I'm sorry, but I can't post anything this morning. I'm too busy mourning Ronald Reagan. No, seriously, lefties can moan about his support of death squads in Central America, his implicit racism, his turning mentally ill people out of institutions to wander homeless, his labeling ketchup a vegetable, and so on and so forth. But let's not forget that when Reagan's hawks wanted to keep all our nuclear weapons, Reagan went the other way. The June 21 issue of The New Republic recounts how it happened:
. . . [A]dministration insiders were furious at the president for even broaching the idea of a nuclear-free world. They were right to be concerned. By the end of 1987, Reagan had begun to distance himself from the extreme hawks who opposed any negotiations (the most prominent of them, Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, left the administration in 1987) and was relying increasingly on the pragmatic advice of Secretary of State George Shultz. In December 1987, the president and Gorbachev met in Washington to sign a treaty eliminating intermediate-range missiles. And, by June 1988, Reagan was kissing Russian babies in Red Square and had nonchalantly dropped the "evil empire" label he had affixed to the Soviet Union in 1983.
Now we get George W., who wants new tactical nuclear weapons, who's done far too little to secure nuclear weapons in the former Soviet republics, and who gave us the mess in Iraq. When Reagan was in office, I disliked him intensely. God, how I wish we had him now instead of Bush. So I'm mourning, and I refuse to post today.