In all seriousness I find it hard to believe anyone watches Chris Matthews anymore.
Check him out here from tonight’s show in which he distorts the facts to “find his Reagan mojo” (quoting Michael Steele from the same segment). It’s quite amusing to watch as these liberal Democrats now….NOW….try to become Reaganites. Give me a break: (h/t Newsbusters)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR88Hghd6O0[/youtube]
Scott Whitlock found even more Matthews distortions during the same show:
Matthews, who did no fact checking, played a clip provided by the Congressional Progressive Caucus from a September 26 1987 Reagan radio address. In the brief snippet, Reagan was heard asserting that the “United States has a special responsibility to itself and the world to meet its obligations.”
The left-wing anchor disingenuously spun the famous Republican’s words as a future warning against GOP “terrorists”: “There he is saying these brinkmanship this trickery around the time of a deadline just to get your way, is sort of economic terrorism.” Listening to more at the address, however, debunks Matthews’ Democratic talking points.
Reagan also insisted, “You don’t need more taxes to balance the budget. Congress needs the discipline to stop spending more, and that can be done with the passage of a constitutional amendment to balance the budget.”
Reagan was a true conservative and, as that press conference illustrates, he understood that raising taxes does not help an ailing economy.
This awful segment from this awful show did produce this great moment tho.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9M3pb7Fq4w[/youtube]
Awesome job Mr. Steele.
See author page
The entire unedited 1987 news conference, if anyone is interested:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
The clip that appeared on Chris Matthews was taken from Part 1. The tax question comes up several times during the news conference. If you want to hear what Joan Walsh said after Michael Steele’s interruption, the entire segment is here.
Who is Dhis Matthews at MessNbc?
Reagan wouldn’t be a McConnell “Republican”, though he would definitely consider Jim DeMint a fellow.
BTW, congrats on a The Younger Limbaugh-Lanche.
In my opinion there are only a few groups who watch shows like this:
(1) People who have gone through government indoctrination centeres (public schools).
(2) People on Federal welfare of any kind and want to keep getting it.
(3) Federal employees who want to keep their jobs and keep getting great pay raises.
(4) People who want to overthrow the USA.
(5) Bloggers who tell us to go to a link they put in their post.
Curt,
I am going to give you a compliment: You would make a lousy democrat.
I went to my 1st TEA party in Seal Beach, CA.
There, about 1/3rd were Republicans, 1/3rd Independents and 1/3 Democrats.
I met some very nice Democrats there.
Four of the ones I met told me they had voted Reagan as part of the Reagan Democrat phenomenon.
Most of the Democrats I met that day were newer than the old Reagan Democrats, though.
These were fiscally more conservative.
The original Reagan Democrats were more socially conservative than fiscally so.
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The very idea that Obama could pretend to step into Reagan’s shoes as if he is a compromiser of any sort is ludicrous.
Obama had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to sign an extension of the ”Bush tax cuts.”
He has force fed the country on one bill after another that nobody had read, but him and his side.
I have seen a few cross over votes for a few bills, but nothing of a truly bi=partisan nature under Obama…..OH, wait!….one major exception: all 97 Senators who voted on Obama’s budget plan voted NO.
E-Trade Baby has higher ratings than Chris Matthews has. True story.
Nobody can remember what Chris Matthews said only a few days ago.
But everybody can remember a Geico commercial from a month ago.
Chis Matthews is a bitchy and gossipy, old yenta. If you have ever
watched one of his dull, dreary, boring, tedious and monotonous
shows, you’ve seen all of his shows. They’re all the same tripe. He
hasn’t deviated from his gossipy yenta format for the past 20 years.
He doesn’t have any talent, none whatsoever. He can attribute his
tenure at MSNBC to the fact that he is the consummate brown-noser.
But let’s not forget that despite President Reagan’s great free market talks, during his 8 years in office, the government:
Increased federal spending by 53%.
Tripled the federal debt.
Increased foreign aid by nearly 120%.
Doubled the Department of Education budget, despite promising to eliminate it altogether.
Hired almost 250,000 new federal employees.
Added more trade barriers than any administration since Herbert Hoover.
Ramped up the War on Drugs; created a new “drug czar’s office.”
Imposed a 100% tariff on some Japanese electronic products.
~John Stossel, Fox News
http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/stossel/blog/2011/02/07/realism-about-reagan
Reagan had a Democrat-controlled Congress during his Presidency. Anyone who talks about the increases in goverment size and goverment spending without also mentioning that is either ignorant or a propagandist.
Would JKF be a democrat to day? How about “nukem Truman”? Since both parties have slid so far to the left, it who knows. But, Regan was no darling of the GOP elites, he was forced upon them by the people.
