Cagle World

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

The phonies who write the laws in Sacramento have no idea how hard it is to run a small business successfully. And they don’t care.

When they pay you not to work, you take a vacation.

That’s what’s going on here in what’s left of California.

The governor of this one-party state, Gavin Newsom, and his fellow Democrats controlling the legislature have tortured us for two years with severe lockdowns and mask mandates.

Now they’re working over-time to put our already crippled restaurant industry completely out of business by making it virtually impossible for them to hire the workers they need.

The state government is still paying people who were put out of work by the pandemic upwards of $450 a week in unemployment benefits, plus it’s picking up 100 percent of their rent and electric bills.

It’s no surprise that my friends in the restaurant business are so desperate for workers that some are offering signing bonuses of $1,500 to dishwashers and then paying them $20 an hour.

Where are their old dishwashers?

They’re vacationing in Mexico and they’re telling restaurant owners they’ll return in January when the state stops paying them unemployment money (which probably won’t happen because it’s an election year).

But wait, there’s even more stupidity coming from the lawmakers in Sacramento.

Remember AB5, the state law that Democrats passed a couple years ago at the behest of their union pals to basically outlaw gig workers in California?

The law was designed to kill off Uber and Lyft by forcing them and other companies to treat 1099 part-time contract workers as full-time employees with full benefits.

But AB5 was so crudely “crafted” that now it is preventing businesses from hiring the part-timers they need, whether it’s at the docks in Long Beach or the neighborhood pizza joint.

To make it even worse for smaller restaurants, starting next spring the state says any business with five or more employees that doesn’t already have a 401(k) or similar retirement plan for its employees will have to provide one through a state program called CalSavers.

I’ll spare you the legal details. But that means every restaurant larger than a Louie’s Pizza Parlor will be affected and if they don’t comply they’ll be fined as much as $500 per employee.

So it’s pretty clear that $50 pizzas aren’t just in our future, they’re almost here.

The cost of a pizza in one place I go has already jumped from $16 to $41 bucks because of what the owner now has to pay to hire and keep his workers.

What’s he going to do next year when he has to start contributing to his dishwasher’s retirement plan?

He’ll have to raise his prices, cut his staff or close. (Soon there’s going to be a lot of four-person pizza joints and hamburger stands in the ex-Golden State.)

The situation is so outrageous you want to cry for the owners of these mom-and-pop restaurants and family businesses.

They’re the ones who are mad now, but pretty soon it’ll be their patrons who hit the roof when they see what their meals cost.

And then what’s going to happen? Nothing, probably.

People here don’t get it. They’ll reelect the same Democrat politicians who have been ruining life in California.

Gov. Newsom and his government cronies must think every restaurant is a posh French Laundry, the $250-a-plate place in Napa Valley where they like to dine and drink.

But there’s only one French Laundry in California and there are thousands of little Italian restaurants and pizza joints.

Already about 200,000 people and many businesses have decided they’ve suffered enough and have left the state.

I guarantee many thousands more will follow them east, but not the struggling owners of your corner pizza parlor.

Unlike rich guys like Elon Musk of Tesla, they’re stuck here trying to make their livings while the clueless – and soulless – politicians in Sacramento continue to write bad laws that make it impossible.

–

Copyright 2021 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

I know in my heart that man is good, that what is right will always eventually triumph, and there is purpose and worth to each and every life.

Those words written by my father, which are inscribed in stone at his gravesite, could very well have been referring to Colin Powell and his life.

Powell was a great American who literally lived the American dream.

Born in Harlem, the son of a Jamaican immigrant, he rose to the greatest possible heights – a four-star general who became a statesman, a presidential advisor and secretary of state from 2001 to 2005.

Powell was a good man who did a lot of good things while in the service of his country.

He also did a lot of good for thousands of children through his organization America’s Promise Alliance, which works to improve the lives of young people and is rooted in the belief that every one of them “deserves to succeed and every adult is responsible for making that happen.”

