Cagle World

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

It’s crazy political times like these that I long for how quickly, simply and peacefully the 1980 presidential election ended.

That was the year President Jimmy Carter called my father at 5 in the afternoon of Election Day – while he was in the shower – and congratulated him on winning the presidency.

Votes were still being counted and probably half the country hadn’t voted yet, but by early evening Carter already knew he was being swept out of office by the Ronald Reagan landslide.

On Tuesday, Democrats were expecting to see a repeat of 1980.

They thought President Trump would be so far behind by dinner time that he’d have to call Joe Biden and concede.

For months they and the country’s inept pollsters, blind pundits and dishonest journalists had convinced themselves that a mighty Blue Wave was coming.

A Biden Blowout was going to sweep away Donald Trump, half a dozen senators like Lindsay Graham and dozens of Republican House members and put Democrats in charge of both houses of Congress and the White House.

But their Great Blue Wave turned out to be a Blue Mirage.

It looks like after a few weeks of legal challenges and a recount or two, Joe Biden is going to win, which would be a huge and impressive victory for the Democrats.

But otherwise, Election 2020 has been a political disaster for their party.

Democrats lost at least six seats in the House and legislative majorities in several states. But most important, they didn’t come close to taking over the Senate.

That wrecked the dangerous pipedreams of the party’s old and young socialists to get rid of the filibuster and pack the Supreme Court.

Ditto for Joe Biden’s promises to implement the Green New Deal, destroy our energy industry and punish the rich by jacking up taxes on incomes, capital gains and corporations.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump may be on his way out but his Republican Party will live on and haunt the Democrat Party.

In four years Trump has single-handedly enlarged, energized and diversified the old GOP, turning it into an energized America-first movement for millions of everyday citizens.

And though he was unfairly called a racist and a white supremacist by Democrats and the media every day for almost five years, he shocked the Democrats and impressed the liberal media this week by capturing a historic number of black, Latino and Jewish votes.

Based on early exit polls, Trump won 26 percent of non-white voters. For a Republican, that’s huge.

Instead of 8 percent he won 12 percent of the black vote – 18 percent of black men and 8 percent of black women. More impressive, he won 32 percent of the Hispanic vote – 36 percent of Hispanic men.

President Trump was on his way to doing what many of us in the Republican Party knew we needed to do decades ago.

During the Bush II years, when I spoke to a few hundred fellow Republicans during a breakfast meeting in Florida, I told them the party had been more diverse when my father was president.

I said we needed to reach out to minorities. To prove my point, I said, “Will all the blacks and Hispanics eating breakfast with us this morning please stand up.”

They all looked around at each other. No one stood. The only blacks and Hispanics in the room were serving breakfast, not eating it.

I told those Republicans that if the Party of Reagan was to survive it had to reach out to blacks and Hispanics every single year, not every two years or four years, but no one really listened until an outsider named Donald Trump came along.

President Trump’s days may be numbered. But whether you are a Republican who loved him or hated him, you should give him the credit he is due.

He’s shown Republicans the roadmap to the black, Hispanic and Jewish voter. If we hope to take back the House, keep the Senate and win the White House in the future, we need to follow that map.

–

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

It doesn’t matter who wins on Tuesday, America is in for big trouble.

If it’s Joe Biden, the Democrat Party’s street gangs will celebrate by rioting in the streets.

If Donald Trump wins re-election, Biden’s supporters will be so enraged they’ll riot, loot and burn everything they can – and the liberal media will say they had every right to express their anger.

I live in Los Angeles, which government law-and-order experts say is not likely to riot and burn because of next week’s presidential election results.

But I’m taking no chances. Here they riot and loot when the Dodgers win the World Series, so I don’t plan to be anywhere near my home on Nov. 3.

I’m hiring a guard for my house and on Election Day morning my family and I will get out of town.

I’m not revealing where we’ll go, but I don’t plan to come back till the following week, when most of the rioting, torching and shooting should be over.

If all this sounds paranoid to you, it’s because somehow you’ve failed to notice that in the last half year our country has gone crazy, and gone to Hell.

I’m not blaming Donald Trump for the country’s dangerous craziness. I’m blaming social media and the deranged, dishonest mainstream liberal media in general because of the way they’ve ginned up hatred for him and protected corrupt and senile Joe Biden.

For the last 20 years everyone clamored for a businessman to become president and drain the Washington swamp of the creatures who’ve been wrecking the country with their bad laws, high taxes and endless wars in the Middle East.

