Cagle World

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

What happened the other night at the Academy Awards show really saddened me.

After all, I’m a child of Hollywood as much as I am a child of politics.

My mother Jane Wyman was a major player in Hollywood – best actress Oscar, two stars on the Walk of Fame, handprints in the cement in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

She was a little girl from St. Joseph, Missouri, who made it big in Hollywood, where she worked in more than 80 movies and later starred on TV.

In 1948 she won her Oscar for best actress for playing a teenage deaf-mute raped in “Johnny Belinda. In 1951 she was nominated for her role in “The Blue Veil” and again in 1954 for “Magnificent Obsession.”

For basically the first half of my life I looked at my mother’s Oscar for “Johnny Belinda” on display at her house.

In those days, when the Academy would commission oil portraits of the best actor and actress winners, the beautiful painting of my mother as she appeared in the role of Belinda hung above her fireplace.

When my mother would ask me – as she did when she was still only in her late 30s – what I wanted her to leave me when she died, I told her all I wanted was “Belinda.”

When she died in 2007 I got the painting and today it hangs in a wonderful spot in my house. I’m so proud of it, I show it to everyone who comes in.

When my mother was being nominated for Oscars and regularly attending the Academy Awards, the event was a class act that deserved to be called “a ceremony.”

Despite the famous excesses and sexy scandals of pre-TV Tinseltown, the night was a dignified celebration of great movies and iconic people you respected.

It wasn’t a low-class affair where actors got away with hitting other actors in the face, yelling f-bombs from their tables or abusing their time on stage to preach their simplistic liberal politics or signal their superior virtue.

It’s bad enough that Hollywood’s creative community has ruined its annual awards night, but now the movie industry has announced it’s going to implement a woke quota system.

The liberals in charge of Hollywood will soon be requiring movie producers to employ minimum numbers of people of color or members of the LGBTQ community before their films can even be eligible to be voted on by Academy members for an Oscar.

In other words, it’s not going to be the quality of your film or the great acting or directing that wins you honors.

It’s going to be making sure your movie meets the required color, gender and sexual-orientation quotas.

This is the kind of madness already being implemented at Disney that would drive my father to tears.

In 1955 he, Art Linkletter and Robert Cummings cut the ribbon and officially opened Disneyland on live TV.

But today the company that has built itself into a global cultural power by entertaining our children has become embarrassingly woke.

It has been removing the recorded “gendered greetings” at its theme parks and replacing “ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls” with a more “inclusive” welcome addressed to “Dreamers of all ages.”

And this week a video emerged of a Disney executive producer boasting that she has been pushing a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” for children’s animation.

It’s a sad day in America that this is how low we – and Hollywood – have gone.

I’m just glad my parents are dead so they don’t have to watch what has happened to the movie industry they loved.

–

Copyright 2022 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

Already I’ve had it.

I’ve been back home for just a weekend but I’m ready to get back on that cruise ship and get away from America the Angry.

The ship that my wife and I cruised on last week in the Caribbean was like heaven.

No political arguments at lunch. No one ranting about $6 gas prices. No TV screens filled with FOX or CNN talking heads.

Only one person on the ship tested positive for COVID – you remember COVID?

Enjoying time on the blue ocean, getting off the ship in Jamaica and playing golf — it was a truly great vacation.

But then you come back to America, where it seems everyone needs to be enrolled in an anger management program.

America has become a depressing, unhappy place to be and it’s all because of woke politics.

It’s getting so you’re not allowed to laugh anymore.

When we got back home we learned that the wokesters who run Twitter were suspending the conservative Babylon Bee satire site.

Why?

For the politically incorrect crime of deliberately “misgendering” U.S. Assistant Health Secretary Rachel Levine by awarding her the Bee’s title of “Man of the Year.”

And this last week I’ve had to watch a supposedly brilliant and super qualified nominee for the United States Supreme Court tell a U.S. Senator that she couldn’t define what a woman was because she is “not a biologist.”

