Cagle World

Is it safe for me and my wife to return from our vacation in Eastern Europe?

I don’t know how many Americans who tuned into the two Democratic presidential debates on CNN this week actually paid attention or were able to stay awake both nights.

But anyone who can prove they watched all six hours deserves some kind of psychiatric help from the government.

Maybe Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and the other progressives who want to be president can add free counseling for Post-Traumatic Debate Syndrome to the list of freebies they’re promising to give every American.

I’m still in Austria – or is it Budapest?

But my sources back home tell me that for two nights leftist Democrats tooted their own tin horns, attacked each others’ pie-in-the-sky “Medicare for All” health care plans and proved once again that not one of them is qualified to be president.

When they weren’t calling the president a racist or promising to give trillions of dollars of free health care college and other stuff to Americans or illegal aliens, the candidates were railing against the usual devils – the NRA, the Koch Brothers, greedy drug companies, the evil fossil fuel industry, etc.

The Democrats’ top talent looked bad, but CNN ought to be ashamed of itself.

Not just for using its Trump-hating trio of Jake Tapper, Dana Bash and Don Lemon as moderators.

Not just for devising a high-speed debate format that gave no one enough time to answer, rebut or explain anything.

Not just for not asking any questions about the economy or the Mueller Report.

CNN should be ashamed for producing a lousy presidential debate like it was a Super Bowl telecast.

Ten debaters were introduced each night like they were the starters on a pro football team, when actually they were two or three star players and a bunch of scrubs and walk-ons who’ll never make the cut.

The big winner on night one was Elizabeth Warren, the shrill progressive professor who has written comprehensive plans to fix everything from college loan debt to climate change.

Warren and her arm-waving soulmate, angry Bernie Sanders, became a socialist tag-team.

They spent the night defending their costly left-wing health care pipe-dreams from the occasionally sensible attacks of moderate lefties like millionaire businessman and ex-Congressman John Delaney and Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio.

Delaney and Ryan, like Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, had their moments – seconds, really.

The only real entertainment at the Tuesday night debate was provided by Marianne Williamson, the new age spiritualist and self-help author whose hippie rants about “dark psychic forces” and political failure in Washington made her the most Googled name of the night.

The second debate in Detroit had more star power, but even fewer laughs and just as many unlikable and humorless Democrats making dozens of un-keepable promises and gratuitous Trump slurs.

Joe Biden brought his C game Wednesday and was much better prepared.

But Kamala Harris and a supporting gang headed by Corey Booker, Julian Castro and Kirsten Gillibrand went after him all night like a pack of jackals attacking an old water buffalo.

Biden was left standing, barely. He made at least seven gaffes and looked old.

He had trouble defending the now politically incorrect positions he held on crime, school busing, the drug war and working women during his 40 plus years in DC.

It wasn’t pretty.If there is a big sympathy vote out there in the American electorate, Old Joe won it.

Meanwhile, Harris got some of her own nasty medicine.

She was badly wounded when Tulsi Gabbard, the congresswoman from Hawaii, suddenly brought up some of the un-progressive highlights of her career as California’s tough-on-crime Attorney General.

Winners on Night Two?Biden, by default. Gabbard. Maybe Booker or Castro, if you grade on a generous curve. The rest were losers.

For the week, Prof. Warren was the big winner, if you don’t count President Trump.

The big losers were Harris and the Democrat Party, which showed the country just how broken and crazy it is.

–

Copyright 2019 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].

Lucky, lucky me.

I just happened to be in Paris – France, not Texas, s’il vous plaît – on Wednesday when Robert Mueller made the Democrats cry and put the country to sleep with appearances at two congressional hearings.

I saw only a few TV snippets of the poor ex-special counsel looking frail and confused about what was or was not in his report, which Mueller apparently didn’t write or even read very carefully before he put his name on it.

How boring was it, America?

During seven hours of dull, slow, partisan grilling by House Democrats and Republicans, Mueller apparently uttered “It’s not in my purview” and “I’m not going to speak to that” about 200 times.

