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Republicans who say that these people do not represent the GOP as a whole can prove this by taking them on. But they won't, will they? They never do.
Indeed. And immediately afterwards, Sully chastizes Tony Kushner for daring to say mean things about Dear Leader, who of course has embraced these people.
via Ailes, who has more to say.
And, while I'm slumming at Sullyville I notice he's taken the words of Arthur Schlesinger from 1982, where he's commenting on the economic health of the Soviet Union, and comments "They really thought that the Soviet Union wasn't evil." I have no idea whether Schlesinger thought the Soviet Union was "evil" in 1982, but nor does Sullivan as that kind of judgment isn't present anywhere in the quote.
The person he gets the quote from, Virginia Postrel, is a bit more honest, owning up to the fact that "Few of Reagan's conservative allies thought the Soviet Union was in any danger either." But, Andy hasn't yet come on board with the "Reagan was a visionary" theme -- he thinks we're still on the "Democrats and Leftists are commie symps" theme.
But, the truth is well into the 80s much of the Right in this country spoke admiringly of the Soviet economy, as did the CIA. Many talked of it being "brutally efficient." Capitalism had not yet "won," and so the communist planned economy was derided not on its failure as a system of production, but as an exploitive system in which people were not given the rewards of their own labor, along with its political and cultural repression. If Leftists still believed that a Soviet style planned economy could succeed as an economic system, then they weren't alone.
The Soviet Union could only be the threat they believed it was if it had an economy that could sustain its military budget. Right wingers almost universally scoffed at the notion that the Gorbachev-era reforms were real, mostly seeing them as some sinister to trick to catch us unaware.
Reagan may truly have been one of the few who believed the Soviet economy could be destabilized, even if there's little evidence our expanding and wasteful military spending had much to do with the actual result. But to pretend that "the Left" was out there praising Soviet economic might while the Right was not is just completely dishonest.