This superb Comment of the Day by Steve-O-in NJ, on the post, “KABOOM! At What Point Do Parents Blow The Whistle On Flagrant Ideological Indoctrination In Our Schools?,” needs no introduction.

It just needs to be read.

A USAF F-16 Fighting Falcon, mainstay of the last 12 years of the Cold War, launches to fly a patrol. In those years it could have been anywhere from Italy to Spain to Turkey, while throughout Europe squadrons of the same under allied flags kept watch. A USAF F-15 Eagle, older still (they entered service in 1976) takes to the air. In the Cold War they kept watch further north, in Germany, in England, and even at Keflavik in Iceland. Every day they drilled, every day they patrolled, every day they were ready to go into battle on command, to stop the tyrannical scourge of Soviet communism or die trying.

We’d made a deal we wished we hadn’t had to with them, because the alternative was the genocidal tyranny of Nazism. We’d either looked the other way on, or not asked and not been told about, or accepted their lies about the worst things they’d done then like the Katyn Forest Massacre. However, we’d also seen them try to starve and freeze West Berlin out, and we’d seen them roll right over Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 when they dared to try to move toward greater freedom. We would be damned if we were going to let them bring that tyranny to the Rhine or past it. We’d heard from those who escaped what the conditions were like on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and we wanted no part of them.

We wanted no part of a system where there was one political party and only one. We wanted no part of a system where those who deviated from the party line either died or disappeared suddenly. We wanted no part of a system where faith was officially disapproved of and suppressed. We wanted no part of a system where the individual was just a cog in the government machine and had no hope of doing better. The system they offered was simply antithetical to what the Founding Fathers set up for this country, and we weren’t letting them bring it here. We’d fight to prevent it, and we’d die fighting rather than surrender to it. That’s why there were these patrols, that’s why the 41 for freedom were at sea at all times, but no one knew exactly where, and that’s why the 2nd Armored Division was always ready to go and the 82nd and 101st had battalions ready to fly out on minimal notice.

Now one of our political parties is likely to nominate a man who not only went behind the Iron Curtain, but did it willingly, for a honeymoon, when most of us head to someplace with a lot of sun and sand, or a lot of palazzos and palaces if the beach isn’t our thing. Not only did he go there, but he praised what he found there, in the place where those who dared speak out vanished and a refrigerator was a luxury item, saying it was a better system than we had here. Not only did he go there and praise what he found, but he did it while Ronald Reagan was finally arm-wrestling the Soviets to their final defeat, which would lead to their dissolution 3 years later. Not only all this, but he wants to bring that failed system here, on speed, and his followers say damned be anyone who stands in his way, because cities will burn otherwise.

I don’t know what’s more ironic (though not in an amusing way), that this system no longer exists in the nation where it originated (which also doesn’t exist anymore), or that the party that’s about to nominate this man is the same party that produced Thomas Jefferson, architect of the American brand of freedom, Andrew Jackson, who decisively stopped the first attempts to tear this nation apart, FDR, whom many still count as third in the great trinity of US presidents with Washington and Lincoln, and Harry Truman, who was the first president to stand up against this system that his party now wants to bring here. Continue reading →