Truth To Former Power

George W. Bush, to the left, has crossed the line from "village idiot" (who keeps plastering them in elections) into the realm of "G-dless apostate" - the g-d in this case being the left's deity in chief, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

First it was Social Security - about which reasonable people can reasonably disagree.

Now, it's Yalta, Roosevelt's deal with the devil, almost literally.

The more reasonable voices on the left ask if victory in World War II would have been possible without Yalta; it's of a piece with many other imponderables about the war (could Stalin have held on without Lend-Lease and the threat of a second front drawing away a third of Hitler's army?). The less-reasonable voices on the left fret that Bush is starting another Cold War - ironically, since so many of them backed the loser in the real Cold War.

Eastern Europeans? Well, they know the truth.

Simple fact: Whether you call it unavoidable realpolitik or a betrayal of convenience or national naievete over Stalin's real nature, Yalta condemned a hundred million people to fifty years...no, fifty more years of brutal, genodidal dictatorship. While the lefty media has the vapors over Bush's apostasy, Bush is right to condemn the results of Yalta on the people of the Baltic States and the rest of the former Eastern Bloc.

But my question is this...

When Ronald Reagan declared the USSR the Evil Empire and demanded that Gorbachev "tear down the wall", the left sniggered; the "Second World" was here to stay, insisted the likes of Galbraith and Talbott.

When the US set about trying to free Afghanistan, the left huffed and puffed about the impossibility and pointlessness of it all, of the rage upcoming in the Arab Street.

When the US invaded Iraq, the left fretted and phumphered and changed the subject, and wondered if the Arab world was ready for democracy.

When the Lebanese and Egyptians and other Arabs took to the streets to demand democracy, the dogmatic left stumbled and spun and dug frantically for the dark cloud behind the silver lining.

And now that a US president is admitting that a man that killed 60 million human beings might not have been a wonderful ally, the orthodox left is acting like their teenager farted in church.

How many more dictators does the left have to lose their shirts on before they get the point?