Cagle World

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

Am I the only Catholic who thinks the church needs to consider getting rid of the old guard – all the way up to the Pope?

That may be the only way to finally purge the predatory priests who have been allowed to exist within the bowels of the Catholic Church for so long.

The church has been rocked in recent years by sexual abuse scandals in Ireland, Australia, Chile, Boston, LA …

Then two weeks ago we got the shocking results of the country’s largest investigation ever into the sex crimes of Catholic priests.

A grand jury in Pennsylvania identified more than 300 “predator priests” in six dioceses who over the course of 70 years had molested and raped nearly 1,000 children, mostly boys.

The bombshell report named the priests who had been caught abusing kids, and in graphic and sordid detail it described what they did ,’ again and again, even after their superiors learned of their molesting.

According to the grand jury report, the priests’ serial sexual abuse was only possible because of a church-wide cover up that reached all the way to the Vatican.

The scandal in Pennsylvania is the familiar horror story: The children who were victimized were not believed while the pedophile priests were protected by the church.

The priests were not defrocked, not reported to police and were often moved to other parishes where their history of abuse was kept quiet and they were able to prey on more children.

As usual, the Vatican’s PR machine said all the right things.

A spokesman expressed “shame and sorrow” and decried the pattern of abuse and coverup in Pennsylvania as “criminally and morally reprehensible.” He said the abuse “robbed survivors of their dignity and their faith.

Earlier this week Pope Francis himself issued a letter in seven languages admitting the church had shamefully failed to protect or care for “the little ones,” whose pain “was long ignored, kept quiet or silenced.”

No kidding.

The pope also vowed to prevent further cover-ups of what he correctly called “crimes” and promised accountability for the abusers — and those above them who permitted the abuse to continue or covered it up.

That sounded good, but at least one Cardinal, Sergio Obeso Rivera of Mexico, didn’t get the message.

Obeso Rivera said this week that victims of priestly sexual abuse ,’ i.e., children ,’ should be “ashamed” to accuse “men of the church.”

Maybe something the cardinal said was lost in translation, but if Pope Francis is serious about cleaning up the church it has to get rid of men like Obeso Rivera.

It’s his generation that has been protecting pedophile priests for decades.

It’s because of old men like him that the people in the pews don’t believe the church is ever going to do what it should to solve its predatory priest problem.

It’s because of old men like the Mexican cardinal that the church is fighting for a statute of limitations on filing child sexual abuse charges instead of fighting to have no statute of limitations on sex abuse at all.

There’s no statute of limitations for murder and there shouldn’t be one for child molesting.

The molesting of a child is the murdering of a soul.I know from experience that when a young boy is molested, as I was by a camp counselor in 1953, it is something that affects you for the rest of your life.

Maybe the Catholic Church needs to start with a clean slate.

It does no good for the pope to meet with kids who’ve been sexually abused and tell them how sorry he is when he has old cardinals in power like Obeso Rivera who believe it’s the child’s fault.

If the pope doesn’t have the guts to take away the red cap, the miter, from a Mexican cardinal who makes that kind of idiotic statement, then maybe the pope needs to be replaced also.

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Copyright 2018 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’s the mainstream liberal media’s most overblown Trump crisis of the week?

First, it was the president’s tweet calling former staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman a “dog” for betraying him and his administration with her new book, “Unhinged,” and her stash of secret White House recordings.

Then on Wednesday came the president’s revocation of the security clearance of John Brennan, Obama’s former CIA director and full-time Trump basher.

From the liberal media’s reaction, you’d have thought President Trump had sentenced Brennan to death and declared himself dictator for life.

The New York Times called it “a striking act of retaliation against an outspoken critic.”

Poor hysterical Andrea Mitchell of NBC, who pretended to worry that the president was “denying his own CIA … access to the wise counsel of Brennan,” said the action was “akin to the Nixon enemies list.”

Trump’s action was, as usual, pure Trumpian. Brennan definitely deserved to have his security clearance taken away.