Was I allowed to laugh at that absurd answer? I hope so, because I didn’t check first with the Washington Post editorial board.

But seriously, there’s nothing funny about what’s been happening to the country since the Biden-Harris-Pelosi gang has been in charge.

We’ve always had incompetent or ideologically misguided Democrats in Washington who royally screw up the country at home and abroad.

But the current regime has managed in just 14 months to wreck our energy sector, whip up the inflation rate to nearly 8 percent, spike the crime rate in cities and turn America into an international weakling that can’t be trusted or respected.

On top of these ongoing Democrat fiascos, look at what’s become of our society.

People can hardly talk to each other or eat meals with each other anymore without arguing about politics. You have to sit with people you agree with 100 percent or they cancel you for lunch.

Everyone’s so worried about being woke, even private schools are joining public schools and pushing sex education on young kids.

And of course Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is being blasted as the bad guy by the liberal media because he doesn’t want kids being taught about sex and gender fluidity in kindergarten.

Seeing all these unnecessary economic and social troubles makes me sad, but I’m not sad for me.

I’m sad for the country. I’m sad for my son who is 43 and my daughter who is 38.

But mostly I’m sad for my granddaughters who are six and almost four. What kind of future are they going to grow up in?

Sometimes – especially if you are not as old as I am or watch too much TV — it can all look hopeless.

It looks like there’s nothing we can do to get back to being the America where people are happy, prosperous and civil to one another even when they argue over politics.

As I tell my kids, remember 1979.

That was a year the whole country was bummed out. Inflation was roaring, interest rates were in the teens, the Soviet Empire was still dangerous and cars were lined up for blocks at gas stations.

But all that misery ended almost overnight when Jimmy Carter was replaced by Ronald Reagan.

So remember, as I tell my kids, it only takes one election to change America for the better again. We proved it in 1980 and we can prove it again in 2024 — first with a little help this fall.

–

Copyright 2022 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

Volodynyr Zelenskyy has made quite a quick and dramatic transition.

In less than six years he’s gone from a comedian and TV actor to politician to president of Ukraine to global hero.

Zelenskyy has become Ukraine’s voice of resistance – the brave leader who refuses to surrender or flee in the face of the brutal and massive invasion of his country by Vladimir Putin’s military machine.

While Putin has become the free world’s Great Satan, people everywhere are praising Zelenskyy and even comparing him to historic war-time leaders like Winston Churchill and Benjamin Franklin.

Not to diminish Zelenskyy’s personal courage or the moral power of his calls for military help from NATO and the United States, but when it comes to great leaders in the world today, there isn’t much competition.

Joe Biden? Boris Johnson? Emmanuel Macron of France?

Not exactly modern day Reagans, Thatchers and Pope John Pauls, are they?

To defend his country Zelenskyy needs some deadly stuff – modern jet planes and lots more advanced shoulder-fired Javelin anti-tank and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

While he’s waiting to see what weapons he’ll get, he’s just received a freedom award from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute.

The Ronald Reagan Freedom Award won’t do much against a Russian tank.

But when Zelenskyy officially gets his honor on Monday for his “courageous fight against tyranny” it might lift his spirits a little.

It’s a fitting award to give to Zelenskyy for standing up to the Russians.

It’s been given in the past to the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, Colin Powell, Poland’s Lech Walesa and a fellow comedian/actor, Bob Hope, aka, America’s ambassador of “Goodwill.”

The award represents the values and principles of freedom that Ronald Reagan fought for all his life and is considered the “highest civilian honor” bestowed by the Reagan foundation.

In a way, what Zelenskyy’s doing reminds me of what my father did on a much smaller scale in Hollywood in the late 1940s.

My father, then a liberal Democrat, was in his first presidency – as president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG).

It was a violent time when the Communist Party was trying to take control of the movie industry’s unions.

