The Democrats Go From Cold War Doves to Paranoid Hawks
The party that once celebrated Daniel Ellsberg can’t tolerate Tulsi Gabbard.
by George Neumayr
March 17, 2022, 1:11 AM
The Democrats once prided themselves on defending opponents of war and dissenters from the perceived patriotic consensus in the country. They were the party of peaceniks, nuclear freezers, draft dodgers, and conscientious objectors. During the days of the Cold War, they would often condemn Republicans for supposedly overstating the threat of Soviet expansionism and gave no support to underdogs, such as the Contras in Nicaragua, who fought against it.
How times have changed. The Democrats have gone from condemning McCarthyism to indulging their own version of it, casting Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, as a traitor for daring to deviate from the party’s line on Ukraine. In 2019, Hillary Clinton insinuated that Gabbard is an operative for the Russians. “I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate,” Clinton said of Gabbard. “She’s the favorite of the Russians.”
Listening to the Democrats today inveigh against the reconstruction of the “Soviet empire,” one might wonder: Where was that bellicose passion during the Cold War?
If the Democrats owe an apology to Joseph McCarthy, they owe an even bigger one to Ronald Reagan. They called him a wild-eyed warmonger for sizing up Russian aggression correctly. They portrayed him, not his Soviet counterparts (which included a young Vladimir Putin), as the provocateur in the Cold War. Teddy Kennedy, among others, called for irenic overtures to the Soviets and scoffed at Reagan’s peace-through-strength policies.
more
https://spectator.org/the-democrats-go-from-cold-war-doves-to-paranoid-hawks/