Instead of acting like a respectable ex-government servant and keeping his partisan comments to himself, he’s been acting like a political hack or MSNBC talk show host.

After the Trump-Putin press conference in Helsinki, for example, Brennan tweeted that the president’s performance “rises to & exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors.’ It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you? ”

Other former Obama/Hillary partisans with security clearances who’ve been investigating or critiquing Trump and his staff are reportedly being considered for the same treatment – including James Clapper, James Comey and FBI super villains Peter Strzok, Lisa Page and Bruce Ohr.

By the way, the whole security-clearance issue for former intelligence officials has been blown out of proportion by the media.

There’s a long history of allowing the clearances for certain officials to continue from one administration to the next. It’s practical. It has worked. That’s why it was done.

But in the past the officials from the previous administrations were not professional public enemies of the new president.

Some people apparently think that Brennan and the other ex-Obama people with security clearances are able to just walk into their nearest federal building and start looking at top-secret stuff.

No, they can’t do that. They have to be invited by the current administration to come and look at material or give them advice based on their experiences or knowledge.

Even Mitchell knows there’s no way in hell the Trump administration is going to ask any of those Obama/Hillary partisans to come in to help.

As usual, the president messed up. He managed to turn a decision he had every right to make into a vindictive political and personal act. If he’s going to pull security clearances on Obama alums, he should have done it on everyone at the same time and done it a long time ago.

My problem with revoking the clearances is that once a president goes down this road, it’s bar-the-door Sally.

We Republicans may all be happy and excited about what Trump did to Brennan, but one day were going to be angry and upset when a Democrat president does it to one of our guys.

We obviously live in a different presidency today than ever before. Things are much different.

Can anyone ever remember a former CIA director pointing a finger and speaking ill of a sitting president? Or a former president speaking ill of a sitting president?

This is the post-Trump world were living in now. We’ve lost complete respect for everything and everyone in Washington.

We’re now at a point where no one in D.C. works together. No one looks for common ground.

The reality is, while this is going on in D.C., the American economy is growing at 4.1 percent, unemployment is down dramatically and taxes and regulations have been cut.

What gets lost in the big media’s over-the-top coverage of petty D.C. beltway crap like the Omarosa tapes and revoked security clearances is that America is doing pretty great – again.

–

Copyright 2018 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].

Tweet Presidentially, Mr. Trump

Trump is still being Trump.

Whether he’s holding his stand-up political rallies in Wilkes-Barre or Ohio, or delivering his incendiary early morning tweet storms, he’s not going to change his wild and crazy ways.

He’s been doing a lot of great stuff in Washington, but if he wants to stay there he’d better be careful.

The raw party numbers are against him.

Last time around, in 2016, the Democrats had a deplorable candidate – Hillary Clinton – who lots of Democrats didn’t like, either, and therefore didn’t show up to vote for at the polls.

Now Democrats have someone even bigger to collectively hate – Donald Trump.

He’s already given them plenty of reasons to put on their “Impeach Trump Hats” and get out and vote for Democrats in the November congressional elections.

But last week the president made things more difficult for himself by foolishly making a few million new enemies in the sports world by personally attacking LeBron James.

Responding to the negative things the NBA superstar had said in a CNN interview with professional Trump-hater Don Lemon, the president tweeted:

“LeBron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon. He made LeBron look smart, which isn’t easy to do. I like Mike!”

Though the president sided with Michael Jordan fans in the great debate over who’s the greatest NBA player of all time, “Mike” sided with LeBron James, who had charged the president with using athletics and athletes to divide the country.

Through a spokeswoman, Jordan responded, “I support LeBron James. He’s doing an amazing job for his community.”

Though the Lemon interview included CNN’s standard anti-Trump political slant, it was focused on James’ foundation’s contribution of $2 million to help at-risk public school kids in his hometown of Akron, Ohio.

The tweeter in chief might have been pleased with himself for scoring a few political dunks and inflaming the anti-Trump media for the millionth time.