The unions were fighting each other and strikebreakers outside studio gates and the movie moguls were hiring gangsters to intimidate and undermine the unions.

Working to keep SAG and other Hollywood unions free of communist influence, my father was not afraid to fight for what he thought was right – and do it publicly.

He stuck to his democratic principles and was a tough negotiator who forced the studio bosses to provide better pay and benefits for the actors who had elected him over and over again.

At one point he even put his life on the line.

In 1946, he got anonymous death threats and a warning from police that he was in danger from the members of a new left-leaning union that was trying to replace SAG.

He not only started packing a gun, he slept with it under his pillow, which scared the heck out of my mother Jane Wyman.

In 1960, SAG brought him back as union president and he led a major strike by actors that shut down the movie industry.

He ultimately forced the studios and producers to create a residual payment system for the first time that continues to this day and has paid out billions to actors.

My father was a natural leader and anti-communist long before he became president of the United States and orchestrated the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Obviously, Ronald Reagan never had to risk his life to defend his homeland against a Russian invasion the way Zelenskyy is today.

But just as some people are calling Zelenskyy the Reagan of Ukraine, I like to think of my father as the Zelenskyy of Hollywood.

I hope Zelenskyy wins for freedom the way my father did.

–

Copyright 2022 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Last week we wondered what President Biden was going to say in his first State of the Union address that was new, upbeat or important.

Unfortunately, this week we found out.

Nothing.

Biden meandered around for an hour.

Committing a few gaffes and making false claims about his alleged successes, he pretended his 13-month string of failures at home and overseas was some other country’s nightmare.

He pandered to union auto workers and spent most of the time rehashing the Build Back Better promises he made but couldn’t deliver because two principled senators in his own party blocked them.

As the Wall Street Journal’s editorialists said in reaction to Biden’s lousy address, “The President really does need to fire some people and get better advice.”

Better speech writers would help, too. Especially ones that know the difference between canned rhetoric and actual facts.

One thing Biden did that really annoyed me was when he was talking about how competition among businesses keep prices lower.

He said, “I’m a capitalist, but capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism. It’s exploitation ….”

Yeah, OK, Joe. Everyone who’s passed Econ 101 agrees competition is good for society.

So if competition is so great, why don’t you and your party allow competition to produce its miracles in the field of public education? A lot of families in Blue cities would benefit greatly from school choice.

Biden’s speech was so bad, it wasn’t even good theater.

A couple of House Republican gals did some heckling, but Nancy Pelosi didn’t rip up her copy of his awful speech.

Meanwhile, the tragic and bloody war in Ukraine – which Biden and his crack diplomats were helpless to stop – has wiped the COVID pandemic from our TV and computer screens as if it never happened.

We used to binge on Netflix. Now we binge on war – in real time. The war in Ukraine has got it all – heroes and villains and violence and tragedy.

By the way, I refer to the war in Ukraine as the “Green New Deal War.”

The Green New Dealers here want to shut down our oil and gas industries so that we have to get our energy from solar and wind. So far they’re being successful.

But do they know that while they’re hurting the USA they’re helping Russia and China?

Do the Green New Dealers who pull Biden’s strings know that while our fossil fuel industry has been hobbled by federal regulators we are buying 200,000 barrels of oil a day from Russia?

Or that most of our solar panels are made in China?

When the president said in his speech we need to buy stuff from America, he got a standing ovation.

So can Joe explain why we are still buying oil from Russia? Sales of oil to the West is where Russia gets the rubles it needs to fund its invasion of Ukraine.

Biden’s state of the union speech showed us again what a weak leader he really is.

For the first 12 minutes he talked about defending Ukraine like a sideline cheerleader at a football game holding up a big “D” sign, but did little to actually help Ukraine defend itself.

As a member of the Ukrainian Parliament said, the speech was a “total disappointment” because we were “promised protection” while Ukrainians were being “executed.”