When Powell died this week, many political people said many nice things about him – and some of them said some pretty rotten things, too.

Most of the criticism had to do with Powell’s “cheerleading” role in America’s invasion of Iraq.

He didn’t instigate or orchestrate the war in Iraq, and he wasn’t the only guy in the Bush II government who argued that we should send American men and women there to topple Saddam Hussein.

But his reputation was hurt forever after he warned in a speech to the United Nations that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he might use against us.

As everyone later found out, Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction didn’t exist and the claim that he was hiding them was based on faulty intelligence, which is the kind that our intel community has become really good at producing.

One of this week’s meanest criticisms of Colin Powell, not surprisingly, came from a fellow Republican, Donald Trump.

The former president – whom Powell called “a national disgrace and an international pariah” in 2016 and whom he did not support in 2020 – wrote this typically Trumpian “eulogy”:

“Wonderful to see Colin Powell, who made big mistakes on Iraq and famously, so-called weapons of mass destruction, be treated in death so beautifully by the Fake News Media. Hope that happens to me someday. He was a classic RINO (Republican In Name Only), if even that, always being the first to attack other Republicans. He made plenty of mistakes, but anyway, may he rest in peace!”

Trump simply can’t help being Trump. He can’t think beyond right now – or think beyond himself.

Instead of issuing a respectful presidential statement about the death of a great American, or just shutting up, he had to get his digs in and try to make himself the top story of the day.

Trump’s boorish statement was particularly upsetting to me because I knew what a nice man Colin Powell was.

I’ll never forget the last time I spoke to him, which was at my father’s funeral in Washington at the Capitol Rotunda.

When the ceremony was over and as my family was walking out, Powell made a point to come over to see us.

Literally running toward us and pushing his way through the crowd, he called out my name, put his hand on my shoulder and turned me around.

“I just want to tell you,” he said, “You know, your father loved you.”

Powell, who understood the dynamic of my family, loved my father. My father loved him – and once told me he would support him for president if that day came.

It’s easy to understand why I was so upset by what Trump and some other Republicans said this week about Colin Powell.

Donald Trump will never understand it till the day he dies. But if he had lived by the words that are carved into the stone at my father’s gravesite instead of his own, he might still be president.

–

Copyright 2021 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 until you leave the United States that you realize how angry Americans are.

Earlier this month my wife the travel agent and I took a cruise in the Mediterranean from Athens to Barcelona by way of stops on the Greek island of Santorini and in Sicily.

It was the first trip Colleen has been able to book since February 2020, right before the global pandemic lockdowns sank 80 percent of the cruise ship industry and put her out of a job.

For me, who got to tag along, it was the best kind of get-away vacation, mainly because I saw and heard virtually nothing about American politics.

I never turned on the TV in my room, so I was never up to date on the status of the Democrats’ zillion-dollar spending packages or the latest wave of illegal immigrants flooding our southern border.

The global pandemic and its precautions and annoyances traveled onboard with us, of course.

We had to be vaccinated and wear masks when we were not eating, drinking or sunning by the pool.

Plus, we were tested for COVID on our trip four times  before we got on the plane to Athens, twice on the cruise ship and before we flew home.

The strict COVID-19 policies were the small price we had to pay to escape Joe Biden’s “Angry America,” where it seems everyone is always griping and bitching about what’s going on – as I admit I do.

My vacation was a great way to hang out with friendly, happy people from around the world who weren’t angry all the time or never shut up about politics.

Best of all, it got me away from the TV and made me forget the political troubles in America.

Cruising the Mediterranean for seven days, I never saw Kamala Harris’ face. I never saw Joe Biden’s or Nancy Pelosi’s, either.

I was so out of America’s news loop, I had no idea that angry parents across the country who’ve been protesting the actions of their liberal school boards had been branded by Biden people as “domestic terrorists” worthy of the FBI’s attention.

