Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [10]
I’m sorry if that sounds a little cheap, but I couldn’t find a rhyme for “Julius Rosenberg.”
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Liberals Who Hate America
That’s me with John Glenn on the second of three USO tours I’ve done because I hate America. We had just choppered onto the deck of the USS Harry Truman, named for our thirty-third president, a liberal America-hater of the worst sort. Can you tell which of us is more accustomed to wearing flight gear?
There’s just one reference to Truman in Slander: “Truman got the country into Korea and couldn’t get us out for two and half years.” That’s it. No Truman Doctrine, no Marshall Plan, no NATO.
John F. Kennedy receives a similarly fleeting mention. “Kennedy got the country into a war in Vietnam after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion and then sat passively by while the Russians built the Berlin Wall.”
FDR gets whacked around a bit because he “spent eight years failing to get the country out of the Depression but then had the skill and foresight to allow the nation to be taken by surprise at Pearl Harbor.” That’s all we get on Roosevelt except that he called Stalin “Uncle Joe.”
She’s tough on us Democrats and “their [our] beloved Soviet Union.”
Ronald Reagan, however, “singlehandedly won the Cold War.” In fact, Reagan “won the Cold War” on page 33 (the same page on which Bush graduated from Yale College and Harvard Business School), on page 34, on page 124, then again on 130, 131, 134, and finally again on page 197.
If Ann Coulter were genuinely interested in finding out who singlehandedly won the Cold War, she should have called my old friend Marshal Viktor Kulikov, the former Warsaw Pact commander. In 1992, Kulikov told U.S. News & World Report that “Reagan was a logical extension of what had started with Truman, a concentrated effort to weaken and intimidate the Soviet Union.”
Other people give credit for ending the Cold War to the Polish pope, John Paul II; to Lech Walesa and his independent trade union, Solidarity; to Jimmy Carter, who put pressure on Moscow to respect the human rights of its people; and to the Soviet Union itself, which was collapsing under the crushing weight of its own failed system. Reagan, of course, did put the medium-range Pershing II missiles in Europe and began developing the Rube Goldberg Star Wars missile defense system which protects us to this day.
So credit where credit is due. Viktor told me that Reagan’s aggressive posture unquestionably hastened the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union by a week to ten days.
Personally, I believe it was the Beatles who set the whole thing in motion. Once The White Album made it over the border hidden in the false bottom of an Aeroflot pilot’s briefcase, it was only a matter of time.
You do a lot of traveling on USO tours. John Glenn and I flew to Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany, to Aviano Air Base in Italy, to the Truman somewhere in the Mediterranean, and to Eagle Base in Tuzla, Bosnia, Camp Able Sentry in Macedonia, and Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo. At each stop, I entertained the troops with anti-American jokes.
I got to spend a lot of time with Senator Glenn and his wife, Annie. I’d kid him a lot. Whenever we were just taking off in some cargo plane or helicopter, I’d say, “So, John, you nervous?”
He’d laugh. And as I, a fellow Democrat, began to gain his trust, Glenn opened up to me about just how much he hates America. I mean, by Coulter’s standards, he had been an extremely liberal senator: pro-union, pro-choice, pro–Social Security, pro-Medicare. You know, all those anti-American things.
On the flight from Europe back to Andrews Air Force Base, I asked him, “John, tell me. Are you kind of embarrassed about the fifty-nine missions you flew as a Marine pilot in World War II? And the ninety combat missions you flew in Korea? And the five Distinguished Flying Crosses and nineteen Air Medals you earned?”
“Yeah,” he cringed, “I’d just as soon not be reminded of all that.”
“How about being the first American to orbit the Earth?”
“It makes me ashamed just to think about it,” he said, bowing his head as we