A major problem we have in the “Free World” today is that there are no strong leaders except maybe for Ukraine’s heroic president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

To keep Putin from invading Ukraine, we needed a strong leader like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher or Pope John Paul. Instead, all we had was Joe Biden.

So for now, it looks like the only way to end the war in Ukraine is if the people of Russia bring on a coup.

–

Copyright 2022 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Goodbye, Ukraine.

That poor, corrupt and undemocratic Eastern European country is in the process of being beaten into submission and conquered by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

It should surprise no one.

Putin has been telling us for months, and showing us for weeks by encircling Ukraine with 150,000 Russian soldiers, what he was going to do.

Now Putin’s doing it – and there’s nothing we can do about it.

This is the kind of stuff that happens when there is a weak leader in the White House.

The invasion of eastern Ukraine proves that of the two countries, the United States and Russia, only one has a strong leader – and it’s not the U.S.

Returning all or part of Ukraine and its 42 million people to Russian control is a part of Putin’s decades-old dream of rebuilding as much as he could of the former Soviet Empire before he’s dead.

Two American presidents – Obama and now Biden – have done their best to make Putin’s dream a reality.

When Putin bit off Crimea from the territory of Ukraine in 2014 the Obama administration did virtually nothing.

Now it looks like if he feels like it, he might decide to just swallow up the whole country, which is 78 percent ethnic Ukrainian and 17 percent Russian.

The “KGB Thug” has played a high-stakes geopolitical poker game with Biden while the world watched – and he won by default.

It’s too late now for the weak and inept Biden administration to do anything but hold press conferences and complain.

Imposing strict financial sanctions on Russia next week will not make Putin pull out his tanks and soldiers.

We’re not going to go to thermonuclear war with Russia over the sovereignty of Ukraine, nor should we.

And the spineless European Union isn’t going to be anything more than a spectator to a Russian land grab that has been inevitable for more than a decade.

Ukraine may prove to be too big, too poor and too full of Ukrainians willing to fight and die in a guerrilla war for Russia’s feeble economy to digest in the long run.

But for now, thanks to the Biden administration’s one-two punch of weakness and incompetence, Ukraine is now Putin’s to do with what he wants.

He’s been waiting for a weakling like Biden to occupy the White House and he has not let the opportunity pass him by.

He’s 73. He knows he’s personally running out of time to “Make Russia Great Again.” He also knew that he had only a four-year window to make his dream a reality.

He had to “MRGA” before Biden – or his inevitable successor, the even more clueless Kamala Harris – was replaced by a competent president with a spine.

The fact is, no matter what you think of Donald Trump – and people know I don’t think very highly of him – the invasion of Ukraine would have never happened under Trump and certainly not under Ronald Reagan.

Last week we spoke about what President Biden is going to say in his State of the Union address on Tuesday.

Well, as of today, his theme looks like it’s going to be “How I screwed up everything at home and abroad in just 13 months.”

Biden’s speechwriters will try to put a positive spin on his multiple failures and the sad state of the union.

They’ll try to blame Republicans or Trump for everything from the failed war on covid and the spike in crime to the high cost of oil and gasoline.

But the blame for our array of serious domestic and foreign problems ultimately rests on Biden and the American people who hated Donald Trump so much that they elected him.

As one of our previous presidents so famously boasted when voters chose him, “elections have consequences.” Let’s pray that truism comes true again this fall.

–

Copyright 2022 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

My son Cameron and I can hardly wait for President Biden’s upcoming State of the Union address.

“What do you think he’s going to say on March 1, Dad?” he asked me earlier this week during our phone call.

“That the State of the Union is …. very sad? Screwed? You finish the sentence.”

“Seriously,” Cameron said. “The State of the Union is supposed to be upbeat – positive – or at least hopeful, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “His speechwriters must be working overtime. The list of big things he’s messed up in a single year is long and getting longer.”

“So what’s he going to brag about to the country?” Cameron asked.

