Robert Amsterdam

From Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post:

McCain's scorn for Barack Obama was on unrestrained display in Friday night's debate. How dare this impudent whippersnapper imagine he can be president, you could almost see McCain thinking. I'm the one who's racked up the frequent-flier miles to Waziristan! Henry Kissinger and I were BFFs when Obama was glued to "The Brady Bunch"! Listening to McCain debate was like a stroll down foreign policy memory lane: Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko. George Shultz, "our great secretary of state." Perestroika. SDI.

Those were the days, my friend. We thought the Cold War would never end.

Maybe we should just ask everybody who were direct participants in the Cold War on both sides to just take a step back from government and policy circles, and let some of us without these burdensome historical hangovers take a crack at understanding each other.... Oh god, did I just endorse the tabula rasa of Sarah Palin?