It’s Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday on Sunday, and everyone on the Right is jockeying for a piece of the Gipper’s legacy. No surprise, then, that the latest issue of the Weekly Standard — the magazine that helped bring you the Iraq War — is a “What Would Reagan Do?” special, with a cover featuring Reagan blowing out his birthday candles. This isn’t the first time the Standard’s editor, William Kristol, has wrapped himself in our 40th president’s mantle. In a famous 1996 article, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” Kristol and co-author Robert Kagan invoke the Gipper for an aggressive program of “global hegemony” and rogue-state rollback.

Nice try. During his career, Ronald Reagan often employed the sort of confrontational rhetoric neoconservatives thrill to, but, as president, Reagan was no neocon — and be thankful for that.