“Well,” I said, “he did a terrible job with Afghanistan, so he can’t bring that up.”

“The economy is also a no-no.

“Inflation is running at 7 percent, interest rates are headed up and millions of workers have still not gone back to work, thanks to the government’s generous and never-ending pandemic help.”

“He sure can’t mention crime,” Cameron said.

“It’s spiking in every big city and his justice department is more interested in eliminating cash bail than catching criminals and putting them in jail.”

“And forget the war on COVID,” I said.

“It’s been a disaster.

“Biden’s still wearing a mask 24/7, but even blue state governors have finally had enough of the mandates and are getting rid of them.”

“He can’t bring up energy, either,” Cameron said. “Gas prices are high everywhere. We’re paying five bucks a gallon.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Remember way, way back in time – 2020, I think it was, before Biden took over and started wrecking our fossil fuel industry? I could fill up my truck without taking out an equity loan.”

“We were energy independent then — and the world’s number one producer of oil and natural gas,” Cameron said.

“Then Biden shut down the Keystone Pipeline, gave Russia the OK for its Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline to Germany and told us that to save the planet we all have to start driving $60,000 electric cars.”

“Biden won’t be bragging on how he’s winning the war on drugs, either.”

“Nope,” I said. “He’s done nothing about the drug overdose epidemic that’s killing a hundred thousand people a year.”

“And the AMA says it’s only getting worse – thanks mainly to all the illegal fentanyl that comes across our Southern border and is made in China.”

“Speaking of borders,” Cameron said, “what’s this big deal about Ukraine’s?

“Biden’s sending troops and missiles to Europe to show Putin how tough he is. He’s helping Ukraine defend its borders, but he won’t help Texas?”

“Yep,” I said, “he’s working overtime trying to stop the invasion of Ukraine. But since the day he took office we’ve had a huge invasion on our southern border – and it’s his fault.”

“I was just looking at an article on the Border Report web site,” Cameron said. “The headline was ‘Migrant encounters top 2 million in calendar year 2021, on pace for repeat in 2022.’ ”

“I don’t think he’ll be talking to the country about the state of his immigration policy,” I said.

“If Putin doesn’t send his troops across the Ukrainian border,” Cameron said, “maybe Biden will be able to brag that he used his great foreign policy expertise and the threat of sanctions to stop the Russians from invading Ukraine.

“By the way, Dad, what’s the latest on the war in Ukraine? Are we losing it yet?”

“After this discussion, Cameron, I think it’s safe to say that the Biden administration is not winning any wars anywhere.

“Not the war on inflation. Not the war on illegal immigration. Not the war on drugs.

“Given the sorry state of our Union under Biden, I don’t expect the war in Ukraine – if it comes – to be any different.”

–

Copyright 2022 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

It’s not masks that those rebel Canadian truckers are against.

It’s not the COVID vaccines or boosters one, two and three, either.

The truckers (who reportedly are 90 percent vaxxed) and millions of like-minded citizens in the democracies of North America and Europe who are blocking highways and marching in the streets are protesting mandates.

They’ve finally risen up in anger after two years of being forced by their governments and flip-flopping public health bureaucrats to wear masks indoors and outdoors, even when it made no scientific, medical or common sense.

Blue State politicians and their liberal media glee club can’t – or won’t – get it through their thick, authoritarian, partisan skulls that being against mandates is different from being against masks or vaccines.

The Democrats have spent the last year bashing and shaming anyone opposed to mask or vaccine mandates, vilifying them as insurrectionists, terrorists and anti-vaxxers.

Even worse, they’ve accused them of all being Trump voters.

But the rebellious truckers in Ottawa and the angry parents who disrupted the traditional morgue-like atmosphere of school board meetings in Virginia are not insurrectionists.

They’re freedom fighters.

Many of them are the same “essential workers” who stayed on their jobs through the first year of the pandemic and kept our government-crippled economy from completely going down the drain.