How much did it benefit the Democrats’ Trump Impeachment Industrial Complex?

Well, Chuck Todd, Michael Moore and Donald Trump pretty much had the same reaction – it didn’t move the needle on impeachment, didn’t reveal anything new and didn’t help the Democrats.

Mueller was always supposed to be the Democrats’ superhero who was going to slay the evil Trump Monster.

He and his crack team of brave Trump-hating prosecutors were going to dig up the dirt that would pave a smooth road to impeachment for House Democrats.

But whoops.

The Mueller Report turned out to be a badly over-cooked $25 million nothing burger that proved there was no Trump-Russia collusion – or anything else that was impeachable.

That conclusion cruelly disappointed every Trump hater, especially the professionals at CNN and MSNBC, who have been parsing the report’s 400-plus pages ever since May in their desperate attempt to find high presidential crimes and misdemeanors in the footnotes.

The House Democrats’ grand plan was for the in-person Mueller to become the legal and moral prop who would dramatically bring his mostly unread and unreadable report to life for the American people.

His televised testimony was going to be carefully edited and turned into 2020 campaign ads and Trump-damning sound bites that CNN, ABC and the sad sacks at “Morning Joe” could run in a loop until next fall.

But Mueller’s testimony on Wednesday created another nothing burger – a double-decker.

He did such an obviously poor and indecisive job that most people pretty much agreed that the “Robert Mueller Show” was devastating for the Democrats.

Mueller dodged all the hard questions Republicans asked, including why he hired so many pro-Hillary prosecutors and who actually wrote the report (not him).

Inexplicably, like the hate-blinded House Democrats and every Democrat running for president, Rachel Maddow and Nicole Simpson at MSNBC thought Mueller did a swell job.

Most Republicans and fair-minded journalists did not agree.

They called out Mueller’s sad on-camera performance for being what former Republican congressman Trey Gowdy said it was – an unmitigated human train wreck.

It was an unnecessary personal embarrassment for an older guy that deranged Democrats made him suffer because it served their foolish mission to impeach Trump.

Mueller was also a political disaster for the Democrats and made impeachment by the House even less likely.

His bumbling appearance backfired badly on House Democrats, who’ve wasted 2 1/2 years going after Trump when they should be working on legislation to fix immigration, health care and the infrastructure.

It only helped the president and Republicans for 2020, which Trump knew immediately as he watched and tweeted.

Afterwards I saw him on TV proclaiming that the ridiculous Russian collusion hoax was now finally over and proclaiming that Mueller did a terrible job.

Wednesday was a good day for America, the president said, a good day for the GOP and a good day for him.

He was right, right, right.

I’m just glad I was on a vacation with my wife in France and didn’t have to watch.

–

Copyright 2019 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].

Thank God for the British Open.

For four days I can watch the best professional golfers in the world playing on TV instead of watching the Democrats playing their political games in Washington.

It was a crazy week of controversial presidential tweets, rabid accusations of racism by the liberal media and parliamentary turmoil in the House of Representatives, but Democrats worked extra hard each day to prove that they are still deranged.

For instance, a hundred House Democrats defied the wishes of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and made fools of themselves by trying – and failing – to pass a resolution to impeach President Trump over allegedly racist comments he made about Democratic congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley and Ilhan Omar.

Meanwhile, liberal, moderate and socialist Democrats in Washington were shooting at each other in a circular firing squad that made their party look even more inept, confused and lost.

Pelosi, a lifelong lefty, continued to be upstaged, disrespected and made to seem like a moderate Democrat by AOC and her wrecking crew.

The four rookie representatives – who in six months have made it clear they prefer socialism over capitalism, Palestine over Israel and open borders over immigration reform – like to call themselves “progressive women of color.”

But Pelosi has a less exalted opinion of them, especially after their leader, AOC, appeared to play the race card when she hinted the speaker was singling them out for criticism because they were women of color.