But if he wants to keep Congress Republican this fall, or have a second term, he’s going to have to change – and learn.

We know he gets beat up unfairly by the liberal media and Democrats every day, all day.But so did Ronald Reagan. My father fought back on the issues or made jokes, but he never attacked anyone personally.

President Trump should not have kept quiet about the Lemon and LeBron insults, but he’s got to learn how to turn his enemies’ blind hatred of him to his own advantage.

He should have tweeted something like, “I’m sorry LeBron disagrees with me personally and doesn’t appreciate the historically low unemployment rates and middle-class tax cuts my policies have created. But I like what he’d doing for those third and fourth graders in Akron. Our star athletes can do great things for their communities and I hope others follow LeBron’s generous example.”

It wouldn’t have been very Trumpian. It wouldn’t have fit in a tweet. And it wouldn’t have gotten the liberal media’s panties in a twist for three days.

But it would have immediately turned Lemon’s and LeBron’s cheap shots back on them and the rest of the liberal media and allowed the president to score a few political three-pointers of his own.

As some point President Trump has to rise above this personal crap.

His family already knows how to do it. First Lady Melania Trump publicly supported James’ work in Akron through a spokesman. First Daughter Ivanka supported the press against her father, saying she didn’t think journalists were the “enemy of the people.”

In one smart tweet the president could have turned the tables on Lemon and LeBron.

The liberal media would never have given him credit for taking the high road, but that’s OK. It’s time the man who is president of us all starts acting presidential.

It’d be for his own political good. But more important, it’d be for the good of the country.

–

Copyright 2018 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, and won’t have a new column this week. He will return the week of August 6.

If a liberal like Jesse Jackson went on CNN and accused my father of being a “known womanizer” like President Trump, conservatives across America would go off the rails.

They’d defend the reputation of Ronald Reagan to the max and blast Jackson for his false and evil equivalency.

They’d point out that it is totally outrageous to compare the personal lives of President Trump and my father.

Yet look what happened last week when a prominent conservative evangelical pastor from Dallas went on Fox News and called my father a “known womanizer.”

The Rev. Robert Jeffress, who’s a Fox contributor, was asked by Ed Henry to respond to another minister who had accused Republican lawmakers of selling their good Christian souls by supporting a serial bed-hopper like Trump.

“You know,” Jeffress responded, “this is not an unusual thing – we’ve been here before. Back in 1980, evangelicals chose to support a twice-married Hollywood actor who was a known womanizer in Hollywood. His name was Ronald Reagan. …

“The reason we supported President Reagan was not because we were supporting womanizing or divorce. We supported his policies.”

When I heard Jeffress say that I blew my top and started angrily tweeting.

The first tweet I fired off to the Southern Baptist minister was pretty blunt – “All I can say is go F yourself.”

My second tweet was “Dr. Jeffress. How dare you compare my father to Trump.”

Apparently, I was the only conservative Reagan Republican in North America who actually cared that Pastor Jeffress was casually throwing my father under the bus to support his beloved sinner-in-chief.

All I heard from my fellow conservatives in the twittersphere was crickets -and a week later I still do.

What that holy man from Dallas said was absolutely outrageous.

He equated my father – who was divorced from my mother Jane Wyman when he was dating in Hollywood and not yet married to Nancy – to Donald Trump, who was dating Playboy playmates and who knows who else when he was married.

What was more outrageous, however, was that no conservative Republicans or Fox commentators rose up in defense of my father and his reputation.

As I also pointed out in a tweet last week, all those conservative talk show hosts and politicians who keep saying how much they love Ronald Reagan are either lying or have lost their spines and a pair of other things.

I don’t believe those so-called “Reagan conservatives” anymore.

If they wouldn’t stand up and defend my father against a vile and uninformed statement from someone like Jeffress’, there’s no reason to assume they love my father at all.

I don’t care what the president of the United States does in his personal life. I care what he does as president of the United States.

If you want to defend Trump, fine.

But for God’s sake, why would you use my father to make excuses for a president who has cheated on every woman he’s been married to?

