Remember Vietnam?

Mickey Kaus has forgotten about Vietnam. He thinks that the Democrats can get elected on a return to normalcy platform whose major plank is that the war on Islamic terrorism is going so well that we don't need the GOP in the White House anymore. He thinks that we can adopt a Cold War mentality. Roger Simon and some of his commenters pointed out how silly this idea is. Kaus responds by claiming: "We even elected Democrats during those decades, yet somehow Communism was still contained and then defeated."

Ignoring how ridiculous it would be for Dems to follow up years of claiming the war is a disaster by now claiming it is going well, we need to remind Mickey that he seems to have forgotten how Vietnam completely transformed the Democratic Party. During the Carter years, Communism was NOT contained, much less defeated. In fact, the biggest obstacle to Reagan's efforts to win the Cold War was the Democrats' insistence that we should not even try to win it!

I seem to recall Jimmy Carter and his friends telling us that Communism was not really a threat. Our fear of communism was "inordinate", he said. And the Congressional Democrats on the Church Committee told us that the CIA was a much bigger threat to us than the USSR. Recent events remind us that things haven't changed much since.

How could Mickey have forgotten Vietnam. His liberal buddies seem to have Vietnam permanently seared into their brains. Every time we deploy our military we hear that we are repeating Vietnam. Surely Mickey remembers.