Giving Back Cold War Gains
We’re all losing ground — ground that was worth winning.

By Jonah Goldberg


In 1993, Bill Clinton joked, “Gosh, I miss the Cold War.” Because, he explained, somberly: “We had an intellectually coherent thing. The American people knew what the rules were.”

Such Cold War nostalgia vexed many conservatives. It seemed to us that the Cold War consensus had broken down with the Vietnam War. Clinton himself didn’t much like that Cold War endeavor, which is one reason he worked so assiduously to avoid serving in it. A young John Kerry did serve, but he also threw away his medals and denounced his fellow servicemen as war criminals. Jimmy Carter, meanwhile, had proclaimed that he had no “inordinate fear of Communism,” suggesting that those who disagreed with him did.

The “intellectual coherence” of the Cold War didn’t stop many liberals from opposing Ronald Reagan’s foreign-policy efforts in Europe, the Caribbean, and Central America, nor did it dampen Hollywood’s ardor in portraying Reagan as a warmonger, a dunce, or both. In the 1980s, the SANE/Freeze movement fired the minds of much of the Democratic party. And when the Cold War ended without a shot fired, the Left worked hard to give all the credit to Mikhail Gorbachev, since he seemed like a more reasonable fellow.

All of that comes to mind as I watch Barack Obama stroll across the globe apologizing for, or condemning, the sins of his predecessors and, by extension, his country.

After former Soviet pawn and current Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega berated the United States at a recent summit, President Obama joked, in reference to the failed Bay of Pigs operation, “I’m grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old.”

Ah, yes, because the pressing issue is Obama’s blamelessness, not the apparently embarrassing faux pas of America’s effort to rid Cuba of a brutal Communist dictator and lackey of the Soviets, 90 miles off our coast.

In Prague, Obama declared that “the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War” is the large stockpile of nuclear weapons left behind after the war, sounding as if he might have been one of those teenagers who translated SANE/Freeze brochures into high-school term papers.

The truth is that the Cold War’s most dangerous legacy remains the bundle of radioactive lies that poisoned so many lands and deformed so many minds. The Soviets fueled national-socialist movements around the globe, telling the poor that if they embraced violent revolution and systematically purged capitalism, tradition, and religion from their societies, they would hasten their ascent to the sunny uplands of history. The reverse was true: Whole generations were either slaughtered, left to live as dehumanized industrial cogs, or forced to labor as serfs tending crops amidst the bleached bones of their fellow countrymen.

The Soviets spread lies about the nature of democracy and destroyed indigenous democratic movements, lest they leech off the revolutionary fervor of groups both more murderous and more loyal to the Kremlin. In the West, they employed useful idiots in academia and the press to foment self-hatred and eat away at civilizational self-confidence with cancerously idiotic arguments about the “moral equivalence” between West and East. They funded antiwar movements, peace congresses, and supposedly crusading “independent” journalists. For example, they spread the lie around the globe that America invented AIDS to kill blacks.

That lie made it all the way to Barack Obama’s church, where Obama’s former mentor and pastor, Jeremiah Wright, would repeat it with blindingly ignorant passion, saying that America invented “the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.”

Obama talks a lot about wanting to move beyond the “stale arguments” of the Cold War. In one sense, that’s fine, since that twilight struggle is over. But in another sense, as we watch him apologize for America’s history, it is hard to shake the feeling that he only saw one side’s arguments as “stale.”

That wouldn’t matter if the past were a page one could merely turn, as Obama frequently claims. But the Cold War’s lessons aren’t irrelevant to the times we live in. The past is never completely irrelevant.

One small example: The Wall Street Journal’s Dan Henninger asked a former Eastern European dissident imprisoned by Communists: “If you were sitting in a cell in Cuba, Iran, or Syria and saw this photo of a smiling American president shaking hands with a smiling Hugo Chavez, what would you think?”

The former dissident responded: “I would think that I was losing ground.”

When I see the president telling so many of America’s enemies and critics what they want to hear, I feel like we’re all losing ground — ground that was worth winning.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. © 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

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Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

Losing ground? hell i think we lost it the day obama was elected.

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A friend with weed is a friend Indeed

Not yet, we haven't. The protests (tea parties) that took place all across the nation on April 15 was only the beginning. There's another one being organized for July 4th. Seeing as how its a holiday, it should be huge.