To rephrase that famous old line, Rev. Jeffress, “I knew Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was a friend of mine. And Donald Trump ain’t no Ronald Reagan – a vice versa.”

–

Copyright 2018 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].

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Yes, President Trump screwed up in front of the whole world at the Helsinki Summit.

But Democrats and the anti-Trump media have a much more serious long-term problem – they’re still out of their minds.

They still actually think the Great Russian Collusion Hoax is going to win them the House and chase President Trump out of the White House.

It hasn’t been widely reported, but after last week’s indictment of Russian intelligence officers by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office for trying to disrupt the 2016 election, half the Democrats in Congress had to sneak over to Chris Matthews’ office to get an emergency Trump Derangement Syndrome booster shot.

“Russia Tried to Sway 2016 Election!!!” is now the crazy Democrats’ favorite new front-page scare-headline.

Trump of course is somehow supposed to be responsible for Russia’s meddling, according to the fake media, even though all the hacking and swaying occurred when the Obama gang was in power.

Not that the Trump-hate media care, but here’s an old newsflash I found under my desk:

The Russians have been screwing with other people’s elections forever.

We’ve been screwing with other people’s elections forever.

Here are some other newsflashes for the media:

The Russians have spies in America. We have spies in Russia.

China has spies in America. We have spies in China.

Basically, every country with a GDP greater than Chad’s has spies in other countries.

Yes, Trump took a hit in Helsinki. Vladimir Putin was this week’s one-and-only big winner, thanks to the media’s hatred of Trump and the president’s gaffes.

While Trump was cleaning up his mess and “clarifying” his press conference quotes to keep the intelligence agencies from defecting to Russia, Putin probably was in a dacha somewhere laughing his butt off and drinking Stoli.

His dirty work is done. No one laid a glove on him in Helsinki and he’s disrupted everything in America he set out to disrupt.

Our political system has been in chaos for two years over Russian collusion and nonstop Trump hate. We no longer trust our president, our elections, our political parties or our major media, though that’s nothing new.

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha – everyone is playing partisan gotcha politics.

When Trump is involved, of course, the liberal media cover each new crazy tweet, gaffe or controversial executive order like it’s a war crime that has never been committed by a president before.

But to be fair, the left and the right tribes both play the gotcha game.

If it had been President Obama slow-dancing with Putin in public at that press conference, imagine how Fox News, talk radio and the rest of the conservative media would have reacted.

Oops.

Obama did get caught playing footsies with the Russkies in March of 2012 when he accidentally spoke into a hot mic, telling then-President Dmitri Medvedev to assure then-good guy Putin that he’d have more flexibility on a nuclear missile deal after the fall election.

A few Republicans, like presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, made a stink.

But the words “collusion” and “traitor” and “impeachment” were never uttered in prime time or on page one because the entire Bicoastal liberal media-sphere rose up as one Andrea Mitchell to explain away or downplay Obama’s shifty promise.

For the record, the New York Times ran its March 26 story, “Microphone Catches a Candid Obama,” on Page A14. That’s not the front page.

President Trump will never get that kind of sweet deal from the liberal media for the next six years, so he needs to learn a few basics I picked up in the second grade.

He has to think before he speaks. And he has to stop taking everything so personally.

At that press conference in Helsinki the president was his own worst enemy. He would have saved himself a lot of grief if had just come out, turned to Putin right away and said, “Cut this hacking crap out, Vlad. First question?”

–

Copyright 2018 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 a great July 4.

The skies over America the Beautiful were filled with fireworks, and the Twittersphere was filled with three Democratic senators blowing themselves up.

My U.S. senator Kamal Harris, Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren and New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand spent their holiday week attacking President Trump in speeches and tweets.

It was rough stuff from three lefties who think they’re going to be the next president and apparently think that tweeting like Trump is going to make their delusion come true.

Sen. Harris of California warned her followers that Trump is planning to nominate someone who’ll overturn Roe v. Wade because she’s certain he wants to punish women “for wanting to control their bodies, their lives, and their futures.”