Nancy Pelosi a racist too? Who’s next? Oh, I forgot. Everyone’s a racist now.

House Mother Pelosi retaliated for the socialist foursome’s trouble-making by dubbing them “The Squad” and reminding them that despite the six months of slobbering attention they’ve gotten from the liberal media, they were “only four people.”

President Trump, who has cleverly made AOC and her gang into the politically unattractive face of the Democrat Party for 2020, stirred the pot by calling them out as “hate-filled extremists who are constantly trying to tear our country down.”

He was right.

Of course, everyone on CNN and MSNBC was certain Trump picked on the Squad because of their color, or because they were women, but as usual they were totally wrong.

Trump doesn’t care what color or sex the Squad members are.

He picked on them because they keep saying the same stupid socialist stuff, keep stirring up trouble in the media by misrepresenting conditions at the southern border and keep charging anyone who disagrees with them as being a racist or a bigot.

The president made a rare political mistake earlier this week by uniting the bickering Democrats with a tweet storm that implied that House members leveling nonstop criticism at America should first “go back” to “help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

Trump didn’t name the Squad members, but everyone knew whom he was referring to. He was predictably called a racist by Democrats and just about everyone with a laptop in the liberal media.

But he was right to bash the Squad for their radical views. They are not just dumb, they’re dangerous.

Their presence in Congress reminds me of that famous but unverified quote that Nikita Khrushchev reportedly said in 1956 about how the USSR would eventually defeat America: “We do not have to invade the United States, we will destroy you from within.”

So let me get this straight.

While I have to watch Democrats in Congress waste time hating and sanctioning the president and trashing America as a racist country after it twice elected a black president, I still have an invasion of illegal immigrants on my southern border.

And while I watch Democrats — and Republicans — in Washington spend another year kicking the healthcare-reform can down the road, I have a daughter-in-law and son in Los Angeles who suddenly had their private health insurance cancelled and must now sign up with the state’s system because there’s no competition in California.

Both Republican and Democrats are at fault for our healthcare and immigration messes.

Both parties have recently held total control of Congress and the White House at the same time, yet neither one honestly tried solve the country’s two most important problems.

If they can’t get find the political courage to fix healthcare or immigration by next fall, we shouldn’t give one member of Congress from either party a single vote.

At this point, the only person I think who deserves to be reelected in 2020 is the Republican who’s repeatedly proved he has the will and the cajones to stand up to the Democrats and the liberal media — Donald Trump.

–

Copyright 2019 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.

Independence Day used to be a happy day when all Americans put aside their partisan differences and came together to celebrate the miraculous birth of the United States of America.

But like almost everything in the upside-down era of President Donald Trump, our great Fourth of July holiday has been spoiled by ugly politics.

Whether it’s Nike deciding not to sell a running shoe with a Betsy Ross flag on its heel because a leftist ex-pro football player was offended, orPresident Trump being charged with militarizing the July 4th parade in Washington, Independence Day has become another thing to fight about for a few days on cable TV and in social media.

Immigration is still by far the country’s most divisive issue now.

My father loved and understood immigrants, but with the way things have deteriorated in Washington, I don’t know if he would have many allies on either side of the immigration battle today.

This Fourth of July weekend is a good time to listen again to the uplifting things he said about immigrants and America in 1989 during his last speech at the White House:

” …I think it’s fitting to leave one final thought, an observation about a country which I love. It was stated best in a letter I received not long ago.

“A man wrote me and said: ‘You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.’

“Yes,” my father continued, “the torch of Lady Liberty symbolizes our freedom and represents our heritage, the compact with our parents, our grandparents, and our ancestors. It is that lady who gives us our great and special place in the world.

“For it’s the great life force of each generation of new Americans that guarantees that America’s triumph shall continue unsurpassed into the next century and beyond. Other countries may seek to compete with us; but in one vital area, as a beacon of freedom and opportunity that draws the people of the world, no country on Earth comes close.

