I just finished writing a column about President Reagan; maybe it will appear this coming week in some publication. But I thought I would include a note here about this great and vastly underestimated man, who was the only politician of his age with the courage and vision to call evil evil, and deal with it accordingly.
Today resembles the darkest days of the 1970s, when the Soviet Union was advancing with impunity and given a free pass by what were not yet known as the forces of political correctness. To tell the truth about jihad today is the same as telling the truth about Communism then: unpopular, even ridiculous. Few grasped the urgency of the moral imperative to rescue the oppressed and defend the threatened, and few do now.
Ronald Reagan did. In those days I despised him for it; only later did I realize that we campus radicals, with all our thirst for justice, were just tools of the totalitarians. Nothing has changed on that front. What may have changed are the spiritual and cultural forces that enabled America to bring forth Ronald Reagan when we needed him. Will we be able to do it again? Will we survive if we do not?
May his memory be eternal.