In 1979, as Ronald Reagan was getting ready another bid for the presidency, he visited the NORAD mountain complex that was responsible for the ultimate defense of the USA against nuclear attack.
When he asked whether there was actually any defense against a nuclear attack, he was surprised to hear the generals answer "No."
The best we could hope for was 8 minutes warning before the missiles hit, and to launch a nuclear retaliatory attack to ensure Armageddon.
Reagan took this ghastly bit of information and came up with something new: a notion of a nuclear defense. One may not have agreed with it, but it was a good and rational response to the threat of annihilation.
In my mind, this is the paradigmatic difference between Republicans of 32 years ago and their degraded descendants of the present day.
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2 comments:
Good analogy . . . GOP today is scary. I was never scared of Republicans before now.
The brute lays just beneath the thin veneer of civilization, and if we but lightly scratch that august lamina with the scalpel of fear, we immediately expose it.
Now it has a political party to do its bidding.
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