“This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation.

“While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.

“This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

My father then told a story to remind his audience that “the magical, intoxicating power of America” was so strong it could make even a German POW imprisoned in the United States “fall in love with us.”

“Those who become American citizens love this country even more,” he said. “And that’s why the Statue of Liberty lifts her lamp to welcome them to the golden door.

“It is bold men and women, yearning for freedom and opportunity, who leave their homelands and come to a new country to start their lives over. They believe in the American dream. And over and over, they make it come true for themselves, for their children, and for others. They give more than they receive. They labor and succeed. And often they are entrepreneurs.

“But their greatest contribution is more than economic, because they understand in a special way how glorious it is to be an American. They renew our pride and gratitude in the United States of America, the greatest, freest nation in the world — the last, best hope of man on Earth.”

Happy Fourth.

–

Copyright 2019 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].

Expectations could not have been lower going into round one of the Democrat Party’s ridiculously overcrowded presidential debate in Miami.

Maybe that’s why it turned out to be a decently watchable debate. It was no “Games of Thrones” finale, but it could have been much, much worse.

NBC had that embarrassing audio glitch at the halfway point, which actually turned out to be entertaining.

But NBC’s all-star moderators – Lester Holt, Savannah Guthrie, Jose Diaz-Balart, Chuck Todd and even star left-fielder Rachel Maddow did a competent, fair, business-like job.

They lobbed dozens of softball questions to the ten politically indistinguishable major and minor league Democrats who have deluded themselves and their parents into thinking they are going to become president someday.

The moderators let everyone deliver their pre-canned answers on how they’d solve issues like health care and immigration and save the planet from the twin existential threats posed by climate change and President Trump.

Being good liberals themselves, they let every socialist candidate take home run swings at big pharma and the rich one precent, and make their wild promises of free healthcare and free college for all.

If Savannah, Todd or Rachel pressed anyone on how much all the “free” government stuff they wanted to give away was going to cost, or how they planned to pay for it, I missed it.

NBC’s moderators were operating under tough circumstances, but it would have been nice if they had asked some tougher questions or baited the candidates into sniping at each other.

They also might have asked a few of them to explain why Congress and previous administrations, including Obama’s, have refused for nearly 40 years to do what is necessary to secure the border and reform immigration laws.

Everyone in the country was understandably saddened this week by the photo of the dead father and his little daughter who drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande.

Democrats naturally have blamed their deaths on President Trump, but as I said on Newsmax after the debate, there have been Latino men, women and children dying coming across thatborder for years.

Our border patrol officers find their dead bodies in the desert every day. But no one ever blamed Obama or his policies for their deaths, just as they never blamed him for those “cages” that were built for immigrant children during his reign.

Giving candidates just 60 seconds to tell America how they plan to end the immigration crisis, reform healthcare or avert climate change was a mistake that should be fixed for future debates when the field of candidates drops to an even dozen or so.

But some candidates clearly did better than others.

Elizabeth Warren and her multi-list of big plans for government solutions to everything was arguably the big winner. She knew what she wanted to say and said it clearly and energetically.

Booker did well and didn’t make a joke out of himself, though I wish Chuck Todd has asked him if he thought Bill Deblasio was doing a good job as mayor of New York.

The most sensible guy on the stage, who 99.9 percent of Americans have never heard of, was the retired businessman and ex-congressman from Maryland, John Delaney.

He pointed out the foolishness of everyone else’s favorite fix for health care, Medicare for All.

Go to your local hospital, what’s-his-name said, and ask the administrators what would happen if every one of their bills were paid at the current Medicare rate. They’d tell you the truth, he said — they’d have to go out of business.

Wednesday night’s opening Democratic debate is already old news.

But if it had been an episode of “Survivor” and I had to pick the winners and losers, I’d let Warren, Booker, former Housing Secretary Julian Castro and New York Mayor Bill Deblasio move forward and I’d send the rest home.