They say it took a Carter to get us a Regan, just think about what we should get for the current POS.
Steveegg @ #3 – Mitch McConnell is a good, stable Republican. He is smarter and more savvy on his worst days than Jim DeMint is on his best days. That was why he was chosen by his peers to be their leader. Get real.
Watch Congressman Walsh hammer Sissy Matthews
GOP Rep. Walsh Yells At Chris Matthews: ‘Obama Doesn’t Send A Thrill Up My Leg’
Quite seriously, I find it hard to believe anyone watched Glen Beck regularly ever since he moved to FOX.
@JustAl: And that same should be said about any tax decreases, any President can do very little by themselves.
@JustAl: So G.W. Bush gave us Obama? One failure after another? When does the cycle end?
@Liberal1 (objectivity): #12
I got satellite recently and was glad Beck was in the package. I have never had cable or satellite till now, then he leaves me. It’s like the time my pet snail ran away on me. It was gone before I knew it.
I find it hard to believe someone could be as dumb and bigotted as liberal2, but there you are…
It cracks me up to see all these democrats going on about the “sanctity of the Constitution” in opposition to the balanced budget amendment. Like a democrat has ever used that document for anything other than toilet paper.
I grew up in a democratic party household. My father adored JFK. However, if he were alive today, my father would be a Republican. I truly believe the Republicans have become the democrats of old, and the democrats have lost their way and have gone off the deep end.
I used to be an independent. However when I had moved to KS many years ago, I had to be one or the other. I looked at my own voting record and found I usually voted Republican, so Republican I became.
@jim s:
You have to understand their mindset when it comes to that document. To them, it isn’t a strict set of rules for government, it is only a guideline for government to go by, and being such, they can pick and choose exactly those elements to live hard and fast by, and which ones they can twist to serve their purposes.
This is why liberal/progressives so staunchly defend 1st Amendment rights, even to the point of reading restrictions into it that are not there, but approve of government infringing upon citizens’ 2nd Amendment rights.
Honorable people would never think to break the rules in a game, such as baseball, but won’t hesitate to support breaking the rules the founding fathers set forth in the Constitution.
And to think Chris Matthews used to guest-host the Rush Limbaugh show. What happened?
@Wm T Sherman, #8:
Republicans recently controlled both the House and Senate for 12 consecutive years, with a republican in the White House during the last 6. Over those 12 years of republican congressional control the national debt increased from $4.8 trillion to $8.6 trillion.
Less that $1 trillion of that increase took place during the 6 years of the period that Clinton was president.
It all took place under a republican congressional majority.
Anyone who tries to pin the entire problem on democratic congressional control is totally ignoring the numbers and dates.
The national Debt to the Penny calculator can be found here, if you want to check the numbers.
@Nevercomingback:
I think the cycle will only end when the people stop, really stop, settling for the “lessor of two evils”. It’s hard to see that McCain would have been a hell of a lot better than “O” (unless he’d had the patriotism to resign and turn it over to Palin), as for “W”, he’s terrible. . . until you contemplate a Gore or Kerry presidency.
It may not end, but we at least need to push back harder IMHO.
Greg, you specifically went after Ronald Reagan. You don’t get to move the goal posts after the fact.
Reagan would not be on board with the GOP establishment of the last decade or so. Absolutely not. They spend way too much and have effectively settled for the country declining and going bankrupt more slowly.
You want some evidence of this? Perhaps people here recall that Ronald Reagan did not want to endorse his own Vice President, George H.W. Bush, for his 1988 presidential run. Did not want to endorse him at all. Reagan stalled and kept silent, but eventually came through for him, grudgingly, at the last possible moment when it became clear that Bush was inevitably going to be the Republican candidate. Bush I represented the “slow the decline” sort of RINO Republican that has compromised and played along with left wing Democrats, put money into new “compassionate” government programs, and added to the growth of government and the national debt. Reagan was vindicated in his distaste as Bush I went against his own public promise (“read my lips”) not to raise taxes, and went on to lose the ’92 election. Bush II was a big government “moderate” Republican very much like his father.
Although Bush I was replaced by Clinton, the Congress went Republican majority in the mid 1990s and forced deficit reduction upon Clinton, who was pragmatic enough to retrench and try to take credit for it.
You keep talking about 12 years here and 6 years there, and Republicans here and Republicans there, as if they are all interchangeable, as if the very real and dramatic differences between the particular years, situations, and people involved don’t matter. That’s a propaganda technique.
The 1980s were a long, long time ago. We are almost up against the true debt ceiling now – the inescapable one where nobody wants to loan the federal government any more money except at sky high interest rates because they start to doubt that they will ever be paid back. We’ve seen it coming for decades and the truly crazy deficit spending of the last three years has brought it to a crisis several years sooner than would otherwise have happened.
