samtheman thinks the secret was "Star Wars" spending.
Gorby surrendered. He surrendered precisely because Reagan out-bid him on defense spending, and the threat to spend ever more on defense, with particular high marks going to Reagan's pushing of the much-maligned (by leftist dunderheads like Dean) "Star Wars".
Gorby was already all-in when Reagan raised the stakes, and threatened to raise them some more and the KGB thug put on his green-eye-shade, did some good old fashioned cost accounting, and surrendered. Simple as that.
Ronald The Great won the Cold War on Planet Earth.
Mars remains under tyranny.
Westbrook brings up some sins of Dems most people have never heard of:
No, of course.
The DemonRATS won the cold war by sending Swimmer Ted the Red Kennedy to undermine Reagan and establish a shadow State Department, in clear violation of the Constitution. In most other countries, the traitor would have been hanged.
But Mickey Garbagechef was so impressed by Red Ted’s act of unilateral capitulation and contrition, that he responded by dissolving the Soviet Union, allowing the Berlin Wall to come down, and allowing all the former Warsaw Pact nations their freedom.
Right, Howie YEARGH Dean? That’s how it happened, right?
Shadow State Department? Was that like when Cantor went to Israel and bashed Obama?
andy58-in-nh thinks Dean is a secret Soviet.
If Howard Dean’s preferences had been realized, our children would be studying the Cyrillic alphabet in order to better understand their roles in the New Soviet World.
But Reagan won and although Dean can’t admit it, he is content to settle for the next best thing: a socialist American President. The substance of his complaint is that thirty years on, most Americans still think socialism sucks.
Steely Tom is sure Dean was an awful doctor:
I think Dean is one of those doctors who has a very cynical attitude toward his patients. This type of doctor, one of whom I knew long ago, thinks most of them don't have lives worth living and would be better off dead, although they would never admit this in the open. They go through the motions out of a sense of momentum and to keep up appearances for their peer group.
Leave it to Freepers to not need evidence to know what horrible people liberals are:
sappy goes Dean-Birther:
release your gubenatorial records, Dr. Dean! lets see what you’ve been hiding.
Howard Dean was way off the mark on this statement. Really one of the more bizarre things he ever said.
ReplyDeleteGorbachev and the failure of Soviet Socialism was certainly already beginning to die when Reagan took office. But as Reagan and others had assumed, this potentially made the Soviet arsenal all that more dangerous . . . because out of desperation and the need to keep up appearances they mostly kept pace with the US in the Cold War arms race.
That is, until Reagan and the Republicans (with Democrat support) pushed for sharply increased defense spending and technological advancement that Reagan knew a struggling Soviet economy couldn't keep pace with. This is unquestioned historically and Dean's statement ranks right there with 'no new taxes' and Obama's promise for a 'more open and transparent government' on the dumbness scale. In other words . . . the height of stupidity.
It does seem a bit revisionisty, but I do suspect that the cold war wasn't won by Reagan alone.
ReplyDeleteAs you noted, his spending may have accelerated the USSR's decline, however. (Though having watched Charlie Wilson's War, he may also have done as much damage as he helped.)
Still, we can all agree that "Star Wars" wasn't the cause of the USSR falling, and Freepers are too blinkered to even correct the hitorical record properly.