It’s hard to know who to root for or who to expect will come out on top in the long-running and fast-galloping race between John Yoo’s moral bankruptcy and his historical illiteracy, but as long as the topic has foisted itself upon us again, I would like to address this question of War on Terror-inspired Cold War revisionism.
As you’ve probably seen, Yoo has now taken to arguing that the restraints on presidential power enshrined in the 1970s came about largely because the US faced no serious national security threats during that era. (George McGovern must be kicking himself, right?) And it occurs to me, considering this, that even at the relatively young age of 37, I and those my age are probably the last people who have any meaningful living memory of what the Cold War was like. Or in other words, what it was like living in a world where the primary geopolitical antagonism was between the United States and the Soviet Union and a full escalation of that conflict would result, for all practical purposes, in the end of the world.
So, perhaps folks in their twenties and early thirties have some excuse for this dingbat historical amnesia, but what’s the excuse of anyone over 40?
Terrorism is scary. More so if you live in a major city like New York. But life’s hard. And compared to nuclear holocaust it’s really pretty much a walk in the park, isn’t it?