As soon as we arrived back in the U.S. earlier this week, I saw that Americans were as angry as ever – and had some new good reasons to be.

The Biden administration was talking about using the IRS to monitor the bank accounts of every American who makes a transaction of $600 or more.

Talk about government snooping.

Nancy Pelosi said something about it being part of a campaign to make sure every taxpayer, including the rich, pays their fair share, but that’s a ridiculous excuse for a dangerous federal power grab.

Everything the Biden administration has come up with so far is just as idiotic as that idea:

Its perverse energy policies, its harmful immigration policies, its proposed tax hikes, its covid vaccine mandates for larger companies, its bloated spending bills, its inflationary monetary policies … And let’s not forget the fiasco in Kabul.

Liberal Democrats used to get their kicks by making fun of the values and life styles of Americans in Red States. Now they’re using the power of the federal government to torture them in new ways and make them mad.

While we were vacationing, Gov. Gavin Newsom got in on the act.

He signed a new California law banning the sale of gas-powered lawn mowers, leaf blowers and other small equipment. Those tools – used by thousands of landscape workers – will have to become battery-powered only.

It’s really sad to watch the damage Biden, Newsom and company are doing with their leftwing ideas, stupidity and arrogance.

The only thing that will save the country is when the voters they’ve made so angry return the House and Senate to Republican control in the 2022 mid-term elections.

Meanwhile, Collen and I are already thinking of going on another cruise tomorrow.

–

Copyright 2021 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

News that a federal judge had approved the unconditional release of John Hinckley Jr. next June set my phone to ringing furiously earlier this week.

Journalists naturally wanted to know what I thought about the decision to let Hinckley go free after serving nearly 40 years in a mental hospital for trying to assassinate my father on March 30, 1981.

Hinckley, now 66, has been living on his own outside the mental facility for several years without incident and doctors say he is no longer violent and shows no signs of mental illness.

But my sister Patty and many conservatives think approving his release was the wrong decision.

They believe Hinckley, who was found not guilty by reason of insanity, is still a threat to society or doesn’t deserve to be fully released.

I totally understand their emotional reactions, but none of them ever talked to Ronald Reagan about forgiving Hinckley like I did.

This week when people asked me about Hinckley, I told them I don’t have a problem with him becoming completely free because I’m going to side with Ronald Reagan.

My father publicly forgave Hinckley long ago.

He did it within days of being shot and before he went back to work at the White House on April 11. He even wanted to visit Hinkley, but the Secret Service wouldn’t allow it.

What was good enough for my father is good enough for me.

He was one of those rare people who didn’t just recite “The Lord’s Prayer,” he lived it.

When he asked God the Father to “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” he meant it.

I’m not going to be angry for the rest of my life at a mentally disturbed guy who tried to take my father’s life. My father didn’t hate Hinckley, why should I?

He was never a hateful or vengeful man – even after almost dying from an assassin’s bullet.

In private, and with his family, he was the same affable guy who quipped to Nancy “Honey, I forgot to duck” and said to the emergency room doctors “I hope you’re all Republicans.”

To prove what I say, here’s a loose retelling of the conversation I had with him six hours after he got off the operating table at George Washington University Hospital.

When my wife Colleen and I walked into his room, my dad looked up at me from his bed and said, “Mike, if you’re ever going to get shot, don’t be wearing a new suit.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, yesterday I was shot.”

“Yeah?”

“That blue suit I was wearing was a brand new suit. It was the first time I ever wore it. The last time I saw it they had cut it off me and it was in shreds in the corner of my hospital room. So that’s why I’m telling you, ‘If you’re ever going to be shot, don’t be wearing a new suit.’ ”

Then he said, “That young man who shot me – Hinckley.”

“Yes,” I said, “John Hinckley.”

“I understand his family is in the oil business.”

“Yep.”

“Do you think they have any money?”

“They’re in the oil business and they live in Denver. Of course they’ve got money. Why?”

“Well, do you think they’d ever buy me a new suit?”

