My review of Tony Hendra’s ‘Father Joe’ and account of George Tenet’s resignation are now both posted to the left.
QUOTE OF THE DAY: “In 1983, I was confined to an eight-by-ten-foot prison cell on the border of Siberia. My Soviet jailers gave me the privilege of reading the latest copy of Pravda. Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of President Ronald Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan’s “provocation” quickly spread throughout the prison. We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth – a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us.” – Natan Sharansky, in the Jersualem Post.
NOT SO FATUOUS: Ramesh Ponnuru dissents from my view that Ronald Reagan was more socially liberal than much of the Republican Party today. He writes that
Some people, eager for a Reagan in their own image, make it sound as though he were a social liberal – as though he had never written “Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation.” To compare Reagan to Arnold Schwarzenegger is fatuous.
Hmmm. I did not describe Reagan as a “social liberal.” (I wrote that “If Reagan has an inheritor, it isn’t George W. Bush, but, in a limited sense, Arnold Schwarzenegger…”) Reagan was opposed to abortion, and regarded Roe vs Wade (rightly, in my view) as terrible law. He did precious little to advance civil rights. But he was definitely more easy-going about modernity than the current Republican leadership. He barely mentioned abortion in his eight terms of office, and never addressed a pro-life rally in person. He rarely went to church as president and was the first president to have an openly gay couple sleep over in the White House. He and his wife were no strangers to male homosexual company. Reagan also appointed the first woman to the Supreme Court, and in Anthony Kennedy, gave birth to the judicial father of the gay rights revolution. His biographer, Lou Cannon, wrote that Reagan was “repelled by the aggressive public crusades against homosexual life styles which became a staple of right wing politics in the late 1970s.” In 1978, Reagan put his career on the line opposing the Briggs Initiative in California that would have barred gay teachers from working in the public high school system. In an op-ed at the time, Reagan wrote:
“Whatever else it is, homosexuality is not a contagious disease like the measles. Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual’s sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child’s teachers do not really influence this.”
That was 1978 – a very enlightened position at the time. You might quibble with this analysis, but describing Reagan’s cultural and political similarities with Schwarzenegger is by no means “fatuous”. Both Schwarzenegger and Reagan hailed from California; both came from the socially liberal world of Hollywood; both were and are conservative pragmatists; both managed to reach across regional and cultural lines to win support. Bush, in contrast, is a Texan, culturally moored in the religious right, with limited ability to reach voters in socially liberal milieus. That’s my point. I think it stands.
The Dish 