Cagle World

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

Everyone should be outraged at Democrats and Republicans for the damage they’ve done to the country during the last year.

But right now, as the country is split into two angry red and blue camps, everyone should be even madder at the way President Trump and President-elect Joe Biden have been behaving.

As the two leaders of a nation of 331 million, they are supposed to be leading. But instead they are still fighting like little kids in a schoolyard.

The inauguration isn’t until Wednesday. But Trump and Biden still have time to do something important for the good of the country.

President Trump can do what Ronald Reagan did during his greatest political crisis, Iran-Contra.

My father was spending so much time defending himself over what he did or did not do in that scandal that he couldn’t get anything else done. He was even threatened with impeachment.

So what he finally did was suck it up, give an address to the country and accept responsibility. Basically, he said, “It happened on my watch. I’m guilty and I’m sorry.”

Then he went back to work on ending the Cold War.

Trump and Biden should go before the country – together, from the White House – to deliver their dueling mea culpas.

President Trump should say something like, “The violent and shameful attack on the U.S. Capitol last week by my supporters was abhorrent.

“It was not what I wanted or intended to incite, but I’m the president. I’m responsible. I should have done better and I’m deeply sorry for what happened.”

Meanwhile, Joe Biden should say something like this to the whole country:

“You know what, I’m sorry for the names I’ve called the president and his supporters, who are not deplorables or white supremacists, but good Americans.”

Biden should also say something statesmanlike, such as, “I hope Nancy Pelosi and my fellow Democrats in Congress will shut down their attempt to impeach President Trump again.

“Instead of seeking partisan political vengeance, they should concentrate on working with Republicans to defeat the COVID-19 pandemic, get the economy back to where it was at the end of 2019 and heal the country’s deep political wounds.”

Trump and Biden still have time to do some symbolic but important things to cool the country’s political fever and make this year’s transition of presidential power kinder, gentler and in keeping with our traditions.

President Trump needs to bury his many personal and political hatchets, swallow his ego and invite the incoming president and his wife to the White House, as previous presidents have done.

Jimmy Carter thought my dad cheated to win in 1980. But he and his first lady still asked him and Nancy to the White House for coffee and a tour. And the Reagans came.

For his part, president-elect Biden should take the high road and publicly invite Trump to the inauguration – and Trump should accept.

Cynics will say doing these things would be a bunch of cheap political publicity stunts.

They’ll say that no matter how much pretend kissy-face the Bidens and Trumps engage in, the country’s politics and culture will remain hopelessly split into two warring tribes that hate each other.

Four years of Nancy Pelosi’s hatred of Trump and the hatred of Trump’s 75 million voters for Pelosi and her gang will not evaporate because of a few scenes of Trump and Biden shaking hands and smiling at each other.

That’s true. But for any healing to occur, even a little bit, the guys at the top have to be the first to suck it up and show the rest of us the way.

It’s time to start thinking about what we can do to bring the country together.

As my dad once said to Tip O’Neill, “You know we’re a great country with great people. Together we can make it better for all. Apart we can’t make it better for anybody.”

–
Copyright 2021 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.
Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

Wednesday was a sad day for America.

We watched the mob violence and lawlessness in Washington with a tear in our eye.

We saw images of the Capitol stormed by hundreds of yahoos who fought with police, broke windows and forced the evacuation of a session of the U.S. Congress. At least four died in the chaos.

Wednesday was also a very sad day for conservatives, the Republican Party and tens of millions of American citizens who voted to reelect President Trump for all the right reasons.

But it was a really terrible day for Donald Trump.

The shocking events in Washington on Wednesday – which he provoked with his stubborn insistence he had been robbed by the systemic cheating of Democrats – have soiled his legacy forever.

And please, before I continue, I don’t want you Trump supporters out there to tweet at me with any of that “What about the violent BLM and Antifa riots in our cities all summer?” crap.

Those destructive and deadly riots by leftists were wrong and so was Wednesday’s riot by Trump people in D.C.

It’s not brain surgery.

Riots, mob violence and destroying private property is never right, even though many Democrats and the hypocritical liberal media think they’re justified if they’re done in the name of “progressive causes” or benefit them politically.

Trump could have prevented Wednesday’s national embarrassment and saved Republicans from disaster, but his ego and his narcissism got the better of him.

