The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
‘Marry a Rich Widow’
“John Kerry Gives Advice to Reporters”–headline, Politico.com, Oct. 22
Out on a Limb
“That said, none of the above means that Obama will win, or that Romney won’t win. He very well may.”–Greg Sargent, Washington Post website, Oct. 22
Insane Anglo Warlord
Mitt Romney missed a golden opportunity during Monday night’s debate. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back,” Barack Obama said. The perfect comeback would have been: “Oh yeah? Well, the ocean called, and they’re running outta ships!” True, Romney delivered a version of this zinger, but much later. His timing was all wrong.
Oh well, maybe Romney can arrange another meeting with the president and get it right this time. We understand Obama will be in Ohio.
Obama went on to tell Romney: “You seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s.” So he’s Reagan, Eisenhower and Coolidge all rolled into one? Sounds way too good to be true, but one can only hope. (A New York Sun editorial makes the same point, though with a caveat about racial segregation in the 1950s, which we prefer to think of as the decade of Brown v. Board of Education and the first federal civil rights law since Reconstruction.)
Ike and Coolidge aside, the president’s dismissive attitude toward Reagan’s foreign policy is telling. It underscores why, despite having “won” again by showing up, Obama failed last night. Before the debate, the left was confident that Romney would scare the [heck] out of voters by coming across as, in the words of New York Times editorialist David Firestone, a “strutting warmonger.” After the debate, they started mocking him as “Peacenik Mitt,” as in this post from the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent.
Just like in the first debate, the left is calling Romney a LIAR!!!! because he did not conform to their stick-figure caricature of him. “By reversing his views on war and peace, Romney has raised a character issue about his ability to be trusted as a steadfast defender of U.S.,” tweeted Bloomberg’s Jonathan Alter. The New York Times’s Bill Keller writes that :”I expect he sent the neocon wing of his campaign running for the smelling salts,” evidently having misunderstood neoconservatism to be a doctrine of constant armed conflict.
Back in the ’80s, they called Reagan a warmonger too–and nowhere more so than in elite universities such as those where a young Barack Obama was indoctrinated. History does not record the name of the person who noticed that you can rearrange the letters of “Ronald Wilson Reagan” to spell “insane Anglo warlord,” but that unknown anagramist provided that decade’s leftists with many a self-satisfied chuckle.
But what wars exactly did Ronald Reagan mong? The 1983 liberation of tiny Grenada was not exactly Normandy, and the 1986 bombing of Libya was small potatoes compared with last year’s French-led, Obama-followed intervention in that country that finally toppled Muammar Gadhafi.
Today Reagan is generally credited with having won the Cold War while firing nary a shot. But to the left at the time, his byword of “peace through strength” just didn’t compute. A more submissive America, they imagined, would placate prospective adversaries. It never dawned on them that a confident attitude can be disarming. Romney seems to have figured that out.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.”