–

Copyright 2019 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].

What the heck was President Trump doing?

What was he thinking when he told ABC’s star fake journalist George Stephanopoulos on Wednesday that if a foreign adversary offered him dirt on a political opponent he’d take a look at it before calling the FBI.

That was an incredibly stupid thing to say. And all day Thursday in the media we heard a bipartisan chorus of everyone but his wife Melania saying exactly that.

But what was Trump even doing giving a professional Clinton apologist like Stephanopoulos unlimited access to him for two whole days?

Has he forgotten that his chief enemy is Fake News, Inc.?

And can’t the president restrain his ego for a few days and let the news media focus on something else but him?

How about the total collapse of the Mueller Report, the impending investigation into the corrupt origins of the Russian Collusion Hoax, the southern border crisis or the latest bumblings of old Joe Biden?

No chance.

For better or worse, Trump is still Trump – and always will be.

But that’s no excuse. His statement was not just wrong, it was politically dumb.

What he said to Stephanopoulos didn’t merely provide several days of fresh free ammo to the Democrats on the House committees who want to impeach him.

It also may have tested the loyalty of the 42 percent of MAGA Americans who so far have been willing to support him no matter what crazy thing he says or does.

In this case, most hard-core Trump supporters probably will say, “So what? Hillary Clinton didn’t just accept Russian dirt on Trump during the 2016 election.

“She and her corrupt campaign actually paid someone to get fake dirt on Trump from Russia and put it in a dossier to give to her soulmates running the FBI.”

Stephanopoulos and his liberal pals in the mainstream media conveniently forgot what Hillary’s gang actually did with Russian dirt because they were so busy beating up Trump for what he said he might do if he were offered dirt on an opponent.

But the media’s blind liberal bias doesn’t absolve Trump of his stupidity or his mistake. And it doesn’t absolve his die-hard supporters of their hypocrisy.

Imagine if President Obama or any other Democrat had made that statement to Stephanopoulos. Talk radio and the conservative media world would have gone nuts – justifiably.

Meanwhile, what’s happening in Washington on important problems like health care reform and border security? Nothing – not even gridlock.

Republicans and Democrats in Congress can agree on just one thing, and we’ll see what it is when they vote for it in a few days – a pay raise for themselves.

In our upside-down Trump World of Washington, Democrats and Republicans have flipped 180-degrees on issues like immigration and the national debt ceiling.

Today Democrats want open borders and Republicans don’t.

And remember how Republicans were always worrying about the soaring national debt, even before Obama nearly doubled it to $20 trillion?

Now, after Trump has added about $2 trillion more to the federal debt, all we hear from Republicans on the subject are crickets.

The only person left who consistently warns us about our rising national debt these days is William Devane in those Rosland Capital gold commercials on TV.

You’d think that after what happened in last fall’s election you’d see some action in Congress on health care or immigration, but there’s been nothing.

That’s because it’s been clear for more than three decades that Democrats and Republicans would rather have both issues as political weapons than come up with the bipartisan answers to fix them.

If they fix them, they lose the issue.

Which is why the 2020 election is going to be about health care and immigration, the 2024 election is going to be about health care and immigration, the 2028 election is going to be about health care and immigration, the 2032 election is…

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Copyright 2019 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].

Earlier this week I traveled to central Illinois to speak at a memorial service at Eureka College, my dad’s alma mater, on the 15th anniversary of his death.

As I flew halfway across the country and talked to many of the good people in the heart of America, it struck me how testy or peeved off everyone is about politics.

It seems like everyone’s got a chip on their shoulder.

You can’t just sit down at a table or a bar and have a simple conversation with a friend or a stranger because you’re afraid of what might happen if you say the wrong thing.

If you say you’re a Democrat, some Republican gets mad at you.

If you say you’re a Republican who doesn’t think Trump should be jailed immediately, someone else gets mad at you.

It’s always a shame when Americans become so divided by partisan politics that they can’t find anything uplifting or positive to say about their great country, but it was especially disappointing to me this week.

This was a week when all Americans should have been united in celebrating two of our historic victories in World War II and the brave young soldiers and sailors who made them possible.

Instead of bickering over partisan politics, we all should have been celebrating the Battle of Midway, the decisive naval battle we won against the Japanese between June 4 and June 7, 1942, that turned the tide of the war in the Pacific.

We also should have been celebrating – as President Trump did on his trip to France this week – the heroism of the Greatest Generation on D-Day, June 6, 1944, when our troops stormed the beaches at Normandy and turned the tide of war in Europe.

America had thousands of great heroes in the Pacific and in Europe during World War II, but we’ve done a terrible job of celebrating success stories like D-Day.

We’ve also done a lousy job of teaching our kids the extraordinary things we did to defeat the twin evils of fascism and communism.

I don’t ever want to run into another 28-year-old American man – as I once did – who didn’t know why there is a cemetery filled with thousands of American soldiers on the coast of France.

I also don’t ever want to talk to another young American standing where the Berlin Wall once was and have him tell me that the United States put up the wall to keep the Communists out of their sector.

It’s not just the history of World War II and the Cold War that young people aren’t being properly taught about, though.

The success stories of many famous Americans are rarely celebrated for what they say about the values of our country and the opportunities that are open to everyone rich or poor.

For example, when I spoke at the memorial for my father at Eureka College, I said – as my father often pointed out – that he was proof that in America anyone can rise to the top.

He didn’t go to Harvard, Yale or Stanford. He went to Eureka, a postage-stamp of a Christian college near Peoria, on a poor boy’s scholarship because his family had no money.

Yet Ronald Reagan rose to be president of the U.S – and lots of graduates from elite schools like Harvard, Yale and Stanford had to look to the poor kid from Eureka College for affirmation.

My father’s life showed that if you put your nose to the grindstone, anything is possible in America.

His success – like that of millions of other Americans – was proof of the basic greatness and goodness of our country.

Along with D-Day and Midway, his life was one of the many uplifting American life stories we could have been celebrating on TV this week.

Instead, what we saw was mostly a lot of arguing about whether to impeach the president or put him in prison.

–

Copyright 2019 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].

There was a big media buildup and a lot of wild guessing by the pundits on FOX and CNN about what Special Counsel Robert Mueller was going to say in his public statement on Wednesday.

But in the end, after Mueller’s nearly 10-minute sum-up of his two-year, $40 million investigation into Russian election interference in the 2016 election, we were left with no bombshells, no smoking guns, no surprise twists – nothing new.

We heard nothing from Mueller we didn’t already know, and he took no questions from reporters.

But because the language Mueller used this week was different from the language Attorney General William Barr used when he summarized the basic conclusions of the Mueller Report Barr in April, Mueller’s statement gave a fresh jolt of energy and hope to the Deranged Democrats’ dream of impeaching the president.

Everyone knows that if Mueller had found even a whiff of collusion with the Russians or the slightest hint of obstruction of justice by President Trump, he would have already made that charge – in BIG CAPITAL LETTERS – on page one of his 400-plus-page report.

Mueller didn’t do that in April and he didn’t do it Wednesday.

But that didn’t stop most of the 23 Democrats running for president or the Trump Hate Media from slobbering all over Mueller’s deviously worded and legally shifty statement.

The Democrats and CNN’s embarrassingly unbalanced panels of Trump-hating journalists parsed every other word to “prove” that, see, Mueller thought Trump really was guilty of obstruction but he just couldn’t charge him because he’s a sitting president.

Now, thanks to what Mueller said and didn’t say, the craziest Democrats in the House wanted to start impeaching the president yesterday morning. But Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi knows nothing new was learned Wednesday that wasn’t already in Mueller’s report.

