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Home Front: Politix
Good Riddance, Liz Cheney!
2021-05-14
[D. Stockman via ZH] There have been few politicians in modern times who have done more to undermine personal liberty, capitalist prosperity, small government and especially world peace than the Cheney Clan. So upon Liz Cheney’s ouster from the #3 job in the US House GOP hierarchy, we say: Good riddance!

And, no, we don’t begrudge her vote to impeach the Donald. The man is such an insufferable bully-boy and megalomaniac that upon his richly deserved exile from Washington her "yes" vote amounted to little more than a slightly offensive Bronx cheer. But what is profoundly offensive about the Cheneys is their central role in high-jacking the Republican Party in behalf of the demented worldview of a small priesthood of neocon intellectuals. The latter have turned the Warfare State of the now defunct cold war with the Soviet Union into a globe-spanning imperialist monster that has bled America dry fiscally and unleashed unjustified destruction and mayhem all around the planet in a manner that would have put even Imperial Rome to shame.
Mr. Stockman’s resumé includes being a sometimes successful contrarian investor, supply sider, President Reagan’s OMB director, and since 2014 a contrarian blogger.
Posted by:Clem

#13  I like Stockman's last thought - the restoration of a conservative party free from the toxic influence of Washington’s neocon cabal, and therefore capable of re-engaging with its real mission in American democracy—that of bringing Leviathan to heel on both sides of the Potomac.

I'm pretty sure the leviathan he refers to the the bloated government.
Posted by: Bobby   2021-05-14 15:21  

#12  The USSR didn't fall by itself. It was pushed
Posted by: Winky Speaking for Boskone1054   2021-05-14 12:17  

#11  No, the author is right. My dad was an SDI scientist; one of the men sent to visit the Soviet Union during the 80's as part of the scientific exchange Reagan set up. I remember what he said to me at the time. He liked the Russian scientists, but felt sorry for them because their tech was already twenty years behind the West's. "Great theoretical physicists. But they have nothing to work with." he told me.

Knowing what we know know, the Soviet Union had become a sleepy, economically uncompetitive backwater with nukes (always important I grant you) by the 80's. The hard men who fought the revolution were all dead, and the next generation didn't have the stones to slaughter Estonians in the streets when the moment came. Reagan may have shortened the Cold War by a decade. But the Soviet Union was going down regardless.
Posted by: Secret Master    2021-05-14 11:57  

#10  In the 1980's Stockman was as Establishment RepublicanTM as you could get. It's definite 'grains of salt' time when reading his stuff.
Posted by: Raj   2021-05-14 09:55  

#9  #1 is correct.

SDI empowered the arguments long made by those Soviets in the policy planning institutes that the USSR had fallen so far behind in semiconductor technology that the correlation of forces was irrevocably tilted against them.

They urged the Politburo to take radical steps to turn around the situation, and that's what caused them to gamble on a second-rate unknown hick politician called Gorbachev who promised "reform" -- changes that ultimately killed off first the Warsaw Pact and then Communist rule in the old USSR.

Note: French Pres. Mitterrand, as his advisor Jacques Attali records, was also terrified by the astonishing military-technological dominance that led Anglo-Saxons' SDI heralded.

In short, SDI more than any single factor caused the stunningly swift and bloodless implosion of the USSR.
Posted by: Spike Black5016   2021-05-14 09:31  

#8  The author is wrong on just about everything, typical deep state wannabe rewriting history.

Reaganonomics brought the US out of an economic hell hole created by Carter and his success lasted through the Clinton years.

Reagans bold Military build up and his relationship with Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher broke up the Soviet Union and the iron curtain resulting in the collapse of the Berlin Wall between East and West Germany.

His most important quote was that freedom lasts only one generation and it is up to the next generation to be willing to fight to hold on to it.
Posted by: Ebbomoger Speaking for Boskone4589   2021-05-14 08:30  

#7  Not to defend Miss Elizabeth, but I think the author - whoever he was in the past - isn't playing with the full desk.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru   2021-05-14 08:02  

#6  #4 Touche.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru   2021-05-14 08:00  

#5  She was completely un-hinged on Fox News yesterday.
Posted by: Deacon Blues   2021-05-14 07:27  

#4  g(r)omgoru the modulation of the TransSiberian RR is left out of this argument.
Surges toward Vladivostok, Surges in Afghanistan and the SDI and the like totally caused the RR to cease being useful (it couldn't support military counter surges back and forth leaving no bandwidth for real product movement).
Posted by: 3dc   2021-05-14 06:58  

#3  ^I wasn't driving any M113 (whatever it is).
Posted by: g(r)omgoru   2021-05-14 02:45  

#2  /\ "Democracy" was the vehicle or cover story, which helped sell the IDF the M113 you were driving.
Posted by: Besoeker   2021-05-14 02:43  

#1  Still, contrary to neocon revisionism, the Reagan defense buildup did not cause the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991

Oh yes it did. The Soviet rulers tried to cope with SDI by their "one step backward, two steps forward" - which worked for them in the past*, and miscalculated the mood of their people.

*I haven't quite grasped why Americans believe(d?) they have to impose democracy/capitalism to achieve World-peace.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru   2021-05-14 02:30  

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