Department of "Huh?"

You know, I've never understood this:

WSJ.com - Republican Advantage on Issue Of National Security Erodes: Republicans are left with one remaining strong suit -- voters' sense, going back a half-century to the Cold War against communism, that they are better able than Democrats to keep the nation secure. "It's still an enormously potent issue" for Republicans, says party strategist and former Rep. Vin Weber. His party's historical advantage on national security is the wild card...

Only Nancy Reagan's rolling over the Republican administration in the 1980s got the U.S. into a sane pro-Gorbachev policy posture. Nixon forgot that the strength of the U.S. is that we are the good guys--as George W. Bush has forgotten. As for Eisenhower... he and John Foster Dulles promised that we were going to "rollback" Communism--and to their sorrow the Hungarians believed them. From the Wall Street Journal's opposition to the Marshall Plan to the ascent of Joe McCarthy to the Fall of the Soviet Union, the one thing you could count on was that the American right would be not Tough on Communism but profoundly Stupid on Communism.

And that glorious foreign-policy legacy, dating from Taft's opposition to post-WWII aid to Western Europe and McCarthy's eagerness to blind the State Department's ability to analyze the world? it has been continued to this day.

Remember the attempts in the early days of the Bush administration to gin up a new cold war with China?

Remember George W. Bush's vacation briefing in 2001 where Condi Rice tried to play three-card-monte with the headline? "BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO STRIKE INSIDE THE U.S. Remember George W. Bush's response to the briefing? "All right, you've covered your ass.".

Remember this, too: