I’m reminded that today is the anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech in Berlin:

It’s a useful reminder that while Reagan included key neoconservatives in his administration, particularly in his first term, most of them always suspected that he was a fool, incapable or unwilling to take the heels-dug-in position that would bring down our Soviet adversaries. Even in 1982, at the height of the neocons’ influence on Reagan and just five years before this speech, neocon capo Norman Podhoretz was accusing Reagan of “following a strategy of helping the Soviet Union stabilize its empire, rather than … encouraging the breakdown of that empire from within.”

I could bore you with umpteen more examples of these sorts of (neo-)conservative denunciations of Reagan, but the man knew an opportunity when he saw it, and wasn’t going to listen to the naysayers and pessimists when they told him it wasn’t so. Reagan by no means got everything right, but on the big questions, he would be a welcome respite from today’s Republican Party, which has been handed over to the neoconservatives in exchange for the mess of pottage that is our Iraq policy.