The truckers, cops, health workers and a lot of other sensible vaccinated and unvaccinated Americans from flyover country who are protesting don’t belong to the laptop class.

They haven’t been able to work from home in their PJs for two years. In millions of cases, they weren’t able to work at all.

It’s no wonder that the frustration and anger of workers over forced vaccinations has boiled over into the streets.

Everything our politicians and their public health experts did or told us to do to “flatten the curve” or defeat the virus didn’t work.

Not the masking, not the social distancing, not the hand-washing. Not the lockdowns. Not the school closings. Not the mass testing.

The new and advanced vaccine we were promised would save humankind from extinction and return our lives to normal by last fall turned out to be a bust – and a danger.

The vaccines not only don’t protect you from getting the virus or transmitting it, the data shows that a very small percentage of people who get vaxxed have had serious adverse reactions.

None of these limitations of the vaccines is new.

We’ve known for a long time that masks are virtually useless against COVID and the vaccines are not the miracle jab Dr. Fauci and the Biden gang built them up to be.

Even the Democrats and their parrots in the media now realize it’s time to surrender in the botched war on covid, but it’s not because the science or the data has changed.

It’s because the politics of COVID has changed – in the last week.

Democrats in Blue States now are falling all over each other calling for the end of mask mandates because they realize a majority of Americans have had enough of the failed Fauci-Biden campaign.

It’s time to conduct the sensible COVID policy we should have conducted in the first place: focusing on helping the vulnerable and letting the rest of us get on with our lives.

That means kids under 15 should not be forced to be vaccinated, masked, used as medical guinea pigs or allowed to be political props in photo ops for phonies like Stacy Abrams.

In other words, we Americans have suffered enough. No more mandates of any kind. Better yet, “Let’s go mandates.”

–

Copyright 2022 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Everyone’s watching Russia to see what its thug-for-life, Vladimir Putin, is going to do in Ukraine.

We ordinary citizens don’t know whether Putin will actually invade Ukraine with the 127,000 Russian soldiers he’s placed at its borders or whether he’s just bluffing.

But the Biden administration – which belongs to the Neville Chamberlain School of Foreign Policy – doesn’t know what Putin is going to do, either.

Biden has just sent 3,000 troops over to Eastern Europe not to fight the Russians but to show Putin that America means business when it tells him not to take the part of Ukraine he hasn’t already grabbed.

That’s Biden’s way of trying to be tough on Russia.

But if we had a real leader with guts and brains, we’d tell Putin if he doesn’t pull his troops from the Ukraine border within 72 hours we’ll bankrupt him like we did in the 1980s.

We’ll shut down Russia’s vital Nord Stream natural gas pipelines from Russia to Germany, reopen our Keystone Pipeline, free up our oil and gas frackers and flood America and the rest of the world with lower-cost energy.

Biden opened the door for Putin last year by allowing the second Nord Stream pipeline, so now he should shut the door by reopening our Keystone Pipeline and telling AOC and the other progressives in Congress to fly a kite in a wind farm.

A lot of Democrats, liberal pundits and former CNN employees who still believe that Putin stole the 2016 election for Trump also believe Russia is still a military threat to us.

But despite its aging arsenal of nukes, it’s really a broken-down, impoverished ex-superpower with a GDP smaller than Canada’s. It has nothing the West wants or needs but oil, natural gas and maybe caviar.

Russia doesn’t have the rubles or gold to spend on a big war or even a little one — but China does.

Russia isn’t in every other American’s pocket, either. But China sure is — and I’m not just talking about its business partners running the NBA or the Biden family.

Unless you’ve been living on a desert Pacific island since my father left Washington, you know our entire economy is dangerously dependent on China and its factories.

Forget Chinese-made imports like iPhones, Nike shoes and Black & Decker tools.

Just check out where most of those home coronavirus test kits Joe Biden has promised he’s mailing to each of us were made.