Like Hillary Clinton, who is still blaming her embarrassing defeat in 2016 on the Russians, Trump has proved for nine weeks that he doesn’t know how to lose.

He could have taken the high road and left office with a phenomenal legacy – and a solid conservative one.

Despite the way the dishonest liberal media ignored or dismissed his record of accomplishments for four years, he could have been remembered by history for a lot of good things.

For getting the COVID-19 vaccine out so quickly.

For creating a booming economy, cutting taxes, raising workers’ wages and turning America into an energy superpower.

Or how about for important things like keeping America out of any new foreign wars, shrinking our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and greatly increasing the country’s overall military strength?

But after Wednesday no one cares much about all those great successes and many others he never tired of boasting about.

It a shame. It could have been much different for the president.

He’s still a hero to millions of Flyover Americans and still a major political player. But the country he wanted to make great again is going to pay the ultimate price for his character flaws.

With the federal government virtually turned into a one-party socialist state, the Biden-Schumer-Pelosi troika will quickly flush away or turn around all the good things Trump did.

Unfortunately, it will be years before conservatives and the Republican Party can recover from the damage Trump has wrought just since Nov. 3.

We conservatives have been down and out before. The year 1976 comes to mind. But we bounced back with the right leadership and we can do it this time, too.

We have to regroup. We need to look forward, to find young new leaders to take us into the political future Trump has made for us.

Maybe now is a good time to go back and listen to some of my father’s great speeches, or his radio addresses from the late 1970s, and remember what he meant when he said he envisioned America as “a shining city on the hill.”

In the meantime, I ask all conservatives and Trump supporters – all 74,222,958 of you – to please stop thinking of Donald Trump as the equal of Ronald Reagan.

There is nothing my father and Donald Trump had in common and there never will be.

Ronald Reagan’s legacy was tearing down the Berlin Wall. Donald Trump’s legacy is going to be tearing down the Capitol. So sad.

–

Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

What a difference a terrible year makes.

Last year at this time, my wife, Colleen the travel agent, and I were getting ready to take 40 of her clients on a 15-day cruise out of Dubai to India and back.

This year, thanks to the COVID-19 virus and the strict lockdowns imposed to fight it, the world’s travel industry barely exists and Colleen and I will be spending January under house arrest.

Unfortunately, house arrest has become the new normal for 40 million Californians.

We’ve been locked down, masked up and ordered to stay in our basements for so long by Gov. Gavin Newsom that many of us have forgotten what freedom feels like or what it’s like to simply eat in a restaurant.

The news is filled with stories of people and businesses leaving this state in droves because it has become so unlivable in so many ways.

Californians who can afford it are moving to red states like Arizona, Texas and Florida, where taxes are lower, homes are cheaper and governors are not nannies and wannabe dictators.

Life in Los Angeles is especially unpleasant, which is why I’ve rented an escape house for my family two hours away in the sleepy Santa Ynez Valley.

Most of L.A’s 10 million people are not so lucky.

They’re stuck living 24/7 in a locked down city with tens of thousands of homeless people and drug addicts living under overpasses and on the sidewalks.

But many well-to-do citizens are buying second homes outside the city in places like Palm Springs, Desert Springs and up here in the Santa Ynez Valley.

My friends here in Santa Ynez tell me the local real estate market is on fire. Houses sell in a day. One real estate guy predicts home prices will double in two years.

Ditto for homes in Palm Springs and other places close enough to L.A. for people to commute to but far enough away to escape the slow-motion destruction of a great city.

Life has gotten so depressing in L.A. that a friend of mine flew five hours to Miami just so he could eat dinner inside a restaurant.

That’s the kind of madness that 2020 has brought us.

Some folks are saying that the COVID-19 vaccines will let people go back to normal in 2021.

But based on what our future pessimist-in-chief Joe Biden has been saying, I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Listening to his dark speeches about the sad state of the union, how it’s only going to get worse and what dumb things he plans to do about it is like listening to Jimmy Carter squared.

Carter had his problems in the late 1970s with a high Misery Index, which was a way to gauge the economic conditions of the average American based on the inflation rate plus the unemployment rate.

But the future Biden is talking about will be Total Misery for all Americans.

He’s saying we won’t get the vaccines to enough people, and even if we do, we’re still going to be living in a masked and locked down country that resembles 2020 California, not 2019 California.