Pelosi may eventually be forced by her caucus to proceed with impeachment, but she knows that it would probably backfire politically on the Democrats in 2020 and that it is never going to happen anyway as long as Republicans rule the Senate.

Despite the liberal media’s biased overreaction, Mueller’s statement was another fizzled “blockbuster” in the “Russian Collision” fantasy that diehard Trump haters still think was real.

The issue Mueller raised that should matter most to Americans now is, “What exactly did the Russians do to screw with our democracy in 2016?” and “What should we be doing to prevent them from trying to screw with our elections next fall?”

None of the Democrats running for president said anything about working on legislation to prevent Russian hackers from meddling in our elections again.

All they and their soulmates in the liberal media did was declare Mueller a great American patriot and climb on the “Impeach Trump Now” bandwagon.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin and his old KGB comrades in Moscow are still laughing their butts off about 2016.

They didn’t spend much on Facebook ads. They didn’t hack our election systems and change vote totals. And they didn’t help Trump steal the White House from Hillary.

But their meddling has succeeded in disrupting the American political system far beyond Putin’s wildest dreams.

And thanks to the sore-loser Democrats and the Trump-hating establishment media, both of which still refuse to believe Trump could have beaten Hillary without committing a crime or treason, Russia’s interference is still succeeding.

Mueller made a big deal out of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election on Wednesday and stressed in his written report how deeply involved they were.

But you don’t hear the Democrats in Congress and the liberal media talking about the importance of stopping the Russians from interfering in our elections.

All we’re hearing is the “I” word – impeachment.

In the end, the deranged reaction to Mueller’s statement by the Democrats in Congress and their soulmates in the media has made it clear – for the hundredth time – that they are much more interested in stopping Trump in 2020 than stopping the Russians.

–

Copyright 2019 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].

The Democrats running the House of Representatives have gone insane – and they prove it every day.

Despite the conclusions of the Mueller Report, Nancy Pelosi and her Deranged Democrat underlings in the House have not given up their fight to depose President Trump.

They have six kangaroo committees in the House subpoenaing anyone who ever played golf with the president and looking everywhere they can for whatever financial or personal dirt they can find to use against him and his administration.

The Mad House Democrats don’t care what irresponsible charges they make. When it comes to Trump, all’s fair in hate and war.

Meanwhile, while they make fools of themselves and waste time trying to over-ride the Mueller Report, the Deranged Democrats refuse to do a single thing about the invasion of migrants on our southern border.

No Democrat would be caught dead calling it “an invasion.”Neither would any journalist or pundit employed by CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times or the Washington Post.

But when you have thousands and thousands of Central American asylum seekers over-running our border every day and overwhelming our ability to process and properly care for their families, it’s an invasion.

Overcrowding is so bad now at the Texas border that the Border Patrol has had to fly or bus migrant families to processing centers in towns like Santa Fe, Denver, San Diego, San Bernardino and Murrieta, a city of about 100,000 between LA and San Diego.

No one is quite sure where they go after they are processed, but it could be anywhere. And they have little or no money, no food, no place to stay – just a slip of paper telling them to show up at their asylum hearing two years from now.

When will Democrats in Congress wake up and acknowledge this invasion is real? Never. They don’t give a you-know-what.

There’s nothing planned. No Democrat is talking seriously about how to fix our broken immigration system – which hasn’t been addressed for 33 years by either party in Congress.

Democrats pretend the invasion is not happening and the liberal media either pretend along with them or mock the president and Republicans who call it a national emergency.

The mainstream liberal media are especially at fault because they have done such a biased, half-butted job of covering the migrant invasion.

They’ve shown us every misery suffered by the poor migrants after they get to American soil.

And they’ve made sure the whole country knows the details about the separated families and the tragic deaths of six kids in U.S. custody – all of which, of course, are entirely the fault of a man named Trump.

But the mainstream media is shameful.

They have consistently underplayed the scope of the invasion problem, its economic and social costs, its causes (bad immigration laws and a chicken Congress) and ignored its many other victims – the American ones.

