WHO WAS ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE COLD WAR?
I admit a slip into hyperbole by suggesting that the Democrats were on the wrong side of the Cold War. And that's why we here at Federal Review are glad to have regular readers from the left to keep us honest.

Not all Democrats were on the wrong side of the Cold War, only those who opposed any policy that confronted Soviet expansion and aggression or opposed military preparedness by supporting pie-in-the-sky notions like the nuclear freeze or a foreign policy concerned more with "human rights" in, say, El Salvador, than Soviet expansion and the accompanying serious threat to human rights and peace that came with it.

McGovern and his ilk were the standard bearers of those on the left who thought we shouldn't fight the Cold War. John Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Henry Jackson, Sam Nunn and other Democrats were on the right side of history, as were the many Democrats who didn't vote for McGovern in 1972 and who supported Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. And Jimmy Carter got religion in 1979/80 when he decided to support the Afghan resistance. To be on the "wrong side" of the Cold War, in my mind, means that you either (a) didn't want to fight the Cold War on any level, or (b) denied the threat the Soviet Union posed. These anti-cold warriors freaked out when Reagan said publicly what we all knew - that the Soviet Union was the focus of evil in the modern world. Now, many who opposed policies designed to roll back Soviet expansion or confront the Soviet threat in an manner, and who denied the threat, pretend to have always been cold warriors.

Now, I think it is reasonable to wonder whether a particular candidate was on the "wrong side" of the Cold War, when that candidate denied the Soviet threat as "bogus" and assigned the Cold War to the realm of paranoia, trivializing that threat by laughing that "[t]he Communists are not about to take over our McDonald hamburger stands." I don't expect the election of 2004 to be fought in the killing fields of Vietnam, the dusty highlands of Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, the jungles of Nicaragua, the beaches of Grenada, the plains of Angola, the horn of Africa or any other past battlefields of the Cold War. But I don't think it's unreasonable to consider these things or the records of the various parties on these matters.