I have a couple of questions, Greg. We can see that trying to use Ronald Reagan as a mascot for the left wing of the Democratic Party is a new, coordinated strategy – it’s plain as day.
How did you, specifically, stumble across your Reagan talking points? Where did you first learn of them? Where do you go to get more material?
@Wm T Sherman, #23
In light of something like Cap, Cut and Balance, why should I–or anyone–expect the GOP to be any more likely to move toward reduced deficits than they were in the past? As Ron Paul points out, the bill is a total sham, exempting from the bill’s spending restraints the three biggest drivers of unsustainable debt:
Must Read: Ron Paul Shreds “Cut, Cap, And Balance”, And Basically Calls House Leaders Liars
The GOP is attempting to force that as an alternative to debt ceiling compromises that would actually put those items on the table to achieve several trillions in spending reductions. The House bill is nothing but posturing.
Here’s the full text of H.R. 2560, also known as The Cut, Cap and Balance Bill.
Note the defense spending exception in SEC. 316. (d), and the Social Security and Medicare exceptions in SEC. 317.(b) (1) and (2).
The short-term GOP strategy seems to be primarily about the 2012 elections. Blocking any further economic recovery under Obama via a threatened or realized debt default only furthers that goal. (Assuming they don’t crash the economy entirely. They’ve apparently ingested too much of their own propaganda, and don’t seem to grasp the fact that they’re playing fast and loose with a bottle of nitroglycerin. )
The long term goal seems to be primarily about preventing any high-end tax increases, and lowering high-end taxes even further, if possible. Clearly this policy hasn’t been beneficial to the debt situation previously; to continue with it, it will be necessary to slash spending wherever possible to pay for more high-end tax cuts–provided the cuts aren’t in areas that are highly profitable to certain special interests.
I’m not clear how this agenda will benefit the average Tea Party supporter or the average democrat, either one.
@Wm T Sherman, #24:
I’m fairly familiar with Reagan’s positions as I went for them hook, line, and sinker as a young man. I voted for him in two presidential elections before disillusionment with the theory behind his economic policies finally set in. I still admire the guy.
He’s hardly a mascot for the left. I think he is quite a good model for how a president should do his or her job and steer a course mindful of both sides of any debate. Obviously democrats aren’t trying to imply that Reagan would have endorsed their economic and social views. That would be ridiculous. The entire point has to do with what a very high-profile conservative said about debt ceiling brinkmanship.
Watching that old 1987 press conference really took me back. It made me a little sad, too. Reagan was no longer in top form by that point. Still very much Ronald Reagan, though. I wish the press had treated him with a little more deference. It seems weird to me that so many disliked all 4 parts being linked in post #1. Maybe people were annoyed that there was a link to the entire Chris Matthews segment.
“Obviously democrats aren’t trying to imply that Reagan would have endorsed their economic and social views. That would be ridiculous.”
But Greg, that’s exactly what they’re doing. And it is indeed ridiculous.
@Wm T Sherman:
There used to be official emails that included Democrat ”Talking Points of the Day,” in them.
But some radio and TV hosts started running all of the exact same worded sound bites for each day together and it formed a major embarrassment to the Dem. Party.
Seems there still are a few getting their daily ”letters from Hanoi” (as we used to call them) but they are not being parroted by as many as they used to be.
@Greg:
Greg, you really need to stop pushing that falsehood. Apparently, you didn’t actually read the entire bill itself, or put the sections relating to Defense, SS and Medicare in the proper context.
-One, and this is the biggest part where Paul is wrong, is that the spending for those three items are NOT $1 Trillion each. I pointed out in the other topic that in 2010, those three items totaled $2.1 Trillion, and that it is highly unlikely that $900 Billion would be added, between the three of them, in just one year.
-Two, the defense portion that is exempted has to do with that portion of the defense spending related to the War on Terror. The majority of the Defense Dept. spending is subject to the limits, however, when voted on, and approved, the government may exceed the budget authority for defense, but only IF, it is (1) Related to the War on Terror, (2) Is voted on and approved, and (3)That spending is still limited to just over $126 Billion.
-Three, the bill places no spending restrictions upon SS and Medicare, that is true. However, the only reason that it does so is so that the programs can continue to be funded, without extra restrictions, based on whatever the current laws affecting SS and Medicare are. Meaning, that if, in the future, either or both programs are looked at and it is decided to adjust the payouts, or eligibility, or whatever else, that it can be done so, and that full funding per that law will be available. In short, it guarantees that whatever the current SS and Medicare law says, it will remain fully funded.
Do not mistake that as being some kind of protection, or inaction, on those two programs. As I stated in the other topic, you’d think that liberal/progressives would be fully in support of that portion of it, as it guarantees that payments to grandma would continue no matter what.
