Spero Consulting

Liz Cheney has an excel­lent op-​ed col­umn in today’s edi­tion of The Wall Street Jour­nal, in which she crit­i­cizes Pres­i­dent Obama’s world­view, par­tic­u­larly with respect to inter­na­tional affairs. The col­umn is enti­tled Obama Rewrites the Cold War.

One of the items she men­tions is a speech Pres­i­dent Obama gave to stu­dents dur­ing his recent trip to Moscow. Here’s the excerpt she cited:

“The Amer­i­can and Soviet armies were still massed in Europe, trained and ready to fight. The ide­o­log­i­cal trenches of the last cen­tury were roughly in place. Com­pe­ti­tion in every­thing from astro­physics to ath­let­ics was treated as a zero-​sum game. If one per­son won, then the other per­son had to lose. And then within a few short years, the world as it was ceased to be. Make no mis­take: This change did not come from any one nation. The Cold War reached a con­clu­sion because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the peo­ple of Rus­sia and East­ern Europe stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful.”

We’re about the same age as the Pres­i­dent, and that’s not how we remem­ber it, but then Rus­sia wasn’t Rus­sia. It was the Soviet Union.

Either the man paid lit­tle atten­tion in the 1970’s and 80’s, or he thinks that no one pays atten­tion now, i.e., dec­i­mate the econ­omy with a new energy tax and the gen­eral populace’s only response is: “eww, looks a dead, creepy celebrity. Let’s fixate.”

We’re old enough to remem­ber the dam­age and dan­ger of Jimmy Carter’s appease­ment and gen­eral wimpi­ness. Why can’t our President?