Who Won the Cold War?
Can any of you remember when Reagan forced the Soviet Union to spend itself into collapse, and then the hawks in this country spent years crowing about Capitalism's immense victory over evil Communism? Well, how is that economic mastery looking now, thirty years later?
It turns out that we couldn't afford the cold war and what followed any more than the Soviets could; Republican presidents just kept on spending anyway, and put it all on the credit card. Now, with a fourteen billion dollar debt, over 80% of which was piled up under three Republican administrations, the bill is due.
It turns out that the American right's fifty year war against a largely impotent enemy did as much damage to us as it did to them; the only difference is that we took out a substandard mortgage to avoid confronting the cost for a couple of decades.
Maybe I'm crazy, because I am saying something I've never heard anyone say before; but from where I'm sitting today, I think both sides lost the cold war. Of course, the natural response to this is to let the same sort of people who ran the cold war run our current colossal military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. What a world.
It turns out that we couldn't afford the cold war and what followed any more than the Soviets could; Republican presidents just kept on spending anyway, and put it all on the credit card. Now, with a fourteen billion dollar debt, over 80% of which was piled up under three Republican administrations, the bill is due.
It turns out that the American right's fifty year war against a largely impotent enemy did as much damage to us as it did to them; the only difference is that we took out a substandard mortgage to avoid confronting the cost for a couple of decades.
Maybe I'm crazy, because I am saying something I've never heard anyone say before; but from where I'm sitting today, I think both sides lost the cold war. Of course, the natural response to this is to let the same sort of people who ran the cold war run our current colossal military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. What a world.
Comments
Humans never learn "where have all the flowers gone".
Had a Republican been in the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis none of us might be here.
007 fantasies are still around too.