Then when the country elected a businessman president, the political class in Washington couldn’t handle it.

Now the D.C. “elites” and the media pundits think a lifetime political hack who has been living in the swamp for half a century is going to fix everything?

Biden’s going to control COVID-19? Really? What’s he going to do that Trump and his administration hasn’t already done?

New therapeutics and tests are here already. A vaccine is on its way. Other than destroy the economy with another crippling lockdown and a national mask mandate, Biden has nothing to offer.

I fear for what might happen on the streets of L.A. next week if Trump wins, but I’m lucky. I can afford to take my family out of town. Most people can’t.

No big city in the country run by Democrats is safe from rioting and violence. Their mayors and governors don’t lead. They tell police to watch looters not stop them.

As usual, the poorest people in cities will become the main victims of mob violence and the failure of police and local government to protect them, their property and their businesses.

If I weren’t able to leave town, I’d sure as heck make sure I was well-armed on Election Night.

I’d want to be ready to defend my family, because once the rioting starts you never know where it’s going to end. I don’t want it ending at my front door.

I’m not going to predict the results of the election. With all the mail-in voting and delayed vote counts in key states like Pennsylvania, we might still be wondering who the winner is three weeks from now.

But my prayer is that Trump wins big. No matter what I think of his tweets or his personality, my prayer is that Joe Biden, his leftwing puppet-masters and his dishonest allies in the media are shocked and humiliated once again.

–
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

Listen before you speak.

My mother Jane Wyman taught me that sensible lesson a long, long time ago.

And based on his fine performance at the second presidential debate on Thursday night, it looks like Donald Trump has finally learned that important lesson, too.

The president proved he could listen to what Joe Biden said and then carefully respond to what he heard instead of instantly reacting and interrupting or talking over Biden.

Of course, the president was forced to behave in part because the debate commission added a mute button that allowed each candidate to have two minutes of uninterrupted time to answer the opening question of each topic.

The mute button acted like an electric dog training collar. It didn’t have to be used, and it was invisible, but, ironically, it turned out to be a great blessing for Trump.

It kept him under control and helped to keep him from hurting himself by repeating his overly aggressive tone and off-putting performance in the first debate.

Like most of the professional pundits on FOX and CNN, I think the debate itself was a draw.

But I gave the president the overall win for one big reason: After this debate you didn’t walk away thinking he was a complete jerk.

As I told my son Cameron, if the president had behaved like he did Thursday night for the last 3½ years, the polls would be 60-40 in Trump’s favor and the election would be over right now.

Overall, President Trump did everything he needed to do to help himself and unmask poor Joe Biden, who looked and sounded like an old, tired and befuddled politician from 1978 – which is what he is.

He abided by the new debate rules and was subdued, but he was still tough. He was on target. Heck, at times he actually looked presidential.

He defended himself on how his administration has handled the Covid-19 plague and helped blacks on prison reform and economic Opportunity Zones.

He touted his economic successes, stressed that the country has to learn to live with the coronavirus and repeated his pledge there will be no more lockdowns.

Trump scored major political points with voters in Texas and Pennsylvania by jumping on Biden’s politically foolish statement that he plans to transition away from the oil industry.

Most important, President Trump consistently gave Biden plenty of time to hang himself while hitting him and his new leftwing ideas with good right-hand jabs.

He baited Biden into committing one of his biggest blunders of the night, getting Biden to defiantly declare, “I never said I opposed fracking.” Several video tapes prove otherwise.

Biden threw the oil industry under the bus along with his old boss Barack Obama, whom he blamed for never solving the immigration problem in eight years. And I’m sure Obama loved hearing his old VP call his new healthcare plan BidenCare.

As we knew he would, Trump also made sure that the readers of the New York Times, the watchers of CNN/MSNBC and the listeners of NPR – whose biased journalists have refused to cover the exploding Hunter Biden scandal – were introduced to the sleazy finances of the Biden Family International Pay-for-Play Racket.

The irresponsible liberal media can continue to protect their “Big Guy” from scrutiny and pretend Hunter’s laptop is Russian disinformation, but for millions of the potential voters watching, Trump effectively pinned the charge of political corruption on “Ten Percent Joe.”

Everyone agrees the second debate was pretty good in terms of informing voters.

Everyone agrees that despite Trump’s tweeted concerns, NBC journalist Kristen Welker did an excellent and fair job as moderator – and put Fox’s Chris Wallace to shame.

