"Remember Communism? Didn't That Suck?"

Remember how during the Cold War, Americans from the left, right, center, and wingnut extremes all shouted in one voice and shook one first and stood as one against Communism?

Yeah, neither do I.

Neither does the Washington Post‘s Fred Hiatt. And he’s smart enough to compare the Better Red Than Dead idiots of 20 years ago, to today’s crop of Better Blown Up Than Grown Up morons.

From Hiatt’s column:

Now those glossed-over divisions are reemerging, in parallel to, and as a consequence of, the drawing of battle lines with regard to President Bush’s war on terrorism. The post-9/11 unanimity also is eroding, with both liberals and conservatives challenging what they see as Bush’s vision of “permanent war.” Small-government conservatives worry about the reemergence of a vast national security establishment; liberals see a plot to maintain presidential popularity and thwart progressive initiatives. And as they begin to grope for a way to oppose the administration without seeming unpatriotic, they are echoing, sometimes explicitly, their Cold War divisions.

In the liberal American Prospect, for example, Paul Starr sees the war on terrorism as providing “the functional equivalent of the Cold War” to pave the way for “tax cuts, huge increases in military expenditures, deficits and the consequent exclusion of all the initiatives that liberals might offer.” Lewis Lapham in Harper’s Magazine says the significance of 9/11 is being exaggerated (the Enron bankruptcy is “almost as spectacular as the collapse of the World Trade Center,” he writes, “but nobody pokes around in the rubble for a world-changing paradigm”) in order, apparently, to continue the Cold War task “of replacing the antiquated American republic, modest in ambition and democratic in spirit, with the glory of a nationstate increasingly grand in scale and luxurious in its taste for hegemony.”

He’s right, of course, and we’ve had this dialogue going on in the blogosphere for months now. There were some bad days throughout the Cold War, when it looked like the idiots might take power. We’ll have those days again in the Current Mess, I’m sure.

Just stick to your guns (so to speak), speak out at every chance, and vote Hawk.

NOTE: I think I just coined “Better Blown Up Than Grown Up” to describe the new crop of anti-war chowderheads, and their childish slogans. Is it a keeper?