{"id":8338,"date":"2011-01-18T19:44:18","date_gmt":"2011-01-19T00:44:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=8338"},"modified":"2011-01-19T10:36:24","modified_gmt":"2011-01-19T15:36:24","slug":"ronald-reagans-unlikely-defender-barbara-walters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/8338\/ronald-reagans-unlikely-defender-barbara-walters\/","title":{"rendered":"Ronald Reagan&#8217;s Unlikely Defender: Barbara Walters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With the 100th Anniversary of Ronald Reagan&#8217;s birth approaching next month, Reagan supporters and detractors alike are looking to cash in on our 40th President&#8217;s legacy. Sadly, it&#8217;s not clear which of those categories his son, Ron Jr., falls into.<\/p>\n<p>In a new book, &#8220;My Father at 100&#8221;, the junior Reagan claims that his father was suffering the effects of Alzheimer&#8217;s Disease during his second term. This is not a new allegation, but it&#8217;s one that has usually been limited to liberal innuendo in the past. No publisher worth his salt is going to let a book like this go to press without a pre-release date press bombshell, however, and Reagan&#8217;s closeness to his father (genetically speaking, at least) gives this claim more credence than it would otherwise enjoy.<\/p>\n<p>Remarkably, a defense of the Gipper is coming from an unexpected corner of the media. On today&#8217;s episode of &#8220;The View&#8221;, Barbara Walters &#8212; who moderated the 1984 presidential debate that the younger Reagan cites as evidence of his father&#8217;s deteriorating mental state &#8212; came out hard against the allegations. <a href=\"http:\/\/dailycaller.com\/2011\/01\/18\/barbara-walters-disputes-ron-reagans-book-claims-about-fathers-mental-state\/#ixzz1BRFdMUzZ\" target=\"_blank\">As noted by the Daily Caller<\/a>, she said:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cRon, Jr.\u2019s half-brother Michael said this is not true. This didn\u2019t happen,\u201d she continued. \u201cI\u2019m going to say something that I probably saw more of President Reagan in those years than either of his sons. He was not really close to them. And I did interview after interview. I didn\u2019t see any signs of dementia or Alzheimer\u2019s or whatever until after he left office.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>After all these years of Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, and Rosie O&#8217;Donnell, this is hardly penance for all of &#8220;The View&#8217;s&#8221; shots at conservatism. But it&#8217;s not a bad place to start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With the 100th Anniversary of Ronald Reagan&#8217;s birth approaching next month, Reagan supporters and detractors alike are looking to cash in on our 40th President&#8217;s legacy. Sadly, it&#8217;s not clear which of those categories his son, Ron Jr., falls into. In a new book, &#8220;My Father at 100&#8221;, the junior Reagan claims that his father [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2291,2290,2292,2294,2298,2293,818,2297,456,2296,1609,2295],"class_list":["post-8338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-alzheimers-disease","tag-barbara-walters","tag-dementia","tag-joy-behar","tag-michael-reagan","tag-reagan-centennial","tag-reagans-birthday","tag-ron-reagan-jr","tag-ronald-reagan","tag-rosie-odonnell","tag-the-view","tag-whoopi-goldberg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8338"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8338\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8342,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8338\/revisions\/8342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}