Pessimism like that from a U.S. president is not normal – or healthy for the country.

You may hate President Trump for a lot of reasons, but you can never fault him for not being optimistic and upbeat.

Other presidents – most recently my father, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama – looked on the bright and hopeful side of things.

Biden is the opposite. He looks on the dark side, the Jimmy Carter side.

He and the liberal media sing the same grim tune – that things are bad and they’re going to be bad in the future, maybe forever.

On Jan. 20 we’re going to lose the only guy in Washington who was consistently optimistic in 2020, one of the most horrible years in our history.

I’m an optimist and I used to think 2021 couldn’t be any worse than 2020.

But with Biden and his crew about to take charge of our lives, now I’m not so sure.

–
Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.
Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Editor’s note: Michael Reagan is on vacation this week. He will return next week with a new column.

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

Christmas in California has effectively been cancelled by Emperor Gavin Newsom.

And now it looks like here in L.A. we’re going to be locked in our basements by the local yahoos in charge until February.

But the continuing destruction of normal social and economic life in California in the name of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic is old news.

Instead, let’s talk about the yahoos in Washington who are continuing to screw up the whole country.

The federal yahoos, it’s no surprise, are the slippery politicians in Congress.

Mostly Democrats but also some Republicans, for a decade they haven’t had the decency or courage to pass an annual appropriations bill to pay for the bloated and wasteful federal government they’ve built.

By midnight Friday these yahoos have to pass another one of their short-term continuing resolutions to avoid a government shutdown.

It’ll be nothing special. For fiscal year 2021 – which began Oct. 1 – continuing resolutions have already been needed twice.

Last week Congress passed a continuing resolution that lasted only a week. If they sign a third “CR” Friday at midnight, it’ll probably last as little as two days.

It’s all pretty embarrassing, but continuing resolutions and midnight voting deadlines are how the annual federal budgeting process works these days in the world’s richest nation.

The way it’s supposed to work, by law, is the way it worked until Sen. Harry Reid and the Obama administration changed it in 2010 for partisan reasons.

The process should be for Congress to pass 12 specific spending bills to pay for government things like transportation, the military, etc., by Sept. 30 every fiscal year.

But for ten years our public servants in Congress have not been able to get their act together to pass the 12 appropriations bills.

Instead, what they’ve done is combine several of the spending bills into gigantic omnibus bills that are packed with all kinds of goodies to reward donors and special interests or to fund federally funded local boondoggles that otherwise would never have the votes to pass.

It’s been a sweet racket for these yahoos.

They’ve found out that if they don’t pass the omnibus bills by Sept. 30 like they’re supposed to they can use a continuing resolution and the threat of a government shutdown to scare the public and get their crappy stuff passed unnoticed in huge spending bills.

The sad thing is these yahoos have been playing this dirty game in Washington for a long time, but no one ever holds them accountable and the media never tell the story.

Both parties do it. Both are to blame. It’s mostly Democrats who engage it, but it’s Republicans that don’t say anything. They all play along.

The same yahoos in Washington who’ll be passing the latest continuing resolution late Friday night are also at this moment dragging out the passage of a COVID-19 stimulus bill to the last possible minute.

It looks like they’ll be wheeling and dealing through the weekend to pass the much needed $900 billion bill.

The COVID-19 stimulus bill would have been passed several months ago but the Democrats and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi used it as a political weapon.

They didn’t want Donald Trump’s re-election campaign to benefit from a second stimulus package.

Plus, imitating the way they operate on annual appropriations bills, they took advantage of a national crisis and tried to load up the stimulus bill with hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of presents for their pet special interests and to bail out badly run Democrat cities and bankrupt states like Illinois.

No American should shed a tear for any member of Congress this weekend, even if they have to work 24/7 on the stimulus bill and eat vending machine food from now until New Year’s.

They haven’t missed a paycheck all year. They’re going to make sure they have a merry Christmas. But they’ve basically said “Bah humbug” to the rest of us.

–

Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

I thought I was going to escape the madness of the L.A. Lockdown.

I thought if I rented a small weekend getaway house in a rural part of the state two hours north, my family and I could eat outdoors at a restaurant again, or at least leave our basement without a note from our tyrannical governor.

But I thought wrong.

