THERE'S NOTHING THE RIGHT HATES MORE...:

Tear Down That Myth (JAMES MANN, 6/10/07, NY Times)

In the historical disputes over Ronald Reagan and his presidency, the Berlin Wall speech lies at the center. In the ensuing years, two fundamentally different perspectives have emerged. In one, the speech was the event that led to the end of the cold war. In the other, the speech was mere showmanship, without substance.

Both perspectives are wrong. Neither deals adequately with the underlying significance of the speech, which encapsulated Mr. Reagan’s successful but complex approach to dealing with the Soviet Union. [...]

In the months leading up to his speech, Mr. Reagan had been under attack in the United States for having been beguiled by Mr. Gorbachev. Conservatives were particularly outraged. In September 1986, after the K.G.B. had seized Nicholas Daniloff, a journalist for U.S. News & World Report, in retaliation for the arrest of a Soviet agent in the United States, Mr. Reagan hadn’t taken a hard line, but had instead negotiated an exchange.

Later that fall, hawks in the national-security establishment were upset that at the Reykjavik summit meeting, Mr. Reagan had talked about the possibility of abolishing nuclear weapons.

And these events were merely prologue: there was considerably more business Mr. Reagan was seeking to conduct with the Soviets — business that he knew would be deeply unpopular with many conservatives. By the spring of 1987, he was well into quiet negotiations for two more summit meetings with the Soviet leader in Washington and Moscow. His administration was moving toward a landmark arms-control agreement with the Soviet Union — a treaty on intermediate-range nuclear forces, which would have to be ratified by the Senate. The idea of such a treaty was beginning to attract considerable opposition in Washington.

The Berlin Wall speech, then, offered cover for Mr. Reagan’s diplomacy. It was an anti-Communist speech that helped preserve support for a conservative president seeking to upgrade American relations with the Soviet Union. In political terms, it was the prerequisite for the president’s subsequent negotiations. These efforts, in turn, created the vastly more relaxed climate in which the Soviets sat on their hands when the wall came down.

...than a conservative who actually gets elected. The preference for ineffectual intellectual purity over governance is the source of conservative derangement syndrome. It's helpful to be reminded that all the same folks who think W has betrayed them felt the same way about Reagan when he was president.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 10, 2007 10:36 AM