{"id":58097,"date":"2016-03-24T06:00:07","date_gmt":"2016-03-24T11:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=58097"},"modified":"2016-03-23T11:43:39","modified_gmt":"2016-03-23T16:43:39","slug":"the-difference-between-obama-and-reagan-part-mmmxm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=58097","title":{"rendered":"The Difference Between Obama And Reagan, Part MMMXM"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If Barack Obama had been president in the 1980s, he&#8217;d have extended the Russians a line of credit to help them forestall bankruptcy (for a while, anyway) and keep a fresh coat of paint on the Berlin Wall . He&#8217;s have opened the nation up to trade\u00a0and &#8220;public-private partnerships&#8221; (by companies that agreed to play ball with the Soviets, of course). \u00a0And he&#8217;d ahve\u00a0not only thrown\u00a0<em>Solidarity\u00a0<\/em>and the legions of the Soviets&#8217; political prisoners under the bus, but stomped on them a few times to keep them there and out of the way, incapable of sidetracking the narrative.<\/p>\n<p>Thankfully, Obama was not president. \u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/article\/433117\/obama-havana-reagan-moscow-no\">Reagan was<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>[After Reagan called the USSR an &#8220;evil empire&#8221; &#8211; how un-Obama-like can you get?], Anatoly Shcharansky was in the Gulag. (After, he would become Natan Sharansky.) He and his fellow zeks heard what Reagan had done. Had the American president really called the Soviet Union an \u201cevil empire\u201d? Yes. Years later, Sharansky reflected:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It was the brightest, most glorious day. Finally a spade had been called a spade. Finally, Orwell\u2019s Newspeak was dead. President Reagan had from that moment made it impossible for anyone in the West to continue closing their eyes to the real nature of the Soviet Union.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Barack Obama has thrown the Castros a lifeline &#8211; which, with the demise of the USSR and the disintegration of Venezuela, their major benefactors this past fifty years, they need to avoid being put, eventually, to the pike. \u00a0He was &#8220;opened&#8221; the country (to those who will play ball with the Castros, the Castros way).<\/p>\n<p>And he&#8217;s just re-upped the sentence for every human rights and liberties dissident on the island.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m ashamed of this president. \u00a0That&#8217;s nothing new, of course. \u00a0But it never gets easier.<\/p>\n<div class=\"returnemail js-only\"><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If Barack Obama had been president in the 1980s, he&#8217;d have extended the Russians a line of credit to help them forestall bankruptcy (for a while, anyway) and keep a fresh coat of paint on the Berlin Wall . He&#8217;s have opened the nation up to trade\u00a0and &#8220;public-private partnerships&#8221; (by companies that agreed to play [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58097"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58098,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58097\/revisions\/58098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}