So when Presidents talk about fiscal responsibility, or when people laud them for their fiscal policies or criticize them – it’s all baloney is it because the President is powerless in regards to fiscal policy? So if Reagan gets a free pass because the Democrats had control of congress does that mean Clinton also gets a free pass and now Obama gets one as well because the Republicans have control? Er except the President signs these bills so he has responsibility. Either Reagan was ineffectual and powerless so all his fiscal talk of restraint counts for very little or as POTUS he was the guy who signed off these bills when taxes were raised and should therefore take responsibility. You can’t have it both way especially when it varies depending who the President’s party happens to be at the time. Certainly the system of ‘checks and balances’ is a screwy gridlock system which enables those in Washington to fiddle while Rome burns.
@Smorgasbord: You said:
Actually Smorgs, more people watch airport radar and sonograms than watch MSLSD…
@Brian: You said:
HAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAAAHAHAHAAA!
Ahem, sorry. Lost control there for a moment.
Brian you are a funny guy, you should take it on the road.
McConnell is a politician.
DeMint is a Conservative.
BIG difference.
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@anticsrocks: #31
You get a lot more useful information from the air controller’s screen than you do from the MSM screen.
Let me translate what Greggie said:
Waaaaa!!!! It’s all Bush’s fault!!!!!!!!! Obama is doing his best!!!! Waaaaaaaaa!
@Smorgasbord: LOL, yep! Good point! 🙂
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I’m going to suggest an experiment: Let’s have all of the conservative bloggers and TV and radio shows not link or suggest going to ANY propaganda media sight and see what happens to their viewership. They could get together and set a date to not promote the sights until a certain date.
I joked about this in one post, but I got to thinking about it and wondered what would happen if they didn’t get free advertising from the conservatives.
@Smorgasbord: Good idea in theory, but implementation is a bitch. Sounds like a similar idea I heard when gas prices started climbing – “If everyone didn’t drive for one day, it would bring the oil companies to their knees.”
Not going to go into the obvious problems associated with that one, but it follows your same line of thought, Smorgs. Great idea, just damned hard to organize.
If it could be pulled off, it would be great to see the left react.
@ #32 – I don’t argue with fools, imbeciles, psychos, creeps, slimy low-lifes ….. or with assholes.
BTW, creep, I meant that in the nicest way. Can’t wait for your, um, snappy reply. LOL!!!!
@anticsrocks:
Actually I was suggesting that it was the fault of controlling republican majorities in both the House and Senate–although what happened during the last 6 years of that 12-consecutive-year period of republican majority rule compared with the first 6 years under Clinton clearly establishes that GWB was a deficit spending enabler.
@Greg: Like I said…
@Brainless: Really?
THAT’S the best you could come up with?
Pathetic.
But since you brought it up, at least we here at FA can rest easy at night knowing that you cleared it up for us.
We know now that despite the indications of your mental illness aside, at least you don’t argue with yourself.
Of course this new revelation about your personal life begs the question – if you avoid fools, imbeciles, psychos, creeps, slimy low-lifes and assholes, who do you talk with at family reunions??
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#41
Alomg with other people, who have made the same observation, I’ve noticed that, whenever I post comments on a a dreary blog, it comes alive and an increasing number of people take an interest in that blog.
I’ve noticed, also, that, adversely, whenever you post comments on a blog, it dries up, and only a few people without a life remain there. From which I must conclude that, out here in the real world, people have the same revulsion for your sliminess, you snotty, little creep.
It must be a bitch to have spent your entire useless life as such a loser. But you never learn. You’re too stupid to change.
BTW, I’m fllattered that you hold me in such high esteem, as you’ve said inadvertently, too stupid to realize how. You really need to conceal your jealousy, resentfulness, paranoia and your envy. It just makes you look only that much more psychotic. Like Bill O’Reilly says, I’m just looking out for you, babe. Grow up, you little creep.
This is my next to last post to you. I’ve wasted enough time with you already.
There is a lesson to be learned here, fool: Next time don’t start a fight that you can’t finish.
@brainless: Now what was it that I remember someone saying about name calling? Oh yeah, it was you brainless who said:
Thanks for announcing my victory. Although I wasn’t trying to “win” anything, I was merely giving you a taste of your own medicine; albeit with a panache that you are unable to attain.
So predictable. Your self esteem must be very low, for the only way you can build yourself up is by tearing others down. Sad, actually. Very sad.
I pity you, brainless. I really do.
You attack everyone that even refers to a comment you make. That is what is very telling.
LOL
Yeeaaahhhh riiiggghhhtttt. 😆
Enjoy your banishment.
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