Reagan Had It Easy in the Cold War?

They don't hand out master's degrees in revisionist history, but if they did, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman might deserve one. Obama is mired in a geopolitical mess of his own making, from the Ukraine to the ISIS menace, yet Friedman's decided to argue that Obama shouldn't be harshly judged. His era is much more complicated than Reagan's, you see.

"I'll leave it to historians to figure out years from now who was the better president," he claimed. Reagan's era was defined by a capitalist-communist competition between "two organized superpowers," while Obama's era centers on a puzzling conflict "between a superpower and many superempowered angry men."

Friedman started this fractured era on 9/11, which as a timeline makes a certain sense. But if so, doesn't George W. Bush deserve sympathy as well? Wasn't his tenure equally "complicated"? So, why, after the 2008 election, did Friedman famously insist Obama should be inaugurated by Thanksgiving Day because he was so immensely superior in talent?

The bloom is off the rose now. It is painfully apparent that the world is just too complicated for President Supersmart. Friedman once labeled this president "smart and mellifluous." Now Friedman is just like all the other socialist buffoons who handed Obama the Nobel Peace Prize on the ironclad assurance that he would deliver a new era of harmonic convergence and prosperity. He looks like a fool.

Friedman offered nothing on Obama's failure to anticipate the rise of ISIS, despite pleas from his advisers, or on Obama's failure to live up to his "red line" rhetoric on Syria before that. Friedman offered nothing on how Obama could have or should have outsmarted Putin as he mercilessly took Crimea and threatened the rest of the Ukraine.

In this article, Friedman was still lamenting Reagan's 1983 withdrawal from Lebanon after hundreds of Marines died in a terrorist truck bombing, but he had nothing to say about Obama's 2012 failure to do anything on the Benghazi fiasco.

Reagan was always dismissed as a dunce by the media elites, and when he won the Cold War, journalists unanimously insisted that was all Gorbachev's doing. Friedman now offers a better take to advance his thesis.

In Friedman's world, it can be argued that most of the Soviet bloc was always part of Western civilization, "naturally and historically inclined toward democratic capitalism." All America had to do was "help remove the bad system and step aside."

So the Cold War was as insignificant as a cold sore, nothing more. Tens of millions died, but so what?

What makes this even more ludicrous is that the leftist media -- Friedman's camp -- insisted the opposite during Reagan's time. They demanded accommodation and detente with global communism. To them, it displayed nothing but arrogance to argue on the world stage that democratic capitalism was a superior system. Every effort to help remove the "bad system" was opposed. Even as the Soviet empire crumbled under Gorbachev, American reporters were still lamenting that a superior system had been lost.

In the last year of the Soviet Union, Friedman's New York Times ran stories on how the demise of the dictatorship was a nightmare: "Beggars and cripples emerged from the shadows, the injured and humiliated took to venting their grievances in the streets, and ever-worsening shortages pushed masses over the threshold of poverty." After it crumbled in 1992, the Times ran the bizarre headline "A Gulag Breeds Rage, Yes, but Also Serenity."

Friedman cannot feign objectivity in suggesting it's somehow an open question about whether Reagan or Obama has been the more accomplished president, especially in foreign affairs. Reagan made the liberal media look like monkeys as the tide of history repealed their conventional wisdom. They're still unable to acknowledge the size of his achievement.

I about puked when I read President Supersmart. I read no further. These progressive spin masters think they are journalists when in fact they nothing more then pawns of the commie’s propaganda ministers. Anyone who is so deluded that they could even picture this mental midget as being smart scares the hell out of me. I saw the types who majored in journalism in 70-72. They were not the ones I would rate as outgoing and blessed with the ability to communicate effectively. In fact, most seemed like they were lost as to their values, and; it was as if the mass communications prof showed them the various media to use to form their belief system. Sadly, I think many are brainwashed.

Tom Friedman stopped being a credible journalist many years ago.
It is funny how he conveniently forgets that he supported Bush’s actions after 9/11 until things became difficult in Iraq. Then he suddenly became a critic.

Reagan destroyed the USSR. All the little commies and socialists spread out like the cockroaches they are (sorry if I offended any cockroaches. But the cockroaches that escaped ended up in our colleges and raising little red diaper thugs like Obama. Obama IS the USSR and is trying like hell to rebuild the dream. ISIS. Iraq. Iran. Al Quaida. They are all just distractions Obama deals with only when he has to for political reasons. They are distractions from his fundamental transformation of this nation.

Obama has it tougher? That’s his excuse for doing nothing?
Reagan had it easier? No, Reagan made it look easier
because he was competent.

Sure, because Reagan never had to deal with organized bands of terrorists backed by state funding like 0bama has. Oh, wait a minute. He did? Well, Reagan never had to deal with diplomacy between multiple countries with competing interests like 0bama is. Oh, wait a minute. He did? Well, Reagan never had to build an international coalition against a common enemy of Western civilization like 0bama is. Oh, wait a minute, he did?

0bama does have certain challenges unique to his situation, to be sure. Reagan never had to deal with two incredibly unqualified and ineffective Secretaries of State, an entirely criminal Justice Department, an openly fascistic IRS, and media who are complicit with government by executive diktat. In all of that, 0bama's wounds are self-inflicted and a result of his own arrogance and incompetence. There's that difference, yes.

Reagan beat the Soviet Union with a resolve to win against an insidious enemy. Obama and gang are busy reestablishing the Soviet Union from our halls of power.

It sure looks like Putin and Obama work together for a common goal.

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