You want to remember that this stuff happened before a quarter of the voters were even born. And that even the Cold War itself is starting to fade from the memory of the electorate.
When you consider that journalism has been openly opposed to anticommunism since the Tet offensive during the Johnson Administration, the Republican Party has some serious teaching to do:
- Communism is murderously evil, and Soviet Communism was its linchpin.
- Jimmy Carter is the prototypical - even the best - Democratic Administration of the past half-century. He didn't do anything which should have gotten him ipeached, which is more than you can say for Clinton, and he didn't have a SecDef whose incompetence was dramatized in the same way that Robert McNamara's was or Les Aspin's was. But he left scope for Ronald Reagan to be the best president of the 20th century.
- Ronald Reagan
- Whipped rampant inflation.
- Got the country going after a decade of stagnation.
- Got us out of the energy crisis.
- Transcended Communism.
And he did it over the opposition of John Kerry and the Democrats who elected him senator and nominated him to be president. - John Kerry faithfully represents a party which hasn't had a decent SecDef since the Truman Administration and hasn't had a competent president since Kennedy (if then):
- Kennedy's Bay of Pigs fiasco turned America's stomach at the time.
- Johnson botched Vietnam and launced welfare programs whose repeal represented triumphs of sanity by the Republican Congress.
- Carter supported the overthrow of a friendly government of Iran, and allowed inflation, unemployment, and Soviet influence to grow unchecked.
- Clinton allowed Osama Ben Laden to become the menace which bore fruit on 9/11 - and before the midterm congressional elections of his first term he had been caught in malfeasance which would have gotten any Republican impeached and convicted.