AUSTIN BAY:

It’s 2003, and the president is George W. Bush, but the teeth-gnashing rhetoric is right of out 1983 and the “Euro-missile protests” against Ronald Reagan.

This month is the 20th anniversary of the Great Euromissile Crisis. Oh, the accusations! Reagan was stupid. Reagan was dangerous, a warmonger seeking the nuclear destruction of the USSR. Reagan was — good heavens — a unilateralist. Today, the mayor of London calls Bush “the greatest threat to life on the planet.”

Read the whole thing for more historical perspective.