The migrant invasion has hurt the overworked border patrol officers, the people and property owners in the towns at the border, American taxpayers and the poorest citizens of the USA whose unskilled jobs are most likely to be taken by migrants.

Now we have cities and towns far from the border becoming the latest victims of Washington’s failure to fix immigration.

It’s their citizens who are going to have to pay for a lot of the food, housing, policing, education and healthcare of the migrants.

The saddest part is that this politically created mess on our border is not going to change.

Congress isn’t going to do anything and it won’t let Trump do anything.

It should be up to the public to clean out the bums in the House and Senate, but voters won’t do anything because though most of them think Congress is a cesspool of incompetent cowards they also think their home congressperson is just great.

Since the invasion of migrants from Central America is not going to stop anytime soon, you might as well go down to your town square or bus station and put up a “Welcome to America” sign.

Just make sure you write it in two languages.

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Copyright 2019 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].

Thanks to Alabama, abortion is back on the national stage again.

It was already becoming a hot political topic when Alabama’s legislature shocked the country this week with its super-strict anti-abortion law.

The Alabama Human Life Protection Act prohibits virtually any abortion to be performed in the state, not even for rape and incest, and severely punishes doctors that perform them.

Like the so-called “heartbeat bills” passed by other states that prohibit abortions if a fetal heartbeat can be detected, it will never be enforced because lower courts will rule against it.

But many think the politically provocative Alabama law – which was passed by the votes of 25 white Christian state senators and signed by a white Christian female governor — is ultimately headed for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Pro-life people are hoping – and praying – that the Court will declare the Alabama law constitutional and effectively overrule Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that protects a pregnant woman’s right to choose whether or not to have an abortion.

But Alabama’s law is so strict, I’m afraid it might end up doing the opposite of what its backers want and result in upholding Roe v. Wade.

Despite the headlines and the chorus of outrage from celebrities like Lady Gaga, it’s going to take a long time for this new abortion fight to play out in the courts.

Meanwhile, we’re back to the same old tough question: What can we do about abortion?

The good news is that abortions in the United States have been dropping slowly each year since 1996, when the number was 1.36 million. The bad news is that the death toll today is still nearly 900,000.

According to government statistics, unmarried women account for 86 percent of all abortions. About 58 percent of abortions are women between the ages of 20 and 29 and almost 10 percent are between 15 and 19.

How do we reduce that terrible 900,000 number? What can we do to ensure that fewer unmarried pregnant women – the youngest ones, especially – have to resort to abortion?

I have one simple idea I like to share with people around the country that can begin the process of lowering the abortions in their state, their county, their town – one baby at a time.

When I speak to pro-life Christian groups I always point out that the preponderance of young girls who get abortions believe in God and come from Christian homes.

How can this be?

One reason is that too many young girls are getting abortions because they are being raised in good Christian homes by fathers who warn them over and over to never disgrace their family by getting pregnant.

Because they know if they get pregnant they will be shunned by their family and friends, or in some cases no longer even welcome in their own homes, the girls find a way to secretly have an abortion.

When I speak to these pro-life groups, I ask the audience, “How many of you know John 3:16?”

“‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.'”

A hundred percent of the people in the room will raise their hands and say, “Yes, I know John 3:16.”

“Yes, you do,” I say. “And how many of you really live it and understand it?”

What I ask next is, “As God gave his son to die on the Cross for our sins, how many fathers are willing to get on that Cross to die for their own daughter’s sins?”

It’s not complicated: Fathers need to have a loving, forgiving heart, as God had a loving, forgiving heart.

When fathers become the loving, forgiving God in their home who embraces their child even though she has made mistakes, I tell the audience, their daughters will no longer feel they have to run to the government or Planned Parenthood to get a secret abortion.

Instead, I say, they’ll be able to feel they can come home, be loved and embraced by their father as we are all loved and embraced by God – and have their baby.

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Copyright 2019 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].