That was what my father was really like. Unlike so many people in and out of politics today, he was never angry – even after being shot.

Humor was his way of putting people at ease, whether it was his worried son, his doctors or the entire country. His good-natured temperament – and the virtue of forgiving the trespasses of others – are what we miss and what we could all use a lot more of today.

–

Copyright 2021 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

Does anyone on the planet really still believe Joe Biden has the mental faculties to be president?

Anyone in Congress? Anyone in the media? Seriously.

It’s time for Democrats and Republicans to be honest. Skip the partisanship.

It’s not about how much you hate Donald Trump or Republicans or Fox News. It’s not about your opinion of VP Kamala Harris.

It’s not about the series of major domestic and foreign train wrecks Joe Biden has engineered in just eight months – the immigration crisis at the Southern border, the demolition of our energy independence, the botched, tragic and humiliating exit from Afghanistan.

It’s about a sitting American president who proves every day that he doesn’t have the mental chops – or the physical stamina – to be in charge of the most powerful and most important country on Earth.

Watching Biden stumble through the motions of being president makes you understand why his keepers hide him in his basement from the media.

Anyone who watched his mini-press conference in the Oval Office with Boris Johnson this week couldn’t help but be embarrassed for Biden and the country.

It was a pathetic sight to see Boris commandeer the “presser” and screw up the plans of Biden’s handlers – Biden’s controllers, really.

Boris took two questions – from foreign reporters, not American ones.

Then, when it became apparent that White House reporters were going to start peppering Biden with questions he hadn’t been prepped for, the president’s staff cut them off and started shrieking at the media to clear the room like it was on fire.

But this kind of clumsy, protect-the-demented-president strategy doesn’t make me mad at Old Joe. It makes me sad. I feel sorry for him.

It’s one thing for the White House staff and liberal media to pretend all is right with Joe Biden’s brain. They all voted for him in 2020 and will protect him as long as they can.

But where is first lady Jill Biden? Where are the president’s brothers and family members?

They know better than anyone how far Old Joe has declined, but they apparently care more about the perks of keeping a Biden in the Oval Office.

Who I’m most pissed off at is his wife, Jill Biden, who apparently wanted to be first lady more than she wanted to be a good “doctor” and do what’s best for her own husband.

Ditto for the selfishness of Biden’s political staff. Apparently, it’s more important for them to keep calling the shots in the White House than it is to do the right thing for a man who clearly has dementia.

I get it. I enjoyed being the son of a president. It was pretty cool – sometimes – to be protected 24/7 by Secret Service agents.

But my God, my father’s health was always a heck of a lot more important to me than taking trips in Air Force One or having access to the Oval Office.

The whole Biden dementia thing has become so horrific you can’t make fun of it anymore. It’s not funny, especially to me.

I watched my father suffer from Alzheimer’s Disease.

But when my dad was really showing the effects of dementia in the early 1990s, Nancy Reagan didn’t let him deteriorate in front of everyone.

Say what you will about her steely persona, but Nancy took her husband out of his office in Century City, brought him home and took proper – and loving — care of him for the rest of his life.

For the good of her husband – and the country – Jill Biden should do the same thing.

–

Copyright 2021 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

“A blow out.”

That’s what I said Monday on Newsmax when I was asked what I thought would happen in Tuesday’s gubernatorial recall election in California.

It didn’t surprise me that in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by 3-1 the “No” vote for recalling Democrat Gavin Newsom won more than 60 percent of the vote.

I had been predicting for months that Newsom, no matter how awful he has been, would easily hold on to his job.

It’s not that I had a crystal ball or I’m a political genius or anything.

It’s just that unlike a lot of conservatives, I can recognize election fraud in California when I see it.

The fraud I’m talking about has nothing to do with any dirty tricks pulled by the Democrats.

The fraud in this week’s recall election – just like the fraud in every recent and future election in California – was the Republican Party.

