Says leftist: "If I could, I would vote with my feet, instead of my mouth..."

You've summarized exactly why Bush's poll ratings are sliding into the toilet.

 

Whatever prompted Glasnost & Perestroika, it wasn't a response to the Pentagon's budget.

"These were unnecessary and wasteful expenditures that we were not going to match"

-Gorby on the US military buildup.

 

Ok you win. I have know idea what a mainstream conservative is and will never again in the future presume to designate anyone on the Right as such. Just because Limbaugh, Horowitz, Bennett and Thomas have an insane amount of politically interested listeners, adherents and readers doesn't mean that they're in the mainstream at all. You're right (if I knew how to insert a rollseyes here I would). What's funny is that you accuse me of trying to paint you into a box by mentioning these guys yet you did exactly the same thing when you brought up Johnny Depp and Alec Baldwin as being examples of all of us anti-American lefties. Maybe next time you won't dump all of us into one "quasi-intellectual dustbin" to make your point.

As far as Kosovo goes, I never said that your position on that war was a determining factor in whether or not I considered you a conservative. You dreamt up that assertion all on your own. In fact I couldn't care less what your stance on that war was. What I did say was that conservatives were able to criticize and critique that war regardless of their reasoning or motivation without having their loyalty to this country questioned. Whereas liberals who question the War in Iraq routinely have their patriotism impugned. That's not fair or consistent.

And your implication that conservatives criticize the country because they hope to make it better and liberals criticize it only because they love to harp on "what's wrong with America" is silly. Your life is better because of over a century of liberals sometimes identifying what's wrong with American policy (foreign and domestic) and remedying it. Social Security, defeating the Nazis, the F.D.A, the G.I. Bill, the Marshall Plan, saving Korea, Civil Rights, Medicare, all were endeavors taken on by liberals either for the betterment of America or for its interests abroad. Joe Conason says it better than I ever could so I'll just quote him:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/08/18/conason_one/index1.html

"If your workplace is safe; if your children go to school rather than being forced into labor; if you are paid a living wage, including overtime; if you enjoy a 40-hour week and you are allowed to join a union to protect your rights -- you can thank liberals. If your food is not poisoned and your water is drinkable -- you can thank liberals. If your parents are eligible for Medicare and Social Security, so they can grow old in dignity without bankrupting your family -- you can thank liberals. If our rivers are getting cleaner and our air isn't black with pollution; if our wilderness is protected and our countryside is still green -- you can thank liberals. If people of all races can share the same public facilities; if everyone has the right to vote; if couples fall in love and marry regardless of race; if we have finally begun to transcend a segregated society -- you can thank liberals. Progressive innovations like those and so many others were achieved by long, difficult struggles against entrenched power. The country we know and love today was built by those victories for liberalism -- with the support of the American people."

Your Coulteresque, broad and sweeping generalization of liberals as a bunch of whiny, America-hating, do-nothings is at odds with much of 20th Century history.

 

C'mon, Utah, you know the answer to this. A notoriously corrupt nation spending itself into oblivion keeping its Eastern European empire quiet undertakes its own Vietnam in Afghanistan. At that point, the only question is whether the dissolution of the empire takes the rest of the planet with it. We are all very lucky that Gorbachev provided a comparatively soft landing.

(The Hullabaloo blog, I think, came up with Operation Inigo Montoya, I just stole it.)

Karl, why haven't you been updating the Good News In Iraq thread?

 

That's fascism for you.

 

We should make Brezhnev & Krushchev honorary Libertarians. They did not waste government money catering to those eastern Euros. If they had a problem in eastern Europe, they just sent over some tanks & shot whoever was causing the problems. Problem solved; on time and under budget.

That Gorbachev wasted money almost as badly as George W Bush does.

I wonder why Gorbachev abandoned Brezhnev's and Krushchev's well-proven methods of dealing with eastern Europe?

Under Brezhnev, the Soviets had enough money to invade Afghanistan and meddle in Nicaragua. And that profligate Gorbachev had to go and blow it.

To the uninformed outsider, the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan and eastern Europe looks like a sympton of panic caused by something a rival was doing. Kind of like the way the Galaxy signed Diego Serna.

Here is your Good News from Iraq:

http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20030925/5532524s.htm

Iraq is safe for Circuit City.

You'd figure that Japan, Germany and especially China should help out with Iraq. The Iraq debacle is killing the US economy; but hundreds, maybe thousands of Japanese & German autoworkers and employees of People's Liberation Army electronics plants are making big paydays.

The only Americans who are going to end up with jobs after Bush's spending kills our economy are military recruiters and the Vivid Video employees who supply the porn that's legal in Iraq now.

 

I realize you're trying to be funny, but military intervention is traditionally the most expensive way to hold down an empire. Economic hegemony is considered far more efficient.

Because Poland was some order of magnitude larger than Czechoslovakia, and more united. And because the military had been pretty much bled White Russian trying to hold down Afghanistan, sending the troops into Poland was not an option.

I suppose Reagan might have chosen to nuke Moscow if they did invade, but I somehow doubt that was an option, or that it played a part in Gorby's considerations.

Not only was Afghanistan a settled issue by the time Gorby took power, frankly so was the Warsaw Pact.

Afghanistan = Vietnam. Well, except the US aided the Afghans, while Vietnam's help came from China. But (a) I think we can comfortably assume that US aid to Afghan rebels would have continued if Carter had been re-elected, and (b) the retreat had nothing to do with American military spending, and everything to do with the Afghan rebels. Just like Chinese support of the Viet Cong would have meant nothing if the VC weren't actually supported by the Vietnamese population. Other military actions have plenty of other factors, but civilians always decide who wins guerrilla wars. No exceptions.

Once the Afghanistan war was lost, there was no question of the USSR fighting an uprising in Poland. They could not possibly have won, although they could have made sure that Poland lost, too. (And Romania, East Germany, and every other country in the Pact, I think, plus a bunch of the Soviet Republics. Those dominos fell in a big hurry, I recall.) History will give Mikhail Gorbachev every possible honor, for realizing the Soviet empire was finished. A lesser man would have been tempted to hold it by force, but Gorbachev saved literally countless lives. Maybe even yours and mine, depending on how crazy Reagan and Counterfactual Soviet Leader turned out to be, given the opportunity.

 

Not really crucial to the issue at hand, but I'm pretty sure you're mistaken. I was under the impression that Viet Nam and China did not get along at all, and that the Viet Namese model for socialism (and their foreign aid) was coming from the Soviet Union.
In one of the Michael Palin travel documentaries (Full Circle?) he crosses into Viet Nam from China (or maybe vice-versa). There's only one crossing, and apparently its used very, very rarely.

 

The North Vietnamese and the Chinese got on fine. It was the Khmer Rouge that never got on with anyone.