Vi

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Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

You know what the bitch of all this is? There is nowhere else to go no frontier to hide in. We are now stuck, our masters in Europe have settled in the new world and made it their own. What are free men to do?

what were our choices? mccain/palin? i mean cmon, hillary clinton? she would have been just as bad if not worst than obama. obama is actually holding true to a fair portion of the campaign promises he made, which for a guy who has made it this far in politics in such a short time is a pretty big accomplishment.
so i think the supposed ground was actually lost when there was the first party debates took place and their was only maybe one guy out of both parties who wasnt a total dousche.
RON PAUL for president in ....... 2012? if the old bastard hasent croaked yet.....

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wanna get high? how bout just a little high?

ur right, both parties sucked. they're two different parties but have the same puppet master. Ron Paul one of a few politicians i trust.

Ron Paul 2012 . only chance we have til we have to fight for our freedom

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"The Cruelest Trick Came From The Talibans, Who Allowed Plenty Of Drugs And Then Banned Music."
"Rarely is the question asked: is our children learning"- G.W.B.

Can you blame him? For the past 8 years our country went from being seen as one of the greatest, a beacon of light... To being probably the most hated nation in the world.
We have always forced our views and opinions on smaller countries. Before we had the power, now we are all on an even playing field. And we don't have the right to tell other's what to believe in.


Obama knows the position we are in right now. He is just playing along, Is it not right to have truces and peace, then to start fights with everyone who doesn't live by your standards..


Wasn't the foreign policy "We don't talk to terrorists"

So instead of settling matters like adults; and actually addressing the problems first and hopefully last by diplomacy, with military action as a last resort, we chose to throw a tantrum and just not deal with it. Really!

The tea party seemed like a FOX publicity stunt.

Don't act like now protesting against democrats will actually get anything done. Remember the last 8 years, we the democrats would protest on every occasion.

But the grass is always greener on the winning side.

[quote=tical916;2431512]Barack, yes, he adheres to a dead ideology that has proven to not work. That makes him psychotic (repeating something despite knowing that it doesn't work.)

OPINION

Opinion about Opinion

P'raps you should go ask the Iraqi people, the Czechs, Slavs, Soviets, or any other civilized people not in Western Europe what they think of the United States.

Of course, on the flip side

We are in the situation we are in with Iran because Carter BETRAYED the Shah of Iran.

Iraq, From what I've heard it was a misunderstanding. Saddam thought it was okay if he invaded Kuwait, not that it was not okay.

Western Europe - :: shrugs :: Who cares?

Eastern Europe - They probably admire us, or did, until we elected that empty suit, Obama into office.


Yeah, typically because the alternative has been letting the USSR or China force THEIR opinions on those countries. Take this argument and shove it, because it's a moot point.

And Santa Clause really does exist...

Actually, the message that I've gotten from our actions is more along the lines of, "DON'T FUCK WITH US, WE WILL FUCK YOU UP!"


Obama doesn't know his asshole from a hole in the ground.

See above.


Terrorists are not small nations, nor are they tribes, or groups, or any other entity that might (in a really bizarre idiotic leftist world) be viewed as a nation or sovereignty.

Though to put this in perspective, you're saying we should talk with the people that destroyed the WTC (stupid f* could have at least had their aim right and taken out the UN Building, of course if they had done that I personally wouldn't have a problem with them.)

We wasted a dozen years being patient with Saddam.

The Terrorists also attacked us first.

Once again you are showing that you also don't know your asshole from a hole in the ground.



Hardly, unlike a leftist propaganda rally where homeless are paid to attend everyone at the Tea Parties was there voluntarily.

Yeah, by bussing homeless around, ROFLMAO...

And Communists, Obama and the Clintons will continue to suck cock.

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Libertas inaestimabilis res est - Liberty is a thing beyond all price. | Sic Semper Tyrannis

Under the Constitution He should not be president.
http://www.newswithviews.com/Devvy/kidd441.htm

http://www.orlytaitzesq.com/blog1/?p=225

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Depression is merely "Anger" without enthusiasm.

When was the last time we had a person that should be President as President?

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Libertas inaestimabilis res est - Liberty is a thing beyond all price. | Sic Semper Tyrannis