Republicans around the country still think they have a competitive party in the former “Golden State,” but that hasn’t been true for a long, long time.

Just 24 percent of the electorate are registered as Republicans, which is why Newsom won in a walk, Joe Biden crushed Donald Trump by 5 million votes and Democrats have controlled the state assembly for decades.

The last Republican governor Californians elected was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was at heart a Democrat and only won because he was a global celebrity.

Since Arnold’s era, the Republican Party here has had no leader, no message and no hope of ever electing a U.S. senator, governor or president.

The recall election just made things worse for the GOP in California – and around the country.

The Republican candidates to replace Newsom – a parade of losers and nobodies led by the great conservative L.A. talk show host and top vote-getter, Larry Elder – never had a chance.

What hallucinogenic drug made GOP bigwigs think they were going to win on Tuesday?

Because 2 million people in a state with 22 million registered voters supported a ballot measure to recall Newsom a year before a general election? I hope not.

Politically, during the recall election the Democrats went to school and got educated while the Republicans flunked out.

In the process of defending Newsom and smearing Elder the Democrats found a tactic that they can use nationally to keep control of Congress in 2022 – painting every Republican candidate as a Trump clone.

In every race next year Democrats will be tying their Republican opponents to the so-called “insurrection” of Jan. 6 in Washington and the Nov. 3 election Trump keeps saying was stolen from him.

The core Trump crowd may get all giddy about this, but the fact is, a Republican candidate will eventually get to a point where the only people who’ll vote for her are the Trump people.

If you look at Tuesday’s numbers, for example, the “yes” vote for recalling Newsom was about equal to the percentage of Californians who voted for Trump in 2020.

What the GOP did by putting their hopeless recall election together was to set up a launching pad for Newsom to run for president.

He can run for governor again next year and win, then leave Sacramento in 2026 in time to set up a campaign to run for president in 2028.

Before that happens, the Republican Party better wake up and find some fresh presidential horses for 2024.

After what they learned Tuesday night about playing the Trump Card, I can hear Democrats across America praying that Trump runs in 2024.

It’s not that President Trump didn’t do many good things for the country. It’s about how he went about doing them.

He’d almost certainly win the Republican nomination because of his base, but I predict he’d lose bigger in the general election in 2024 than he did in 2020 – to anyone.

As I tweeted this week, if the GOP wants to retake Congress next year and regain the White House in 2024, I hope they learned this week they have to become more like Ronald Reagan and less like Donald Trump.

–

Copyright 2021 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

As the country sadly marks the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks on Saturday, I’ve been thinking about where America was 20 years ago and where it’s headed.

In the weeks and months following the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans at the Twin Towers in New York City, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pa., Americans were united in a way it’s hard to imagine today.

Patriotic country songs were written about America and what it stands for – positive, uplifting songs – and everyone in New York City and Washington promised to rebuild the fallen towers even taller.

Politically, we were all singing from the same bipartisan hymnal: We had to strike back quickly and severely punish the Islamist terrorists who did us harm.

Every politician in Washington – even career non-interventionist Ron Paul – called for kicking al-Qaeda’s butt by destroying their training camps and “headquarters” in Afghanistan.

Our great military quickly did just that and, for good measure, dethroned the brutal Taliban government that was providing safe harbor for al-Qaeda.

Then for the next 20 years America pretty much went to Hell.

Today, after a series of botched Middle East wars, the deaths of thousands of our soldiers and the spending of trillions of our dollars, we’re a politically divisive, unhappy and humiliated country.

It’s bad enough that the Taliban are back in charge of Afghanistan, hunting down and killing their enemies, prohibiting girls from going to school and forcing women to look and act like it’s the 7th century.

But four of Afghanistan’s top leaders are terrorists we once held at Guantanamo.

The last 20 years have been one big American foreign policy blunder after another.

In Afghanistan we wasted lives and money on a tribal, backward, corrupt, ungovernable and historically unconquerable country that our leaders in Washington apparently thought we could turn into Switzerland.

