By Count Friedrich von Olsen
In the mad rush to condemn Donald Trump, his political opponents are demonizing him for the relationship he has cultivated over many decades with the Russians. It seems to me, the animus fueling this condemnation is partisan in nature, one that is disguised or falsely represented as ideological in origin and which is based not at all upon factual accuracy…
The inference those attacking our president want us to draw from the jumble of rhetoric and three-quarter, half- and quarter- truths they cast about is that the leader of the West is either in league with the Communists as a longtime sleeper agent to overthrow the various regimes of the Free World, including that of the United States, or he is a dupe of the Russians, or variously, being blackmailed by the KGB. All of these scenarios are so far-fetched that none of them can be true…
It used to be that the Democrats complained that the Republicans were unfairly making false accusations that the Democrats – who espoused liberal social welfare programs akin to socialism – had become fellow travelers with the Kremlin. Now the situation has reversed itself and it is the Democrats who are making false accusations that the Republicans – who are espousing an economic alliance and stronger business ties with the Russians in the face of a rapidly changing global marketplace – have become fellow travelers with the Kremlin…
The reality is that the Democrats are debasing themselves by opportunistically latching onto hackneyed and outdated mischaracterizations of the “Soviet” threat in an effort to evoke a conditioned kneejerk response from an unthinking segment of the American public in an effort to achieve a political advantage in the interminable struggle with the Republicans for political primacy…
Back in the late 1980s, during what was Ronald Reagan’s last year in office, I was having a conversation with a friend and his wife in which we were sizing up the Reagan presidency. My friend’s wife, a Democrat, was not, for the most part, too charitable in her view of what President Reagan had accomplished. She did, however, pay him and his performance as chief executive one compliment, which at this point I believe appropriate to cite. She said that despite President Reagan’s penchant for what was referred to as “conservatism,” that he fortunately was not so mentally rigid and ideologically blinded that he still possessed the mental agility to recognize Mikhail Gorbachev was a “modern Russian” who was not himself so rigidly wedded to the precepts of the Soviet system that he could not compromise in a very real and very substantive way. She said that to his credit, Ronald Reagan had been able to seize upon the prospect for accommodation this presented, and that he had capitalized upon it. We did not know at that time, though there were signs, of what was to come. A few years later, the Soviet Empire crumbled, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics de-unionized and became the independent nations that now inhabit the modern map. A few years later, in what was arguably the most dramatic moment of the 20th Century, Boris Yeltsin stood up to support Mr. Gorbachev when the reactionary and backward-looking remnants of the USSR and the KGB staged an ultimately unsuccessful coup attempt…
We are now at a similar point. It is time for the American people to recognize that President Trump is a modern American who recognizes the United States can work with the new Russia and that Russia is our country’s natural ally and potentially our most engaging trading partner. And it is time for the American people to stand up and support President Trump against the reactionary and backward-looking remnants of the failed and discredited political class to prevent them from taking us back to a point in history we have wisely removed ourselves from…