I didn’t count on Gavin Newsom’s latest lockdown edict.

Two weeks ago life in empty and beautiful Santa Ynez Valley – where my father had his ranch and I’ve been visiting since 1974 – was about as normal and civilized as you could hope for these days.

Restaurants were open for outside dining. Wineries were open.

The local residents – about 20,000 all told – dutifully wore their masks, washed their hands and didn’t have to work very hard to practice safe social distancing.

As an extra bonus, unlike LA, there weren’t tens of thousands of homeless people and drug addicts living in tents on the sidewalks of Solvang, Los Olivos or Santa Ynez.

But then Newsom and his health experts suddenly decided to change the rules and make the Santa Ynez Valley a part of the Southern California lockdown region.

It didn’t matter that the rural valley has hardly been touched by the coronavirus.

Since March there have been 276 cases of COVID-19 in the valley and only seven people have died. In crowded L.A. County, where 10 million live, the death toll is nearing 8,000.

But thanks to the “scientific reasoning” of Emperor Newsom, the Santa Ynez Valley was ordered to do what L.A. had to do.

Restaurants were told to close except for take-out business. Along with the valley’s restaurant employees, hair-cutters and spa workers were thrown out of work.

Welcome to L.A., Santa Ynez Valley, whether you like it or not – and believe me, you won’t.

In Los Angeles I live around the corner from the Pineapple Hill Grill & Saloon, the restaurant whose owner Angela Marsden posted a powerful video about the devastating impact the lockdown was having on her business and her entire industry.

Marsden’s place was closed down with two days’ notice right before Thanksgiving when outdoor dining was outlawed by the state.

As she showed in her emotional video, which went viral, Marsden – who had taken an $80,000 loan to meet the city’s outdoor dining rules – got the shaft from the city.

At the same time she was forced to close, an NBC production company had been given a permit by the city to erect a huge outdoor catering facility for 200 people directly across the street.

A GoFundMe page has raised nearly $200,000 for Marsden, which I hope will help her survive.

But what about her employees? All of L.A. is under a stay-at-home order will be locked down until Dec. 28 – at least.

So where are the tens of thousands of out-of-work restaurant employees in L.A. going to get help?

We know Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti won’t do anything. They’ve proved over and over they don’t care about the little guys who are the chief victims of their severe, unpredictable and arbitrary public health decrees and lockdown policies.

My wife Colleen and I have decided to do our small part to help L.A.’s crushed restaurant industry by helping an unemployed server at our favorite family-style restaurant.

She’s a part-time actress, too, so she’s not working anywhere now, so we’re going to “adopt” her for the Christmas holidays.

We’re going to pay her rent, pay her bills, get her a Christmas tree – whatever helps.

We challenge everyone in L.A. who still has a job and a heart to adopt your favorite server and do what you can to help them.

Meanwhile, at this point, there’s only one way to reopen L.A., the Santa Ynez Valley and the rest of the state.

It’s for everyone who works in restaurants, bars, entertainment venues, gyms and personal care businesses to unite, safely open up their doors on the same day, flip the bird to the governor and see what happens.

–
Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.
Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

The state of California has felt like a minimum-security prison for eight months.

In the name of fighting the pandemic and preventing our hospitals from being overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients, the politicians and public health experts have told us “non-essential” Americans where we could go, where we could eat and where and how we could gather with our friends, strangers or fellow worshippers.

They’ve slowly managed to outlaw any social activity and fun that brings ordinary people happiness.

And now, thanks to Mayor Eric Garcetti and something called the “L.A. County Public Health Temporary Targeted Safer at Home Health Order,” everyday life in Los Angeles has become even more miserable and less free.

Reacting to the rising COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths in Los Angeles, this week Garcetti laid down a 14-page list of “guidelines” that a dictator of a banana republic could envy.

Telling us we had to “hunker down,” he kept the city’s outdoor mask mandate in place and issued a strict new stay-in-your-basement order.

From now until almost Christmas, the mayor decreed, public and private gatherings of people from more than one household are prohibited.

Unless you are on your way to doing something essential, like going to work at a grocery store, gas station or health care facility, even walking is prohibited.

So is driving a car or riding a bike, motorcycle or scooter. So is traveling on a public bus. Violators can be fined or put in jail, or both.

