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Edited on Tue Sep-26-06 05:09 AM by lapfog_1
the one that had the gulags and pravda and it was a crime to THINK of a different way, a place where there was no freedom to travel, where you never knew if the Three Letter acronym government agency was listening in to your phone calls or reading your mail. Where you could be held in some far away hellhole without ever knowing why you were arrested in the first place.
An evil empire that attempted to extend its influence to the far corners of the earth, that went on reckless adventures with it's professional and, by all accounts, dominant military, imposing its economic and political systems to those that would oppose it at the point of a gun.
But was it Ronnie that brought down this evil empire or was it 40 years of staunch opposition from a Freedom Loving west? 40 years of simply holding the beacon of hope for the USSRs masses, countering their Pravda lies with the truth, and, yes, out spending them on a military, in an arms race in which the victor won by outlasting the vanquished. And there were other factors as well, including a drawn out war with a set of religious fanatics in a place called Afghanistan. Ronnie gets some of the credit, but so does Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter before him.
And now we have Shrub... and now WE have become what Ronnie fought so long against. we have the gulags (Gitmo and foreign rendition sites), we have the TLA agencies reading our (e)mail and wiretapping our communications, we have the executive unitary government that decides who should be arrested and "disappeared" without trial, without evidence. We are the ones who now torture and then uses the confessions of the tortured against them in secret trials... We have the news which is nothing but lies and half truths (FOX and "friends") and we are the nation who's citizens cannot travel freely (no fly lists) and We are the nation now in Iraq and Afghanistan, fighting the same radical fanatics in the same mountain passes. And losing.
We are the ones spreading our economic and political models to the rest of the world at the point of a gun. And we will suffer the same fate as the Evil Empire that Ronnie helped destroy.
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