But Trump clearly benefited the most from the debate.

His campaign will be able to pull half a dozen damning Biden soundbites for its TV ads.

And I hear that the president’s staff has finally found a way to keep Trump from hurting himself. For the next ten days they’re going to install a mute button at his press conferences.

–
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

Watching the Senate confirmation hearing of Amy Coney Barrett reminded me of the promise my father made to my sister Maureen to put the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court.

It’s a great piece of POTUS-SCOTUS history I haven’t told in many years.

Democrats and the media said a lot of nice things this week about the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the liberal icon who in 1993 became the second woman appointed to the Supreme Court.

But I don’t remember hearing anyone – unfortunately, including the Republican senators – pay homage to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court, or to my father Ronald Reagan, who put her there in 1981.

My father made his promise to my sister Maureen during the Republican primaries of 1980, when she was simultaneously campaigning for his campaign and the Equal Rights Amendment.

My father’s campaign team thought it was not a good idea for Maureen to be a public advocate for the ERA, since the Republican Party was against it at the time.

In fact, they were so concerned that my father might lose Republican votes in the primaries and not get the presidential nomination that the advisors called Maureen into campaign headquarters.

Lyn Nofziger, Mike Deaver, my father and several others in the office discussed with Maureen how they could get her off the campaign trail.

When they were done talking, Maureen looked at the staffers and said:

“If you can get your candidate to promise me that if elected the first person he will nominate to the Supreme Court will be a woman, I will stop campaigning for the ERA today.”

Their candidate – our father – said, “Deal” and reached out his hand. He and my sister shook on it.

Later in the summer of 1980 at the Republican National Convention in Detroit, when Maureen and her friends showed up wearing big “ERA” pins, the campaign staff thought that she had gone back on her promise and they were upset.

But if you looked closely at that “ERA” button, its fine print said, “Elect Reagan Anyway.”

During the campaign against Jimmy Carter my father said if he was elected he’d put a woman on the Supreme Court, and less than a year later he kept his promise to his daughter and the voters and chose Justice O’Connor.

So when people look back and thank the people who put the first woman on the Supreme Court, you can look to Ronald Reagan, but you also have to look to Maureen Reagan.

Maureen was tough as nails and she was brave. Can you imagine anyone doing what she did today?

Ronald Reagan with three staffers on either side, and they’re all telling her she has to get off the trail because it’ll hurt the campaign – and she has the courage to say, “OK, I understand. But here’s my deal….”

Only seven people knew that story. All of them but me are gone.

My sister, who died of cancer on Aug. 8, 2001 at age 60, shared what happened at that meeting with me on the day it happened. We talked a lot during my father’s campaigns and through the 1990s.

Maureen stood up to everyone, even her stepmother Nancy Reagan, and she had more courage than anyone in the Republican Party.

She used to say things like, “The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that it’d take the Republicans a week longer to become communists.”

She’d be right at home in the current political madness.

And she’d have a right to be proud that she did something in 1980 that helped make it possible that someday we’d get a Supreme Court Justice with the brains and class of Amy Coney Barrett.

Oh, how I wish my sister Maureen were alive today

–
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 Kamala Harris-Mike Pence death match will go down in history as another forgettable vice presidential debate, but it had its pluses.

It showed us two important things we already knew.

It showed us that Vice President Pence is a smart, sober and able defender of Donald Trump and his record at home and overseas.

And it showed us that Sen. Harris is an empty pants suit who likes to laugh and smirk, play the race and gender cards, hide her own leftwing politics and blame the Trump administration for everything that’s wrong with the world.

The moderator, Susan Page of USA Today, didn’t help things with her loaded questions, strict time-keeping and unerring ability to cut off any real back-and-forth on any issue just as it got interesting.

She was like one of those basketball referees whose constant whistle-blowing ruins the game for everyone.

To be fair, her main job was to enforce the debate commission’s rigid rules and out-of-date format and prevent the VP debate from becoming another free-for-all like the Trump-Biden match.

But Page overdid it so much she made Mike Wallace look like a neutral moderator.

Her loaded questions, as usual, were tougher on Team Trump than Team Biden. And she was in such a hurry she rarely if ever forced Harris or Pence to actually answer the questions she asked them.

