathers who created our Constitution, the evangelical Right has been exasperated over the performance in office of Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, and discontented with the candidacies of Bob Dole in 1996 and John McCain in 2008.

So now, a large group of these social conservatives, including many religious leaders and wealthy businessmen, have met in Texas, and decided to coalesce around former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum as the best hope to stop former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney in the race for the Republican Presidential nomination.

More than two thirds of those gathered in Texas decided that Texas Governor Rick Perry and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich had too many weaknesses and shortcomings, and that Santorum, who has emphasized his opposition to gay rights and abortion rights, was their “man”!

These religious right wingers are desperate to defeat Barack Obama, but see Romney as a “Massachusetts liberal”, and many are uncomfortable with a Mormon running for the Presidency, as many of them see the Church of Latter Day Saints as a cult.

It will be interesting to see whether the Evangelical Right will be able to stop Romney from being the nominee, and stop Barack Obama from having a second term of office in the White House.

The whole idea of a Mormon candidate against a mixed race President, who is black in appearance, drives these religious fanatics crazy. The whole concept of separation of church and state, and the idea of personal freedom of individuals to control their own lives, drive these extremists to fury and anger.

Hate is the key word here, and it seems likely that the evangelical Right will lose on both counts, and America will be the better for their repudiation!

Political Attacks On First Ladies: Nothing New!

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The new book that claims that First Lady Michelle Obama has had problems with White House staff, that she interferes with their agenda in defense of her husband, has led to denials by her, and bitter attacks by conservative media.

Is criticism of the First Lady, whoever she is, anything new? History tells us otherwise.

First Lady Dolly Madison was always more outspoken in all ways than her taciturn husband, James Madison. She was known as the “party giver”, but that included her willingness to speak her mind!

First Lady Mary Lincoln was controversial over her expenditures, her clothes, and her mouth, and came under a lot of political attacks during the Civil War, including the fact that her brothers were part of the enemy, fighting for the Confederacy against the American government led by Abraham Lincoln.

Lucy Hayes came to be known as “Lemonade Lucy”, due to the fact that she prevented the serving of liquor at White House gatherings, and believed in women’s rights, including the right to vote, and spoke her mind regularly, causing problems therefore for her husband, Rutherford Hayes.

Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, the second Mrs. Wilson, led cabinet meetings after Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke in 1919, and often was considered the “first woman President” during his last 18 months in office.

Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt, was the most controversial First Lady, speaking up regularly on all kinds of issues and topics, and labeled by her critics as a Communist and a Socialist. After her husband died, she remained part of the political controversies in the era of McCarthyism and the Cold War, always speaking her mind and being a political activist.

Betty Ford became a lightning rod under President Gerald Ford, speaking out as a feminist for the Equal Rights Amendment, and endorsing abortion rights, and speaking about her alcohol and breast cancer problems openly.

Rosalyn Carter attended cabinet meeting of her husband, Jimmy Carter, and also spoke out for feminist causes openly.

Nancy Reagan was criticized for her spending on White House China, and defended her husband, Ronald Reagan, against his own White House Chief of Staff, Donald Regan, who she was able to arrange to fire. She had no problem stating that she was there to help and defend her husband.

Hillary Clinton was the most involved and outspoken First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt, and became a lightning rod particularly when she promoted a failed health care plan in the first term of Bill Clinton.

And now, Michelle Obama is making clear that she is there as an advocate of her husband, while claiming no problem in getting along with the White House staff.

So this is all nothing new!

The Republican Tradition Of “Next In Line” For The Presidential Nomination

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The Republican Party has developed a tradition of choosing the “next in line” for their Presidential nomination in the past half century, with the one exception of Barry Goldwater in 1964, which became a total disaster.

Witness:

1960–Richard Nixon was “next in line” as Vice President to succeed Dwight D. Eisenhower.
1968–Richard Nixon was “next in line” after the Goldwater debacle, as a “second chance” for the “workhorse” of the Republican Party.
1976–Gerald Ford had succeeded Richard Nixon, and was therefore “entitled” to the nomination of the party.
1980–Ronald Reagan had fought the “good fight” against Gerald Ford and carried the conservative tradition of Barry Goldwater, so was “next in line”.
1988–George H. W. Bush had finished behind Reagan in 1980, and served as his Vice President loyally for eight years, so was “next in line”.
1996–Bob Dole had competed and lost to Bush in 1988, had also competed for the nomination in 1980, and run with Gerald Ford for Vice President in 1976, so was “entitled” to the nomination.
2000-George W. Bush wished to carry on the tradition and heritage of his father, who had been defeated by Bill Clinton, with the assistance of third party candidate Ross Perot in 1992, so was seen as “next in line”.
2008–John McCain, who had been the leading opponent of George W. Bush in 2000, was seen as “next in line”, “entitled” to the nomination of the party.
2012–Mitt Romney ended up second, losing to John McCain in 2008, so is seen by many as “next in line” for the nomination.

Of course, in none of these elections did the “next in line” gain the nomination just for the asking, and that will not happen in 2012 either, but it is, in historical terms, an interesting state of affairs!