Religious services are OK – outside only – and the homeless get exemptions, but not gyms.

By some miracle, golfing at one of the city’s ten public courses is still permitted – if you follow the insane new rule.

If you want to play at a city course you have to cancel all existing reservations, re-book tee times and prove that your group includes only members of the same household.

Who wrote that guideline? Whoever it was, I guarantee he or she is no golfer.

Golf is the last activity that needs to be subjected to the rules of public health bureaucrats.

It’s outside. In the sun. Plus, it’s perfectly safe for social distancing.

Everyone has their own golf cart. You can leave the flag stick in so no one touches it. And they already make you wear a mask – while playing.

The public health people who write dumb guidelines like these supposedly follow the science, but they don’t even have any data to prove that restaurants are dangerous virus spreaders.

Do you think they have any data on the risks of playing golf? Of course they don’t.

They just issue their idiotic and arbitrary rules about indoor dining, schools and golfing because they’re bureaucrats who’ve been given the power to write them. We’re lucky they didn’t mandate that golfers prove they’ve had the vaccine before they teed off.

The good news, I guess, is that Los Angeles’ same-household rule applies only to city owned-and-operated golf courses.

If you want to play with your buddies, business clients or strangers, you can still go to a country club. Of course, you have to have a spare $100,000 to pay for a membership.

So, as usual, in their all-out war on the virus the politicians and their virus experts have again managed to screw the little guy – the average duffer who plays the public courses.

It’s just like when their unscientific rules put restaurants out of business. It’s not just the owner who gets hurt, it’s also dozens of wait staff, cooks and parking lot guys.

I realize COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths are going up, but lockdowns, social distancing and masks don’t seem to be having much success here or anywhere else in the world.

I know a vaccine is coming.

But I’m beginning to think they could lock the whole country down for a year and three months after they let us out of our basements we’d be back in the same condition. Because no matter what we do, it’s a virus and it’s going to behave like one.

–

Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.

Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Editor’s note: Michael Reagan is on vacation this week. He will return with a new column on Friday, Dec. 4

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

Californians have suffered greatly in our crazy war against the China virus.

Our economy is a wreck. Restaurants are dying off by the hundreds. Schools are half closed. Disneyland is a ghost town.

And now things here have gotten worse.

Because cases of new positive infections and hospitalizations have jumped lately, Gov. Gavin Newsom has pulled the “emergency brake” on reopening the state’s economy, imposed a new limited “Stay-At-Home Order” through Dec. 21 and issued a bunch of idiotic rules to ruin Thanksgiving and Christmas for 40 million people.

Newsom and his public health experts call their edicts “small gatherings guidance,” but we know it’s really “California’s Thanksgiving Mandate.”

Like the Thanksgiving rules issued in other Blue states, they are an insane blend of bureaucratic stupidity and unscientific tyranny.

Here are some of them:

• Gatherings cannot have people from more than three households.
• Gatherings should only be two hours or less.
• All gatherings must be held outside. People can go inside to use the bathroom.
• Gatherings “may occur in outdoor spaces that are covered by umbrellas, canopies, awnings, roofs, and other shade structures provided that at least three sides of the space (or 75 percent) are open to the outdoors.”
• Seating must provide at least 6 feet of distance (in all directions – front-to-back and side-to-side) between different households.
• Keep physical distance from others and practice hand hygiene.
• “Singing, chanting, and shouting are strongly discouraged.”
• The host should collect names and contact information of attendees for contact tracing.

Of course, it’s a given that everyone at your family gathering should be wearing a mask, indoors and outdoors, at all times, including between bites of turkey and sips of wine.

Please excuse me, but I don’t get the science behind these “guidelines.”

To stop the spread of the coronavirus, I’m told by the public health experts that I can’t eat a turkey dinner in my own home with my family or friends unless I follow their nutty rules.

But it’s OK to get on a plane at LAX with 200 other people I don’t know and fly five hours to New York City?

And it’s OK to protest or celebrate with thousands of people in the streets, or eat at a high-end restaurant in Napa Valley with a dozen maskless friends, but you shouldn’t have Grandma over for Thanksgiving because you might kill her?

Another question: If masks are so effective, why are so many additional people becoming infected with the virus?

Social distancing and hand-washing have become ingrained in the culture and something like 85 percent of Americans are said to faithfully wear masks.