If Page had been truly interested in fairness and balance, Pence would not have had to be the one who asked Harris the Dodged Question of the Week:

What is her ticket’s position on the Democrat idea for a Biden administration to pack the U.S. Supreme Court with liberals if conservative nominee Amy Coney Barrett becomes a justice before the election.

You’d like to believe the 50 million people who watched the VP debate were looking at the issues, but none of what either candidate said really matters.

No one votes for vice president. No one votes for the VP hoping the president dies.

Anyway, the Pence-Harris debate already is old-old news.

Another hurricane is bearing down on Louisiana. The FBI has foiled a plot by some rightwing militia jerks to kidnap Michigan’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

And the next Trump-Biden presidential debate is up in the air because the president says he will not take part in a virtual debate with Biden.

Though it exposed Harris’ sneaky political radicalism and personal weaknesses, the Pence-Harris match didn’t change the dynamics of the 2020 election.

For that to happen, it’s up to Donald Trump.

It’s not Mike Pence’s job to win this election for Donald Trump.

As I said on Newsmax, it’s Donald Trump’s job to win the election for Donald Trump. If he loses, it’s on him. It’s not on the media or anyone else.

Trump and Biden can argue and debate issues like the economy, the Green New Deal and the Supreme Court until dinnertime on Nov. 3, but who wins the election will come down to who’s the most likeable candidate.

When it comes to electing presidents, many people simply vote on how much they like the candidate’s persona.

In these last four weeks, if Trump wants to win reelection he has to be more likable, less bombastic, more presidential.

We know that’s not who Donald Trump is. But he’s got to realize that running for president is different from running as president.

What was cute and refreshing and disruptive when he was an underdog and outsider running against “The Swamp” doesn’t work when you’re the president of the swamp.

Mike Pence did help his boss in one important way on Wednesday night. He showed the president how to behave during a debate and still get the job done.

President Trump needs to debate again, Biden doesn’t. The next debate or two, if there will be two, are much more important to Trump.

But Trump doesn’t need to win the next debate, he just needs to make sure he lets Biden lose it.

–
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

President Trump was his own worst enemy at Tuesday night’s big debate.

As we’ve said here a dozen times, he still hasn’t learned when to shut up.

He stepped on his own message dozens of times and interrupted Joe Biden so often and so quickly that Old Joe never had the chance to hang himself with his damning or garbled answers.

We didn’t need to hear Trump tell us what he thinks about rebuilding the post-COVID-19 economy or what an idiot the mayor of Portland is.

We’ve seen and heard that noise a hundred times. Every day, it seems.

What the country needed to see more of, however, was Basement Joe Biden. He was the mystery candidate who needed to reveal himself and his ideas to us.

I wanted Biden to have plenty of time at the debate to show us just how out of it he is and how unprepared he is to be president.

I wanted the whole country to see him try to defend the New Green Deal and his $4 trillion tax hike and tell us if he’s in favor of packing the U.S. Supreme Court with more Democrats.

What I and the rest of the world got instead at the debate was an aggressive, ill-prepared and un-presidential president who forgot he was a contestant and thought he was the co-moderator.

It was so frustrating to see him cut in so often that at one point I was shouting at the TV, “Shut the hell up, Trump! Let Joe go off the rails!”

I’m sure I wasn’t the only frustrated Republican screaming at their TV on Tuesday night.

If Trump really wants to spare the Free World the horrors of a President Biden, he’d better learn a few things before the next debate or town hall.

First off, he needs to concentrate on saying “we” more often than “I.”

He also needs to learn how to listen to the moderator’s question or Biden’s answer, respond to it, and turn it back to his advantage.

The two idiots who helped Trump prepare for the debate — Chris Christy and Rudy Giuliani – obviously didn’t stress that smart tactic.

Those two were terrible choices, by the way. Both are failed presidential candidates. Both are attack dogs, not debate coaches.

I talked to half a dozen conservatives on Wednesday and we all came up with better answers than Trump gave to the questions that Christy, Giuliani and Baron Trump knew the president would have to answer.

For example, when asked about reports he paid only $750 in federal income tax in two recent years, Trump should have had this answer memorized:

“Yes, Chris. I paid $750 for two years, but in previous years I paid tens of millions in income tax. I’m a businessman. And the reason I could pay only $750 was I was able to take advantage of the tax laws that Joe Biden and Barack Obama put together a decade ago. But I didn’t break the law. And by the way, 60 other huge companies used the same laws to pay no taxes, including Chevron and Amazon.”