Between them, Bush II and Obama and their third-string generals mismanaged the war for 16 years, kicking the Afghanistan war tin can down the road, and leaving it for first Trump and then Biden to figure out how to end it.

Biden, not surprisingly, did the worst possible job in the shortest time, screwing up the American evacuation of Afghanistan in every way imaginable.

President Biden deserves all the criticism he’s gotten – and much more. But the Afghanistan debacle is not entirely his fault.

It’s what happens when you don’t fight a war to win – or when you fight and win a war but then don’t know when it’s time to get out.

In case you haven’t noticed, with the exception of maybe Grenada, the last war America actually won was World War II.

We won it because FDR and his generals knew we had to totally crush Germany and Japan and we did it unconditionally.

If you’re going to take your country to war, if you’re going to risk your country’s precious blood and treasure, you better crush your enemy.

We didn’t crush the Taliban.

And we didn’t win in Afghanistan because the war there became a political issue, not a military one, and our politicians of both major parties were more interested in winning elections.

So while America mourns 9/11 this weekend, the Taliban are celebrating it. While we are mourning our 20-year failure in Afghanistan, the Taliban are having a victory party.

I have no idea what the surrenderer-in-chief is going to say to make the families of 3,000 dead Americans feel better when he visits the three 9/11 memorial sites on Saturday.

He’ll be lucky if some families of the 9/11 victims don’t turn their backs on him.

He might even hear an echo of what thousands of America’s young people were chanting at a handful of sold-out (and unmasked) college football games last weekend.

Their three-word chant – which had the initials “FJB” – is vulgar and disrespectful. But it’s about the only thing recently that has given me hope for the future of America.

–

Copyright 2021 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

Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York got a special Emmy last year for his nauseating daily pandemic press conferences.

So why shouldn’t President Biden win something this year from his Hollywood supporters for his series of wildly untrue Afghanistan speeches about the evacuation of Kabul?

How about something like a special Oscar for “Best Performance by a Confused American President in a Reality TV Series”?

Gov. Cuomo and his sickening ego had to step down, and his phony politically inspired award was revoked by the Emmy people because of the credible groping accusations by nearly a dozen young women who worked for him.

But unfortunately for our future, Biden continues to play the lead role in the Democrat Party’s long-running production of “The Decline and Fall of America.”

He’ll be reading his scripts from a teleprompter, refusing to take tough questions from journalists and pretending he truly believes the lies he’s saying for as long as his guardians think it’s safe to let him out of his basement.

Biden and his brain created a lot of trouble for his floundering administration and his nervous party earlier this week by declaring on TV that the evacuation of Kabul had been a spectacular success.

Unfortunately, however, the whole world, which had been watching in real time, had seen that the “Kabul Airlift” was a tragic screwup, and everyone but Jill and Hunter Biden could see that the Big Guy was either demented or lying, or both.

Everyone saw how Biden’s evacuation fiasco ended up killing 13 U.S. soldiers, stranding an unknown number of Americans and our Afghan allies and gifting the Taliban with tens of billions worth of U.S. military equipment to use or sell.

If the military had not sent in airborne troops to protect the Kabul airport during the airlift, there’s no telling how much worse Biden’s terrible plan would have been.

It was Biden’s own wrongheaded military decisions as commander in chief and his diplomatic deals with the Taliban that turned our long-overdue exit from Afghanistan into a bloody, humiliating and historic catastrophe.

According to Biden’s twisted logic, America is supposed to be safer from terrorists now that the Taliban is in charge of Afghanistan.

Biden congratulating himself for “ending our forever war” and praising himself and his generals for the “successful” exit from Kabul is a sad joke.

It’s like the captain of the Titanic boasting that he got most of the lifeboats in the water without admitting it was his fault that his ship rammed into the iceberg in the first place.