Sen. Warren tweeted to her followers and fellow Native Americans that Trump’s short list of Supreme Court nominees “was hand-picked by right-wing extremists who want to criminalize abortions.”

And Sen. Gillibrand echoed socialist Bernie Sanders, hitting the president for strictly enforcing immigration laws that separated illegal immigrants from their children at the Mexican border.

No word on what CNN pundit-in-training Stormy Daniels tweeted, probably because she’s still touring the senior strip-club circuit.

The Democrats are in deep trouble and they know it. As Trump is only getting stronger, wilier and more popular, Democrats only get more desperate and stupid.

When Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement last week, the thought of President Trump naming his successor sent Democrats into a complete meltdown.

The mental state of the typical diehard Democrat or MSNBC host is now somewhere between terrified and my congresswoman Maxine Waters.

Somehow the bosses of the desperate Democrat Party have concluded that the only way they’re going to capture the House this fall and take the White House away from President Trump in 2020 is to out-Bernie Bernie.

Good luck with that plan in Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania, comrades.

But I’m a kinder and gentler Republican. I like to help the less fortunate when if I can.

I’d like to offer the Democratic leadership a free TV or radio spot to help them.

It’s not perfect, and it hasn’t been cleared yet by the Russians. But maybe they can use it in their fall media campaign.

Here goes:

“IF YOU WANT TO SEE TRUMP IMPEACHED, VOTE FOR US ON NOVEMBER 6.

“IF YOU WANT NANCY PELOSI IN CHARGE OF THE HOUSE AGAIN, VOTE FOR US.

“IF YOU WANT SOCIALISM FOR AMERICA LIKE THEY JUST VOTED FOR IN NEW YORK, VOTE FOR US.

“IF YOU WANT TO ELIMINATE BORDER PROTECTION, VOTE FOR US.

“IF YOU WANT A WEAK MILITARY, VOTE FOR US.

“IF YOU DON’T LIKE YOUR FEDERAL INCOME TAX CUT, VOTE FOR US.

“IF YOU WANT MORE ABORTIONS, VOTE FOR US.

“IF YOU WANT TO TURN THE USA INTO CALIFORNIA, VOTE FOR US.

“IF YOU DON’T LIKE AMERICA’S OIL AND GAS BOOM, VOTE FOR US.”

I’ll leave a dozen other easy examples for desperate Democrats to think up. It’ll be easy for them, now that they’ve dropped their masks and are showing us their true socialist faces.

Maybe they can get help from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the socialist from the Bronx who knocked off 10-term incumbent House member Joe Crowley in a Democrat primary last week.

She’s only 28, but I hear some people think she’s the future of the Democratic Party.

If that’s true, that’s good news for Republicans. The only thing we’ll have to worry about now is who we should pick to succeed President Trump in 2024.

–

Copyright 2018 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].

I understand why the national media is so obsessed over the story of children of illegal immigrants being separated from their parents at the Mexican border.

It’s a heartbreaking sight to see photos of innocent little kids traumatized and crying – even when they were taken in the Obama era. It’s also great TV.

I also get why the Democrats can’t stop using the crying border kids as a political weapon.

It’s the only issue they have left.

The Pelosi Party can’t very well complain about the booming Trump economy, the low-low unemployment rates for blacks and Latinos or the threat of the president starting a war with North Korea.

The Democrats are so desperate they’re still trying to blame President Trump and his mean immigration rules for making the border kids cry.

But the American people know better. In every poll I’ve seen they place the blame squarely where it belongs – on the crying kids’ irresponsible parents.

I really don’t mind that much that the dominant national media keep showing crying kids who are being temporarily separated from their parents.

But I wish the news media – and the politicians of both parties — would spend as much time covering the crying children of America who are taken away from their parents every day and put into our broken and harmful foster care system.

Heartbreaking images of crying little Americans don’t show up on CBS, MSNBC or Facebook. They aren’t championed by politicians of either party. No protestors march on city hall and demand they be returned to their parents.