If Trump wanted to turn the tables and take a jab at Biden, he could have added, “Joe, I bet Hunter used those same laws to lower the taxes on that three and half million dollars he got from the mayor of Moscow.”

Humor is a powerful weapon in debates, as my dad knew. Next time, the president also needs to lighten up and use the same sense of humor he displays at his rallies.

Most important, though, he has to learn to listen more and talk less. My mother taught me a long time ago to be a good listener and I put it to good use during my talk radio career.

For his next debate, maybe President Trump should have Tucker Carlson prepare him instead of Christy and Giuliani.

Why?

Because Tucker knows how to do it. He asks tough questions. He doesn’t interrupt his guests. And he’s a great listener.

–
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

It didn’t matter what the findings of the Breonna Taylor grand jury were going to be.

Black Lives Matters and their sympathizers were well prepared to riot on Wednesday night in Louisville and other cities, like New York and Washington.

The video of that rented U-Haul filled with big signs and who-knows-what-else is all the proof you need that their “peaceful protest” was a planned operation.

Taking over the streets, burning down buildings, destroying businesses, shooting things at police and roughing up ordinary citizens was like a summer job for protesters in dozens of our cities.

Now it looks like it’s going to be their full-time fall job, too.

Whether it was a response to George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police, the shooting of Jacob Blake by police in Kenosha or Taylor’s accidental shooting during a late-night drug raid gone bad, the rioting has been done under the pretext of seeking justice for black Americans who were victims of allegedly racist cops and a supposedly racist justice system.

But the young Black and white mobsters of 2020 America aren’t doing their cause much good with their nightly melees.

All they’ve done is make a lot of new enemies among white people, create new Trump voters and scare the crap out of ordinary citizens who get caught up in the violence or watch it nightly on TV.

I can’t tell you how many people have told me how frightened they are for the safety of their children and the future of the country they’ll grow up in.

Other good people I’ve talked to lately have completely changed the way they feel about Black people because of the riots and the rise of the radical BLM.

These people were never even close to being racists before, but now they are.

That’s what BLM wants, of course.

Their goal is not to get justice for the few unarmed Black victims of police violence in the U.S. each year or to solve the social, economic and policing problems of Black people and their communities.

The BLM’s radicals are open Marxists who want to create chaos, foment racial hatred and tear down America’s founding values and democratic ideals.

So far, the BLM has been successful, thanks to the great job the mainstream media have done to ignore its true nature and goals, spread its propaganda and lies and treat it like it’s the League of Women Voters.

For six months – until the grand jury’s report Wednesday – the media gave us the BLM’s version of how Breonna Taylor died in her apartment March 13.

We were told it was a no-knock narcotics warrant. We were told Taylor was shot in her bed. We were told that trigger-happy racist police officers were at fault and should be charged with murder.

But they were BLM lies.

According to the evidence gathered by the grand jury, it was not a no-knock warrant. The police knocked and announced themselves several times before they broke down the door.

Taylor’s boyfriend, who said he thought the police were intruders, admitted he fired the first shot, hitting an officer in the leg.

The police had a legal right to return fire, which is why the grand jury decided no cop would be charged with homicide. Taylor, killed accidentally when police fired 32 shots, was not in her bed.

Breonna Taylor’s death was a tragic mistake. But the sad truth is, if her boyfriend didn’t shoot at the police first, she’d still be alive.

If her boyfriend had killed the cop he shot, by the way, the number of police officers killed in the line of duty so far this year would be 39 instead of 38.

No one has been marching or rioting in the streets of our cities to protest the deaths of those cops.

And the mainstream media, which hardly bothers to cover them, are too busy portraying cops as racist murderers to worry about who’s going to be around to defend law-abiding citizens when the police are gone.

–
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].

Correction: Jacob Blake’s name was misspelled when the column was originally sent to editors. It has since been corrected. We regret the error.

Making Sense By Michael Reagan

Lots of people in politics and the media out here in California are blaming global warming for the 26 major wildfires that have killed at least 24, burned more than 3 million acres and destroyed thousands of homes.

But let’s get real.

This state has been plagued by wildfires long before baby left-wingers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decided that they’re caused by humans heating up the planet by burning fossil fuels.

I grew up in Los Angeles in the 1950s.

We didn’t have as many people, cars or smokestacks in those days, but we had plenty of 115-degree days in the summer.

Why? Mainly because we were living in a desert.

The L.A. area may not actually meet the official definition of a desert, but anyone who’s lived here long enough to get a suntan knows that’s essentially what it is.