The scariest thing about President Biden, though, is that no matter how dumb, incompetent or addled he is, it’s highly probable that his understudy, the still missing Kamala Harris, would be even worse.

The Democrat Party bosses, who obviously know this is true, have kept her so muzzled and out of sight of the media that I’ve heard reports her laughing face is starting to show up on America’s milk cartons.

But seriously, there’s nothing funny about what’s happened to Biden’s brain. It’s sad to watch it decline in public.

What Old Joe said about the success of the Kabul Airlift was so untrue, and so bonkers, even the Washington Post and most of the faithful Biden press choir (except diehards like MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell) called him out on it.

Biden and his brain have become a serious problem for Democrats, who are terrified of being crushed in next year’s midterms and losing control of Congress.

I don’t want to help the Democrats hold on to their power for one more second, but a smart way to keep the president from saying things that hurt their chances next fall would be to listen to my good friend David Webb, the conservative talk show guy.

David’s friendly advice to our poor president is, “Just turn the teleprompter around and let us read what you’re trying to say.”

–

Copyright 2021 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

“Terror in Kabul.”

That’s what CNN branded its coverage of the two powerful suicide bombs that exploded in the sea of U.S. soldiers and Afghani civilians surrounding the Kabul airport.

As of late Thursday, 12 U.S. Marines and a Navy medic were dead and at least 15 other American military were wounded by suicide bombers belonging to the splinter terrorist group ISIS-K, who are rivals and sworn enemies of the Taliban.

The explosions outside the airport gates, which everyone knew were inevitable, also killed more than 60 Afghans and wounded at least 140 more.

The death toll from those bombs is sure to rise – and more bombings are expected.

Meanwhile, about 5,200 U.S. soldiers remain inside the airport’s perimeter as the chaotic and botched “Biden Airlift” continues to evacuate Americans, other foreigners and terrified Afghans.

No one – especially President Biden — knows what will happen next, or if the humiliating and bungled evacuation will meet next Tuesday’s promised deadline.

It took Biden about eight hours before he addressed the country about the bombings.

Somber, serious and sad, he took responsibility – kind of – for the fiasco that has unfolded in Kabul in the last two weeks.

He said he intended to meet the Aug. 31 deadline for completing the evacuation of all U.S. forces.

And he warned the ISIS-K terrorists who carried out the attacks that “We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down.”

Politically, President Biden and his party own the disaster in Kabul and the 13 American deaths.

So far he and his friends in the media have not blamed President Trump, but we know they probably will.

Eight months after Trump left office, and they still have not been cured of their Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Biden likes to claim, as he hinted at today, that he inherited the problem of the Afghanistan pull-out from the deal Trump made with the Taliban early in 2020.

But Biden and his generals had eight months to plan how to safely leave Afghanistan without risking American lives and without leaving behind the thousands of Afghans who worked with us.

Yet because he hates Trump so much, Biden immediately threw away the Trump administration’s logical evacuation plan and instead removed U.S. troops first, Americans and other civilians second and left about $80 billion in military gear behind.

No one ever said getting America out of Afghanistan after two decades was going to be easy or bloodless.

But the way the Biden administration has bungled everything in Kabul makes the Bay of Pigs look like a smoothly run operation.

The president likes to blame his biggest problems on what Trump did, but he’s the one who’s responsible for Kabul and for wrecking several important parts of our country in just eight months.

He inherited a mostly closed Southern border with hundreds of miles of new walls – and he immediately opened it up to millions of illegal immigrants.

He inherited a booming energy sector – and he immediately hobbled it by shutting down the Keystone pipeline and issuing anti-fracking regulations on federal lands.

Now, as gasoline prices are soaring, he’s begging our so-called friends in Saudi Arabia to pump more oil.

Biden also inherited an economy that was rebounding nicely from the COVID lockdowns – and immediately began wrecking it with higher taxes, gigantic spending policies and higher inflation.

The president likes to blame Trump for everything that has gone wrong under his watch – even vaccine hesitancy.