But at any given time there are about 400,000 American children placed in our horrible government-run foster care system. When they were taken from their abusive or drug-addicted parents’ homes – sometimes in the middle of the night – many of them suffered the same trauma as the border kids.

But half of our foster kids will never be reunited with their parents and only 20 percent will be adopted. Many will grow up being bounced around from foster home to foster home – as many as five, 10 or even 15 times – until they “age out” at 18.

Their stay in foster care hell doesn’t end there.

About 60 percent of foster care kids who age-out end up on the streets, in jail or are quickly recruited by human sex traffickers – many of whom are ex-foster kids.

You never get the tragic, infuriating and decades-old story of our failed foster care system told in the dominant media. All you get are crickets.

Our government foster care system is broken, harmful – and stupid. It takes young innocent children and turns many of them into bad kids and criminals.

Today it has more than 100,000 kids waiting to be adopted. A disproportionate percentage are black.

But government rules and concerns about mixed-race families make it so hard to adopt black children out of foster care that adoptive parents who are white are forced to go overseas.

It’s clear governments don’t know how to take proper care of children. Our foster care system, which proves that every day, should be ended or radically reformed.

But that’s never going to happen until the people who are so deeply concerned about crying immigrant kids at the border show the same sympathy and outrage for the hundreds of thousands of American foster kids who cry off camera.

Unfortunately, when it comes to foster care the people who are always saying “We’ve got to take care of the children” are oblivious or AWOL.

Where is the mainstream media?

Where are the great churches?

Where are the weeping celebrities, politicians and pundits?

Where are the angry protestors?

Where are the black leaders?

Where are President Obama and Maxine Waters?

Do they really care about crying children?

–

Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). 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].

It’s no surprise that Democrats and everyone in the liberal media are blaming President Trump personally for the crying immigrant children at the border.

He gets blamed for everything their hysterical minds can think of.

But it’s not up to him to fix what’s wrong with our messed-up immigration policies. It’s up to Congress.

The problem is, as Americans can see for themselves every day, Congress is broken ,’ and crawling with spineless politicians.

Our senators and representatives can’t or won’t come up with an immigration reform bill and send it to the president’s desk any time soon – just like they couldn’t or wouldn’t do so when Bush II and Obama were presidents.

Both parties are at fault.

For more than thirty years, no matter which party controlled Congress or the White House, they did nothing significant to fix our illegal immigration problem – which now should be more accurately described as “an illegal invasion problem.”

House Republicans today can’t even get their act together to pass an immigration bill and send it to the Senate, where they’d never get it passed anyway.

Meanwhile, cynical Democrats prefer to continue using footage of crying children as propaganda weapons in their 24/7 war against Trump and anyone bearing his name.

When Melania Trump flew down to Texas this week to see firsthand how illegal immigrants and their children are being treated at the Mexican border, some creepy media people made fun of her.

But she deserved applause, not laughs. She did something I bet 95 percent of the members of Congress have never done.

She actually went to find out what madness our border security people have to deal with every day.

No one with a heart likes to see kids crying or suffering behind chain-link fences (except the anti-Trump media who weaponize the image).

But children of illegal immigrants caught at the border have been separated from their parents for years.

It happened while Obama was president, though the liberal media didn’t notice or get hysterical about it or his other strict, Trumpian policies.

Now everyone in the media is appalled because it’s occurring under Trump?

I get it.

No one expects fairness or historical perspective from the liberal mainstream media when it comes to Trump. Like so many other issues, on this one the president was doomed no matter what he did.

When he told Congress that immigration was its job to fix, he was correct.

But Congress and the liberal media begged him: “Please, Mr. President. You can solve this tragic separation problem simply with your signature.”

So Trump did a 180.

He signed an executive order to cease his own administration’s practices and allow families (or alleged families) seeking asylum to be detained together until they were vetted or processed.

And what was his reward for his change of heart? People whined that it wasn’t enough or that it would make things worse.