If it weren’t for the Colorado River, which provides 1.4 trillion gallons of water a year to about 18 million Southern Californians, we couldn’t survive here.

Because we live in a basin, and because temperature inversions in the atmosphere form caps that trap smoke and pollution, we’ve always had smoke or smog hanging over us.

Heck, when the Spaniards arrived by ship in the 1500s they saw the smoke over Los Angeles and called the harbor Baya de los Fumos, or Bay of the Smoke.

The Spaniards didn’t know whether the smoke came from the campfires in the many Native American villages in the basin or from the wildfires in the hills that had been started naturally by dry lightning – just as they are today.

When I was growing up, we had wildfires in the hills and the Santa Ana winds fanning them every year.

It’s one of California’s seasons. It’s like Florida’s “Hurricane Season,” only we call it “Fire Season.”

Back in the 1950s, the wildfires up and down the state mainly burned dry brush, grass and dead foliage, not homes and small towns.

But in the last 70 years, as California’s population exploded, we’ve built hundreds of thousands of new houses where they shouldn’t be.

Today wildfires still happen in the same places they used to, but the difference now is that hundreds of homes get destroyed.

If you’re living in a rural or suburban area with a million dead trees around you and a wildfire starts from dry lightning, a downed PG&E power line or an arsonist, don’t be an AOC and blame global warming.

Blame government stupidity.

For a hundred years federal and state forest managers have practiced a wrong-headed policy that quickly suppresses wildfires.

That policy, which has been criticized for decades, allows enormous amounts of fuel to build up on the forest or canyon floor so that when future wildfires start, as they will eventually, they will burn so fiercely they can’t be stopped.

Other bad government policies have helped to make wildfires more dangerous and destructive.

They include allowing housing developments in high risk areas and environmental laws that prevent people from clearing the brush and trees around their homes.

The state of California’s FAIR Plan that provides last-resort fire insurance to homes built in high-risk areas doesn’t help, either.

AOC, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and their frontman Joe Biden promise if they depose Donald Trump on Nov. 3 they’re going to pass the Green New Deal, rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement, save the planet and bring an end to things like California wildfires.

But there’s a question the greenies never want us to ask: If we do everything you want us to do to cool down the planet, how much cooler will it be in 20 or 30 years?

The answer is something like .002 percent.

Despite their big promises, even if we eliminate all cars and all fossil fuels and start living in caves again, LA’s future will still include 113-degree days, smog, droughts and killer wildfires.

So reversing global warming is not going to stop California’s fire season, just as electing Joe Biden won’t cure COVID-19.

–
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

Am I in Hell, or just L.A.?

The other day it was 121 degrees here.

There’s so much smoke in the air from all the wildfires the sun looks like the moon.

Everything’s closed because of the coronavirus pandemic.

People can’t go to work. School kids are struggling to learn on Zoom.

Parents are going nuts. Some are hiring teachers, wannabe teachers or former teachers to come in and tutor their kids.

And now the Los Angeles County Health Department has tried to wreck Halloween.

At first the county announced a ban on trick-or-treaters going door-to-door for candy, saying it was too difficult to maintain proper social distancing on porches, ensure mask rules, etc. etc.

The public outcry was so great the ban was quickly rescinded, but Halloween parties, carnivals, festivals, live entertainment and haunted houses are still prohibited.

The coronavirus pandemic has hit Los Angeles County especially hard.

It’s the most-populated county in America with 10 million residents. So I guess it makes sense that it has more positive cases of COVID-19 (over 249,000) and more deaths from COVID-19 (more than 6,000) than any other county.

Daily new infections and deaths in the state are in decline, but no one knows when Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Eric Garcetti will allow life in L.A. to return to normal, whatever that’s going to be.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden and the Democrats are busy blaming President Trump for the country’s 190,000 COVID-19 deaths and the crushed economy, as if he brought the coronavirus from China himself.

Trump got slammed this week by Democrats who claim that back in January and February he knowingly and willfully lied to the American public about the serious danger posed by the virus.

The Democrats and the liberal media say the president downplayed the threat of the virus to the public at the same time he was privately telling author Bob Woodward in interviews that the virus was very dangerous.

The president was right to be calm and optimistic in public about the fight against the coronavirus.

No good leader would deliberately scare the people of his country about the threat posed by a new, unknown virus – especially while the country was still trying to figure out how dangerous it was or how to deal with it.

