Showing posts with label President Reagan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label President Reagan. Show all posts

Saturday, October 19, 2013

Matthews Takes Break from Calling Opponents Racist to Lecture America on Civility

Okay, that headline is a little misleading. MSNBC host Chris Matthews never really took a break from calling his opponents racists and paranoids while engaging on a media blitz promoting his book about civility and amity in politics.
Matthews is presently touring the media universe and recalling the history which he was privileged to witness and record in his new book, Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked. The theory is that politics in the nation’s capital used to end at 6 o’clock when bitter partisan rivals would drop their disagreements and have a friendly scotch together. 
That era of comity, Matthews submits, is gone. Exploring this theme in The Boston Globe on Friday, Matthews cites the wisdom of former House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s chief counsel, Kirk O’Donnell, to explain why Washington worked in the 1980s but fails so spectacularly today.
“It was Kirk who not only taught me the rules of politics, but, just as important, that there are rules,” Matthews writes. “I believe Speaker O’Neill and President [RonaldReagan honored that truism to a T.”
When I first met the conservative hero — he had come to Capitol Hill to give an early State of the Union — I tried breaking the ice. “Welcome to the room where we plot against you,” I offered. “Oh no,” Reagan countered. “It’s after six. The speaker told me that here in Washington we’re all friends after six.”
“Critics can say what they will to diminish the importance of that sentiment,” Matthews continues. “I believe it masks a far deeper value. It said that after all the fighting, all the battling of left and right here in this country, we’re in this thing together. In the end what matters is the system of self-government itself. It’s what gives us the chance to make things better.”
This is an important sentiment and Matthews is correct that it has faded from relevance in recent years. Many on the grassroots right and left, and some in Washington like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), have no apparent need for what they denigrate as the “professional wrestling” aspect of politics.
In this sense, Matthews is right; the period in which politics was characterized by pugnacity on the legislature floor but concord when the cameras were off is slipping away. However, Matthews is probably the single worst person to remind the public of this fact, considering all he has done in the past several years to exacerbate tensions, smear his political foes, and dishonestly delegitimize their ideas.

Monday, August 13, 2012

Obama cuts Medicare more than Romney would


To borrow a phrase from President Reagan, there they go again.
As soon as Mitt Romney announced Congressman Paul Ryan as his vice presidential running mate the Democrats again started with their debunked and discredited MediScare campaign. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee called Ryan “the architect of the Republican plan to kill Medicare” in a fundraising message sent by DCCC Executive Director Robby Mook. A false charge that the left-leaning Politifact called the 2011 “lie of the year.”
As pointed out by The Washington Examiner’s Joel Gehrke, Politifact rebuked Democrats for engaging in such scare tactics:

“A complicated and wonky subject with life-or-death consequences, health care is fertile ground for falsehoods,” the fact checker said. “The Democratic attack about ‘ending Medicare’ was a pervasive line in 2011 that preyed on seniors’ worries about whether they could afford health care.”
The Democrats didn’t stop there. Obama spokesman Jim Messina said Ryan’s plan “would end Medicare as we know it by turning it into a voucher system, shifting thousands of dollars in health care costs to seniors.” That is no more true than the DCCC’s MediScare claim. As explained by Avik Roy, the Wyden-Ryan plan would only apply to Americans younger than 55 years of age, and gives those younger individuals the option of remaining in the traditional Medicare program, or choosing a comparable private-sector insurance plan.

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