20 years ago something very momentous happened, on November 9th, 1989, people from both East and West Germany crowded atop the Berlin Wall and brought it down to the ground. At the time I was a young man of 23, I had been married for less than a year to my beautiful wife Kristine and it was for me a year of wonder and euphoria. I had grown up in an America that lived under the constant and imminent fear of global, nuclear destruction. I also had grown up a rather lonely child with as many friends as I could count on my hand and was never known as a ladies man in High School. Now it was 1989 and I was married and the world seemed to be entering a new era of Peace and Freedom.
The air was charged with an optimism never felt before, even in popular culture with the song Peace In Our Time by Eddie Money. For many people my age, this was the legacy of Ronald Reagan and there was much animated discussion at the time by pundits such as George Will about how it happened on "Bush's watch" as did Gary Wills later - but Ronald Reagan deserved much (not all) of the real credit while others wanted the credit to go to George H.W. Bush. 20 years after the fact, Bush told Greta Van Susteren humbly that, "...we had a great team working on it, and they all deserve credit." The New York Times predictably gave the credit to the communists:
East German Change Owes No Thanks To Us
2 years prior on June 12th, 1987, Ronald Reagan delivered his landmark "Mr. Gorbachev . . . tear down this wall" speech:
Watch here:
Text and audio here
President Obama recently declined to visit Germany even for one day because he is too busy with an upcoming trip to Asia (he claims) but do you suppose it might be because it is not enough about him? Or could it be that the fall of the Berlin Wall was too much of a statement of the triumph of Democracy and Freedom over Statism? After all, the collapse of the Berlin Wall is the most concrete (pun intended) empirical data you could ask for to show that a Command Economy will fail when left to compete with a Market Economy. This is why in philosophy and political science we call Communism and Socialism forms of Idealism - they only work in your head, not in real life where the rubber hits the road. After all, an 'Idealist' is a person who upon observing that a rose smells better than a cabbage concludes that it will also make better soup and an 'Ideologue' is a humorless zealot who finds fulfillment by spouting the ideas of famous humorless zealots - like Karl Marx and Nancy Pelosi.
And that leads us back to our beloved President who may be an idealist but is also savvy enough to know he neither would fit in at a celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall (because he doesn't really understand Freedom like someone such as Angela Merkel, the daughter of a Lutheran minister who lived under Communism), nor would he want to invite a comparison of his creeping socialist policies to those of the fallen Soviet Union.
Now for those of you without blood pressure issues, watch what Obama did have to say, all 3 minutes and 4 secinds of it:
Not one mention of Reagan, Bush, Thatcher or John Paul II - but he did inject himself and Hillary Clinton into it! What a colossal egomaniac, reminds me of a country song, I'm glad he did not go.
TTFN,
Jim
The air was charged with an optimism never felt before, even in popular culture with the song Peace In Our Time by Eddie Money. For many people my age, this was the legacy of Ronald Reagan and there was much animated discussion at the time by pundits such as George Will about how it happened on "Bush's watch" as did Gary Wills later - but Ronald Reagan deserved much (not all) of the real credit while others wanted the credit to go to George H.W. Bush. 20 years after the fact, Bush told Greta Van Susteren humbly that, "...we had a great team working on it, and they all deserve credit." The New York Times predictably gave the credit to the communists:
East German Change Owes No Thanks To Us
2 years prior on June 12th, 1987, Ronald Reagan delivered his landmark "Mr. Gorbachev . . . tear down this wall" speech:
Watch here:
Text and audio here
President Obama recently declined to visit Germany even for one day because he is too busy with an upcoming trip to Asia (he claims) but do you suppose it might be because it is not enough about him? Or could it be that the fall of the Berlin Wall was too much of a statement of the triumph of Democracy and Freedom over Statism? After all, the collapse of the Berlin Wall is the most concrete (pun intended) empirical data you could ask for to show that a Command Economy will fail when left to compete with a Market Economy. This is why in philosophy and political science we call Communism and Socialism forms of Idealism - they only work in your head, not in real life where the rubber hits the road. After all, an 'Idealist' is a person who upon observing that a rose smells better than a cabbage concludes that it will also make better soup and an 'Ideologue' is a humorless zealot who finds fulfillment by spouting the ideas of famous humorless zealots - like Karl Marx and Nancy Pelosi.
And that leads us back to our beloved President who may be an idealist but is also savvy enough to know he neither would fit in at a celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall (because he doesn't really understand Freedom like someone such as Angela Merkel, the daughter of a Lutheran minister who lived under Communism), nor would he want to invite a comparison of his creeping socialist policies to those of the fallen Soviet Union.
Now for those of you without blood pressure issues, watch what Obama did have to say, all 3 minutes and 4 secinds of it:
Not one mention of Reagan, Bush, Thatcher or John Paul II - but he did inject himself and Hillary Clinton into it! What a colossal egomaniac, reminds me of a country song, I'm glad he did not go.
TTFN,
Jim
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