Nancy A. Youseff, The Miami Herald

Nancy A. Youseff

The Miami Herald

One Herald Plaza

Miami, Florida 33132-1693

RE: “Shootdown Raises Concerns” – A comment from an older and wiser reader of your tale of the grave implications of the successful “shootdown” of an errant satellite by the United States as reported by you in today’s Miami Herald.

Ms.Youseff,

First, let me welcome you home.

It’s obvious from your fudged canard that you have spent the last 3 decades in some very strange places:

#1 – One of the minor moons of Jupiter

#2 – The guest house at Barbra Streisand’s beach house.

#3 – Zabar’s

#4 – The Democratic Party – the sanctum sanctorum of modern American Liberalism. The terms are interchangeable.

Quien sabe?as they say on Calle Ocho down here.

Let me flesh this out for you. It is obvious that History is not, I am being polite, your strong suit.

25 years ago next month President Reagan added a line to a speech on foreign policy. He asked if it wouldn’t make sense for us – the United States of America – to make itself impervious to missile attack by constructing a shield, an Aegis [from the Greek surprisingly enough meaning shield] if you will, using the technology that we possessed. If we had to develop new technology we would do that too. That is something we have always been able to do. It is one of the reasons people risk death to get here. It is one of the reasons, to quote the legendary Big Mike from Bayonne why you never see anyone swimming to Cuba

Everybody in the alternative universe occupied by modern American Liberals went, forgive me, ballistic.

The New York Times erupted in high dudgeon in a way not seen until they went apoplectic trying to force the Augusta National Golf Club to let chicks play in the Masters Invitational Tournament.

Senator Kennedy, AKA Senator Jabba the Hutt, led every elected Democrat in the entire country, every one from Congress to the Governors’ mansions, to town councils, to library advisory boards, each and every card carrying Democrat in America, in opposition to “Star Wars”.

Every editorial board, every TV news reader, every revisionist History and English teacher, all the really, really smart people in the world were opposed to it.

There were only 2 people in the entire universe who thought it could work.

A – Ronald Reagan

B – Mikhail Gorbachev

To me, the worst part of the ’80s debate about Star Wars, the Strategic Defense Initiative, call it what you will was not from the people who thought it wouldn’t work. I suppose there is some honor in being a modern day Luddite. It was from the people who thought it shouldn’t work.

The next stop on our History tour is Iceland.

Have you ever heard of the Reykjavik Summit?

In the New Testament – I can still mention religion, can’t I? – Satan tempts Jesus. The Devil shows Jesus the world and all that is in it. He tells Jesus he will give it to him if he will but bow down to him.

Gorbachev began by telling Reagan that he would give up repeating rifles, jet planes, the Gulag, spying, tea, and, finally, vodka. Reagan yawned. OK, OK, said Mikey the Red. He would get Stalin and Lenin out of the tomb in Moscow and hang them in Red Square. Reagan dozed. He then promised RWR that he and the entire Politburo would become Christians.

“All this will be yours if you stop SDI.”

Reagan hummed “You got to know when to hold’em and know when to fold’em”. Reagan, to his everlasting credit, knew when to ‘hold’em”. That’s why his countrymen love him. That’s why he is on a stamp. That’s why he is headed for Mount Rushmore. Conversely, that’s the reason why Jimmy Carter is hanging dry wall and had to bamboozle his way to a Nobel Prize. His big thing was getting euchred by the Gomers in North Korea, remember? All it required was the willing suspension of disbelief.

History is made by great men making great decisions. Reagan made them.

Do you remember the Berlin Wall being torn down? Do you remember a TV commercial saying “the lights are going on all over Europe”? If ever there was a better definition of enthymemes I have yet to find it.

Gorbachev will be appearing next week at an Indian Casino in Florida.

“I don’t see how other nations don’t see this as an anti-satellite test,”

said Theresa Hitchens, the director of the Washington, D.C. –based

Center for Defense Information, a centrist [italics mine] national security

policy institute. “They’ll see it as the weaponization of space.”

The Miami Herald

Today

3A

If I were to do a DNA test on the Center for Defense Information, an institution that you laughingly call “centrist”, I would find pictures of them at the airport, weeping uncontrollably, as Chamberlain alit from the plane from Munich and said, “Peace in our time”. You would then see “them” saying that while maybe Hitler had some rough edges he was an OK guy. We all know that the Jews are a “stiff necked people”. “They” said this from August 22, 1939 until June 21, 1941.

I am probably going too fast for you. You may want to Google the above paragraph. You may wish to familiarize yourself with what Auden called “a low and dishonest decade”.

I have a modest proposal for those countries who feel threatened by the visible success of American technology.

Do it yourselves.

It took this country 42 months to go from a universally shared knowledge of theoretical physics to a nuclear explosion. 3 weeks later we turned Hiroshima into the world’s largest outdoor tempura takeaway. 3 days later, to make sure the lesson was well and truly learned, we did it again, this time in Nagasaki.

If Russia, a country that spent the majority of the 20^th century being unable to feed itself, and China, a country for whom the rest of the world is filled with barbarians, a country that set the bar for killing its own citizens at 60,000,000, is worried or feels threatened let them build their own.

From Zippo lighters, to Polaroid cameras, to Xerox machines, to the Salk vaccine, to “Mickey, Willie, and the Duke”, to TV dinners, to the Green Bay Packer sweep, to walking on the moon, to leisure suits, to fax machines, to microprocessors, to the Internet, to the Nike swoosh, to Viagra, to the “vast Right-Wing conspiracy”, it has been a period of continuous, continuing American exceptionalism.

We built a bullet to hit another bullet. It hit the bullet. And, lest we forget, we said we were going to do this before we did it. It ain’t bragging if you can do it. We did it.

If I build the world’s best umbrella why shouldn’t I use it, particularly if I think it’s going to rain? If my neighbor doesn’t have one or can’t afford one why should I put mine away?

If they feel threatened they should build their own.

I don’t know if Mrs. Obama feels proud of this. If she doesn’t I, and I am sure a lot of my country men, do.

Reagan’s legacy to his country continues.