Of course the most dangerous product China has exported to us – and the world – was Covid 19.

It’d be hard for Hollywood to make up something as crazy as this true story: China gives us a deadly virus that kills nearly 1 million Americans and then sells us boatloads of the test kits that tell us if we have caught it.

Meanwhile, it’s Communist China – not authoritarian Russia – that has been flexing its military muscles and expanding its influence in Asia and around the world for a quarter century.

China’s dictators have taken over Hong Kong and snuffed out most of its people’s freedoms.

Before that they conquered Tibet – what the Communist Party propagandists called the “Peaceful Liberation of Tibet.”

They’ve also built islands for military purposes in the South China Sea and lately have been intimidating Taiwan by flying warplanes into that free country’s airspace.

China has paid no price for any of the evil it’s done to people outside or inside its borders, not even for oppressing 12 million mostly Muslim Uyghurs and putting a million of them into concentration camps.

China should worry everyone on the planet, but it’s the Russians we’re supposed to fear? Like so much of the Biden administration’s foreign policy “thinking,” it makes no sense.

So don’t worry about Russia starting World War III over Ukraine, folks.

WWIII started decades ago. It’s us against China, not Russia – and we’re losing.

–

Copyright 2022 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

The good news is I’m feeling a lot better than I did on Sunday.

The bad news is that despite being vaxxed a year ago and boosted about ten days ago, I’ve come down with COVID.

I, my wife Colleen and my son, his wife and one of their young kids have just caught the omicron variant – or it’s caught us.

I guess you could say we’re on the COVID family plan.

To say the least, it’s been a real kick in the butt.

For almost two years my wife and I listened to the “science” and the people in charge and did everything you’re supposed to do to protect yourself and prevent the virus from spreading to others.

But it turns out it doesn’t matter whether you’re vaccinated or unvaccinated, masked or unmasked, the virus is a virus and one of its variants eventually is going to get you.

I’m not worried though. I heard Dr. Fauci say we’ll have a vaccine for omicron by March.

Meanwhile, from my couch I see that President Biden is in a serious squabble with Vladimir Putin over his threat to invade Ukraine.

Biden and Putin have exchanged testy messages, with Biden threatening severe economic sanctions against Russia if Putin doesn’t cool his invasion plans.

The Biden-Putin “showdown” reminds me of a talk I had with my father the night he lost the Republican nomination to Gerald Ford.

Alone together in a hotel room, I asked, “Why in the world would you even want to run for the presidency of the United States?”

“You know, Michael,” he said, “for so long I’ve watched American presidents sit down with secretary-generals of the Soviet Union and watched them ask us to give up something to get along with them.

“I want to be the first president to say ‘Nyet’ to a Secretary-General of the Soviet Union.”

That was in August of 1976.

My father didn’t even know he was going to seek the GOP nomination again because, as I always joke, Nancy hadn’t told him yet that he was going to run again in 1980.

Then in 1986 — ten years after he told me that story – he was called to Reykjavík by Mikhail Gorbachev to sign a nuclear weapons agreement.

My dad arrived in Iceland and Gorbachev said to him, “I’m only going to sign if you give up the Strategic Defense Initiative” (aka, “Star Wars,” the outer space-based missile defense system then in early development).

Most everyone in my dad’s cabinet thought that signing the treaty would be Ronald Reagan’s greatest legacy and they wanted him to do what Gorbachev wanted.

But Ronald Reagan was not thinking of his legacy. He was thinking of America and freedom.

He knew that if he signed on to that deal and gave up the Strategic Defense Initiative, it wouldn’t make America and the world safer and freer.

So he said “Nyet” and turned and walked away from the summit – as I knew he would.

My father stood strong and did the right thing in 1986 and a year later he and Gorbachev had their historic weapons agreement that began the end of the Cold War.

We now have a weak president who wants to get along with the Russians and Putin knows it.

