It is startlingly instructive to see Bill Clinton seize the public limelight again immediately after the funeral rites for Ronald Reagan, to juxtapose the dignity of those rites with the deception of Clinton’s book, the national outpouring of grief and admiration for Ronald Reagan with the adolescent infatuation for Slick Willie.Bill Clinton’s intelligence and abilities exceeded Ronald Reagan’s - but they don’t count. It was their choices that made the difference between Clinton’s sleaze and Reagan’s nobility.This month, June 2004, the American people have been pulled between two poles: the positive of Ronald Reagan’s appeal to the best within them, and the negative of Bill Clinton’s appeal to irresponsibility and depravity. I am confident the pull of Ronald Reagan will be the stronger.One reason is that it’s too blindingly obvious that Bill Clinton’s book should have been entitled My Lie.

Last April, famed theoretical physicist Haim Harari, Chairman of the Davidson Institute of Science Education and former president (1988-2001) of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, gave a speech entitled “View from the Eye of the Storm.” It is a fascinating discursion by a brilliant mind on the conflict between Western Civilization and Islam.Dr. Harari singled out Iran as "the number one danger to the world today." Yes, Iran is waging war upon the United States, is the primary sponsor of terrorism in Iraq, and will soon be capable of indulging in nuclear blackmail and terror. Yet it is not Iran that is the world’s primary danger. It is Colin Powell’s State Department which is waging war against George W. Bush and is doing everything it can to keep Iran’s Islamofascist regime in power.

In the Monday, June 14, 2004 edition of The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan wrote a despicable hit piece on her fellow speechwriters in the Reagan White House. It was entitled “The Ben Elliott Story,” supposedly a tribute to the White House Chief Speechwriter told in the context of seeing him at President Reagan’s National Cathedral funeral service - yet it ended up being a nauseating attack on her former colleagues.The people she attacked are my friends, and it so happened that I attended President Reagan’s service with them. That she took this sacred occasion to vindictively smear them is beyond and beneath contempt. I was compelled to write the following letter to The Wall Street Journal:To: Ned Crabb, Letters Editor, Wall St. JournalIt is a sad and bizarre spectacle to see Peggy Noonan immolate her reputation in a gratuitous spasm of spite. As someone who worked closely with the Reagan White House speechwriters for five years - 1983-1988 - I know the source of the resentment. She was never part of the team.

Back in early February, I told you that Ariel Sharon’s purpose in building a Security Fence walling off the “West Bank” was to precipitate a civil war among Palestinian terrorist groups (The Coming Palestinian Civil War, TTP Weekly Report, February 6, 2004). Four months later, we can see Sharon’s strategy is clearly working.In those intervening months, terrorist attacks are way down while the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) has relentlessly hunted terrorists down and either killed or stymied them. Hamas has been decapitated. Arafat, sick and dying, finds his grip on power slipping away. Even senior members of the Palestinian Authority run by Arafat are admitting that it would disintegrate except that it pays salaries to 140,000 workers - which are now in serious arrears.The February essay predicted a dark period of murderous chaos with Palestinian militants killing each other off in a warfare of competing mafias. Thus there are now news reports that militants in the West Bank and Gaza have “created a lawless society in which citizens complain more about the armed gangs than about Israeli soldiers.” Yet there are indications that this could be short-lived.

This past week has seen a good many Reaganaut Reunions here in Washington DC. At several of them, we raised our glasses to toast Gorby - Mikhail Gorbachev. All of the Reagan Doctrine guys loved Gorbachev - but not quite in the same way as did the State Department squishes.Mikhail Gorbachev seemed to burst from nowhere when he became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) and leader of the USSR in March of 1985. The liberal media swooned over the smiling suave telegenic Russian - so smart, so sophisticated, so capable of making a shining success of Soviet Communism! We did everything we could to encourage the swooning press’ delusion - for we knew the truth about Gorby.

In 1989 on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I had a meeting in Prague, Czechoslovakia with a group of Anti-Communists dedicated to ridding their country from Soviet rule. Their leader was Martin Palous, a founder of the Charter 77 democracy movement. He explained that when he and other Czech intellectuals such as Vaclav Havel formed Charter 77 in 1977, they did so against all hope. “To dream of real freedom for our country was unthinkable,” he said. “The best we could ask is some little bit of light, some small increase of breathing space for us to think and talk more freely.” Then the world changed: Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States.

In October of 1965, Ronald Reagan came to speak at UCLA. I was a senior, and it was a depressing time to be a College Republican. Barry Goldwater had been thrashed the previous year, and my professors were so left-wing that I took one to court because of her biased grading. The UCLA Student Union was packed, SRO. There was a buzz that Reagan was considering running for governor against the entrenched Democrat, Pat Brown. My buddy and fellow CR Bill Anthony and I sat expectantly in the audience. As Reagan began to speak, he filled the room with an energy that was both exciting and soothing, and the thousand-plus students were entranced. Then he caught us by surprise.