But when you are pointing a finger at Trump for everything that’s wrong, there are three fingers pointing back at you and you’re not accepting responsibility.

Ultimately, however, who’s really at fault for what happened today?

Us.

Because as we’re pointing our fingers at Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and his people for the harm they’re doing to the country and for bringing us the catastrophe in Afghanistan, three fingers are pointing back at us, the American people, who elected these fools.

–

Copyright 2021 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

So what else could President Biden possibly screw up?

Our commander in chief and his woke generals have blown the evacuation of Kabul so badly that even CNN and MSNBC have had to cover it.

For the last month, Biden assured us that when our military left Kabul it wasn’t going to be a humiliation like Saigon in 1975.

It sure wasn’t. It was much worse – and it’s far from over.

We’re just starting to witness the deadly costs of the Biden administration’s back-ass-wards evacuation of Afghanistan’s capital.

Safely evacuating tens of thousands of American citizens and Afghans who risked their lives to help us for 20 years from a city surrounded by the enemy is not rocket science, it’s just Military Science 101.

First, while you hold on to your soldiers and air power for protection, you get all the civilians out – women and children first.

Next you get your fancy military equipment out – untold billions worth of it – so, um, your enemy doesn’t get to use it.

Then, after a look around to make sure no one is left behind, you pull your soldiers out – and say goodbye to America’s longest war.

But when it came time to leave Afghanistan, Joe Biden and his generals – most of whom apparently were asleep at their big desks in D.C. – pulled the soldiers out first and the civilians out second.

America’s fully televised screw-up in Kabul will go down in history as a metaphor for the foolish way we fought and lost the war in Afghanistan.

“Kaos in Kabul,” or however CNN will brand it, will also be remembered as the event that showed the whole world what many of us already knew – that Joe Biden is mentally unfit to be president and his entire administration is as incompetent as he is.

Biden’s public response to the chaos in Kabul this week was pathetic.

After the world watched several days of unforgettable images from Kabul’s airport, he finally emerged from his vacation hideaway at Camp David to speak on TV to the American people.

He read a 19-minute speech trying to explain why leaving Afghanistan was the right thing to do and blaming Afghanistan’s leaders and army for the crisis at Kabul’s airport and the quick takeover of the country by the Taliban.

Then he turned and shuffled off backstage without answering a single question.

Can you imagine any other president doing that? And then hopping on Marine One and being whisked back to his vacation at Camp David?

“Excuse me, I’ve got to get back. I was lining up a long putt on the 12th green.”

Biden’s speech and his later interview with ABC’s veteran left-handed softball pitcher, George Stephanopoulos, were further proof of his growing dementia and his obsession with undoing Trump’s successful policies.

Anti-Trump energy policy, anti-Trump immigration policy, anti-Trump tax cuts, anti-Trump Iranian deal – whatever Trump did right, Biden quickly un-did in his first eight months.

Now it’s Afghanistan.

Biden, naturally, blames the Kabul fiasco on Trump and his deal with the Taliban, but even the Trump-deranged liberal media aren’t buying it – not yet, anyway.

After all, it was Biden’s inept generals who pulled out of Bagram Air Base, ended U.S. air support and left behind the modern weaponry for the Taliban goat herders to play with.

Trump’s evacuation plan for the American military in Kabul might not have gone perfectly. We’ll never know.

But I bet it wouldn’t have left thousands of Americans stranded in a brutal nightmare, plus it included Trump’s threat to the Taliban leaders to behave themselves in the future, or else.

I’m really angry at the killings that Biden’s blunders are going to cause in Afghanistan and what his botched exit from Kabul has done to America’s global reputation.

Who’s going to fear or trust us now with him in the Oval Office?

What do you think Iran’s mullahs and China’s Communist Party are thinking they can get away with?

And how would you like to be the president of Taiwan and know your country’s survival depends on the faulty judgment and diminished mind of Joe Biden.

–

Copyright 2021 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.