What Biden needs to do is make it crystal clear to Putin that although he paid no price for his annexation of Crimea in 2014, he’ll pay dearly if he invades Ukraine.

That means major economic and financial sanctions and energy policies designed to do what my father did to the old USSR – bankrupt Putin’s Russia.

The rest of the world is watching to see how Biden and the United States respond to Putin’s tank rattling at Ukraine’s border.

If Biden shows a backbone and puts Putin in his place, it may turn out to be the big foreign policy decision of his administration – his “Missiles of October” moment.

Mr. President, the whole world – especially its dictators and terrorist thugs — is watching to see if you can say “Nyet.”

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Copyright 2022 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Joe Biden didn’t disappoint me.

At his press conference this week he was the same old strange guy with the same old predictable excuses for one of the most hapless rookie presidential years in history.

The liberal media reporters didn’t disappoint me.

I knew they’d ask a bunch of friendly questions about issues most of the American people don’t care about – and they did.

Who did disappoint me at this week’s endless Q&A session with the cognitively challenged leader of the Free World, however, were the conservative reporters from Fox News and Newsmax.

Normally, you can count on Peter Doocy of Fox News and James Rosen of Newsmax to play a little hardball – to ask Biden the tough questions.

We know the liberal reporters in the White House pool will never grill Biden on any of the ongoing national disasters he’s created or made worse – soaring inflation, a permanent invasion of illegal immigrants at our Southern border and the crime wave sweeping our cities come to mind.

So what tough question did Doocy ask Biden?

“Why are you trying so hard in your first year to pull the country so far to the left?”

That softball produced a chuckle from Biden, who then rattled off some bogus middle of-the-road accomplishments for working-class people that was supposed to prove he was not a Bernie Sanders socialist but a mainstream Democrat.

That was it for Doocy. That was his one and only chance.

Unlike many other reporters, he got no follow-up question, so as far as conservatives are concerned, he might as well have been working for CNN.

As for Newsmax’s Rosen, he asked Biden “why do you suppose such large segments of the American electorate have come to harbor such profound concerns about your cognitive fitness.”

“I have no idea,” said the president who quickly moved on to take more softballs, which he answered with pat answers that were clearly written down for him.

Biden didn’t apologize for the blunder in Afghanistan or $4 gasoline or any of his other fiascoes or mistakes.

He took responsibility for nothing, said everything was peachy and everyone would be better off if Republicans in the Senate would only pass his gigantic spending bills.

The only real news he made was when he said that a small incursion into Ukraine by Russia might be OK and that the 2022 midterms “could easily be illegitimate” because Republicans were blocking federal election reforms.

Both gaffes were walked back by Biden’s keepers about 30 seconds after he left the podium.

Biden’s rare press conference was an embarrassment for him. It was too long, too sad and too boring for most people to watch. It would have been much better if a real journalist had asked Biden one of these questions:

Mr. President, nearly a million Americans have died from covid in two years. Do you still have confidence in the vaccine, Dr. Fauci and the CDC to get the virus under control?

Mr. President, you keep saying it’s a pandemic of the unvaxxed and that they are predominantly Republicans and Trump supporters. How can you say that when Blacks and Latinos are the least vaccinated ethnic groups?

This week the British government said because the threat of the omicron variant was rapidly diminishing it was ending all mask mandates and vaccine passports. Will America follow suit?

Mr. President, what do you think about the crime wave in the country and what will you ask the Department of Justice to do to help cities fight it?

Mr. President, inflation is soaring. High gas and food prices are hurting the poor and middle class. The supply chain is clogged up. Many grocery shelves are empty. Some say your policies are responsible. What do you say?

But at the end of the day, these and a dozen other hardball questions were never asked.

Even Doocy and Rosen played a game of softball with the president on Wednesday afternoon – T-ball, really. And like their liberal colleagues, they struck out.

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Copyright 2022 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to [email protected] and follow @reaganworld on Twitter.