So does that mean that the 15 percent who don’t wear masks are the ones who are catching the virus? Or do the cloth masks that most people wear really not do the job of protecting us, as a recent study found?

I don’t know the answers, but the bottom line is, people are doing more today than ever to protect themselves from the virus, yet more people are catching it.

What all this tells me is that mask or no mask, social distance or no social distance, plastic shielding or no plastic shielding, the virus is in the driver’s seat. It’s acting like a virus.

It does what it wants to do when it wants to do it, and the only sure way to stop it is with a COVID-19 vaccine, which, thanks to President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, is just around the corner.

Meanwhile, while suffer another statewide lockdown and wonder if Christmas and New Year’s will be outlawed altogether, I hope Newsom won’t do to us what his fellow emperor in Oregon threatens to do to her state’s Thanksgiving scofflaws.

There, if they catch you with too many people in your home eating turkey and mashed potatoes next Thursday, they’ll arrest you. Then they’ll put you in jail – which is a real safe place to be, eh?

Have a happy Thanksgiving, America – if you dare.

–

Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.
Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at [email protected].

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

Our politicians and leaders still don’t get it.

They don’t seem to understand – or care – that China has already declared World War III.

The Communist Party thugs who rule China with a heavy hand didn’t have to invade Japan or drop an A-bomb on anybody.

They just had to drop a deadly virus on the world.

The coronavirus, COVID-19, the China Virus – it doesn’t matter what you call it.

We know it came from Wuhan, China. In my opinion, it was put out into the world deliberately, not by accident.

In any case, the China pandemic has killed more than a million people around the globe and more than 240,000 Americans.

Efforts by governments to defeat it with strict lockdowns have destroyed the economies and social life of dozens of countries, closed schools and thrown tens of millions of people out of work.

In the United States, power-mad politicians like Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, Gov. Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania and Gov. Andrew Cuomo have used the fight against COVID-19 as an excuse to control the lives of their citizens.

Now, because cases of new COVID-19 infections (but not deaths or hospitalizations) have been spiking, Emperors Cuomo and Newsom are telling us idiotic things like we can’t have more than three families come to our house for Thanksgiving dinner.

And that we should eat outside, not sing or talk too loudly and wear our masks between bites of turkey.

Meanwhile, president-elect Joe Biden and the authoritarian disease experts advising him are threatening us with a national mask mandate and a six-week national lockdown next year.

The China Virus – more correctly, the strict, arbitrary and often un-scientific war waged against it by power-mad Democrat politicians and their public health czars – has already done us serious damage.

People are stressed and spooked out of their minds. Businesses are bankrupt. Schools are closed. Suicides are rising. So are opioid deaths.

It’s especially heartbreaking to watch what’s happening to the lives of our kids – who are virtually at no risk from COVID-19.

Toddlers growing up in a masked and frightened world without seeing the faces and smiles of their neighbors. Teenagers stuck in their bedrooms. College students deprived of their fun.

The people of America and the world are suffering and dying from the Wuhan virus and the lockdowns, but China is paying no price for its global crime against humanity.

Does China really have such a hold on corporations, governments and politicians around the world and in the United States that everyone is afraid to hold them accountable?

Is any U.S. president ever going to stand up to China? President Trump hasn’t really punished China for unleashing a deadly plague on the world.

Calling it “The China Virus” didn’t do anything but offend the New York Times editorial page.

And don’t count on Joe Biden. He’s been the best friend the communist Chinese government has had in Washington for decades.

In the face of our country’s weakness, China is only going to get more aggressive.

They’re still building those militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea. They’ve just crushed Hong Kong’s freedom. They’ve put a million Uighurs in detention camps.

It’s time for an “Evil Empire” speech like the one my father gave when he went to the border of the USSR and told Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall.

We need someone like Ronald Reagan to make a tough speech on the border of China that says the Chinese people are fine, but the communists running their government are evil and they need to pay a price for their evildoing.

It’s a good thing I’m not president, because I would have used a drone to obliterate that building in Wuhan where the coronavirus was created months ago.

I wouldn’t care if Nancy Pelosi impeached me. In fact, I’d accept it with honors.

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Copyright 2020 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “Lessons My Father Taught Me: The Strength, Integrity, and Faith of Ronald Reagan.” He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected]. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter.
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