But in any case, Trump didn’t lie.

What he told Woodward in private was essentially what he had already said in public.

What’s more, while Trump was being interviewed by Woodward, he was proving with his executive actions that he took the threat of the virus very seriously.

He had already closed off travel from China and Europe, and by mid-March he had shut down the entire economy and ordered up thousands of ventilators and millions of masks from the private sector.

He’s criticized now by his political enemies and the deranged Monday morning quarterbacks of the media for not having done enough – as if Joe Biden could have done more or done anything different or better.

But we know that no matter what the president had or hadn’t done, the Democrats still would have said he was just as wrong.

Imagine how Biden and Pelosi or the liberal media would have reacted if in January President Trump had spooked the whole country with predictions of millions of COVID-19 deaths – before there was a single fatality in the USA.

Or what if he had ordered a national shutdown in early February when Dr. Fauci was still downplaying the coronavirus threat and Biden and Pelosi were accusing Trump of overplaying it and spreading panic.

Trump has done a good job of fighting the pandemic. Now he’s trying to reopen the economy and schools and speed a safe vaccine to the public.

But Democrats like Biden and Pelosi, and governors like Newsom, are in no hurry to see it end.

For them the coronavirus has been a political weapon to use against Donald Trump and a perfect excuse to grab even more control over our economic and social lives – including preventing us from celebrating Halloween.

–
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

At least the media haven’t politicized the weather reports – yet.

Watching the next Category 4 hurricane hit Florida is about all I can stand to see on TV these days.

The news and cable talk shows are brutal – all-partisan-politics-all-the time.

Sports programs are almost as bad, thanks to their blind worship of the Black Lives Matter movement and its dangerous ideas.

The NBA coverage is the worst.

You almost feel like you have to swear your allegiance to BLM or confess to being a lifelong racist before every tip off – which is why the NBA’s TV ratings for this year’s playoffs are in the toilet.

The only sports I can stand to watch anymore are professional golf and bike racing.

Thank God the Tour de France started last weekend. All the announcers talked about was bike racing.

Not one time did they make me think that I was a racist.

It was a refreshing break from months of our mainstream liberal media pushing the line that America’s Blacks are victims of systemic white racism.

I know America has a shameful history of racist government policies and Jim Crow, the oppressive system of legalized segregation that racist Southern Democrats in Congress protected until the mid-1960s.

I know there are still racists in America. There will always be a small percentage of racists – of all colors.

But if you swallow the liberal media’s dishonest narrative, you’d think America was 90 percent white – and 100 percent racist.

For starters, let’s remember that only about 63 percent of us Americans are white. About 18 percent are Latinos, a little over 13 percent are Black and Asians are about 5 percent.

But if white people are so solidly and systematically racist, as the liberal media and Democrats imply, I have a handful of questions to ask.

– Did America elect Barack Obama president twice because it’s a racist country – or just half a racist country?
– Is Oprah the richest Black woman in America and beloved by millions of whites because America is racist?

– Did Kamal Harris find the only white guy in America who wasn’t racist and marry him? Did Don Lemon?

– Was the white couple who adopted Colin Kaepernick and sent him to the best schools the only non-racist white couple in America?

– Was my sister Maureen the only white woman in America who adopted a Black child from Africa?

– Are the thousands of white parents who adopt Black kids out of foster care racists?

– Are the white owners who pay multimillion salaries to Black NBA players racists?

– Are the millions of Americans who live and die with their favorite predominantly Black basketball team or favorite Black star athlete racists?

– I have a Latino daughter in law, two Latino granddaughters and niece from Uganda. Am I a racist?

– My wife’s ancestors were part of the underground railroad that helped runaway slaves get to freedom. Is she a racist?

I’m sorry, but because of these obvious examples and a hundred others I have a real hard time believing we live in a country crawling with racist white people.

The liberal media have been working overtime every day trying to make us believe America is racist, but our everyday reality proves them wrong.

More than Democrats, Republicans, BLM protestors or rioters, it is the media who are fomenting a race war.

They almost make it seem like white cops go out each morning looking to kill an innocent Black man.

The news media seize on rare police shootings like the ones in Minneapolis and Kenosha and simplify them, sensationalize them, play the race card, declare the victim completely innocent and blame the cops long before all the facts are known.

The media will never point this out, but in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Kenosha and cities across the country, Black people call the cops for help, too. Are they racists?

–

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].