Meanwhile, since spineless Congress isn’t going to touch immigration reform this year or in 2020 or maybe ever, what should we do?

There are no good or easy answers.

But if we really want to make sure kids and their parents from Honduras or Guatemala are kept together after we catch them trying to break into the United States, I’ve got a cheap and sensible idea we could try.

We should immediately put them on a nice bus and send them home. Actually, I stole the bus idea from Barack Obama.

In 2014 he told George Stephanopoulos on TV that he had a tough message for the families of Central America who were thinking of sneaking their kids into the USA: “Do not send your children to the borders. If they do make it, they’ll get sent back.”

Maybe President Trump should ask Obama if he has any other good advice.

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Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). 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].

You wonder why Fox News is Number One in cable?

It’s because CNN, MSNBC, NBC and the rest are so relentlessly negative about Donald Trump they force people to watch Fox to find out the truth about the growing economy or the historically low unemployment rates for blacks.

Take this week’s Singapore Summit.

No matter what President Trump accomplished in Singapore in his face-to-face meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, for Joe, Mika and their fellow foreign policy experts in the media, it was not enough.

Or it was too much.

Or Trump was naive or stupid.

Or he gave away too much.

Or he didn’t ask “Little Rocket Man” about his gulags.

Or he was just trying to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

My favorite complaint about the Singapore Summit from liberals was that by merely meeting with Kim Jong Un, President Trump gave a thug the legitimacy he didn’t deserve.

As if American presidents haven’t met with thugs like Kim Jong Un since the beginning of time.

Just two years ago Barrack Obama and a delegation of a thousand staffers, insiders and reporters flew into Havana to slobber all over Raul Castro and the ghost of his brother Fidel.

The in-bed-with-Obama embedded media loved Obama’s move. They called it historic. They called it a Berlin Wall moment – a step toward the liberation of the Cuban people.

The mainstream media never complained that Obama didn’t ask Comrade Raul to be nicer to the impoverished people living under his communist dictatorship or release the gay Cubans held in his prisons.

Not a peep from the MSM. Not even crickets.

Trump, on the other hand, can’t win with the mainstream media.

One month they’re saying his tough rhetoric about North Korea is going to start World War III. A month or two later they’re complaining his Singapore statement wasn’t strong enough and he was too soft on Kim Jong Un.

It reminds me of the way the liberal media treated my father back in the 1980s when he was calling the USSR “The Evil Empire” and trying to meet with Soviet leaders about nuclear arms control.

The mainstream media and the foreign policy establishment were constantly pushing my dad to hurry-up and meet with the USSR’s leaders, who kept dying on him until Mikhail Gorbachev came along.

The media of the day wanted my dad to sign a deal in Reykjave k with Gorbachev, ASAP. They wanted him to sign away Star Wars, take our missiles out of Europe – give up whatever it took to make the Soviets happy and avert Armageddon.

My father stuck to his guns.

He ignored the impatient liberal media, the foreign policy “experts” and some of his own staffers and within a few years the Berlin Wall was down and the USSR was history.

My father learned that negotiating successfully one-on-one with an enemy like Gorbachev is a process that takes time. The two leaders didn’t accomplish or sign anything at those meetings, but ultimately my father and Gorbachev developed a liking for each other.

But that relationship didn’t stop my father from telling Gorbachev at their first meeting that either you come to the table and negotiate in good faith or we’ll jack up our military spending and bankrupt you, which we eventually did in the long run.

Trump’s message to Kim Jong Un was similar, only blunter and much tougher – either you’ll come to the table or you’ll cease to exist.

Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump both used the negotiating tools they had in their hip pockets.

In the long run Trump may or may not be as successful as my father.

We’re still in the first days of a long process, but the biased media are impatient and irrational.

They want everything settled yesterday and the Korean Peninsula denuked tomorrow.

But even if it turns out the way they want, they’ll figure out some way to give the credit to Nancy Pelosi, Barrack Obama or Dennis Rodman long before they give it to President Trump.

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Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). 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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