Today and Yesterday

Denver
One of Mark Warner's selling points for Obama is that "We need a president who understands the world today."

Yet one of the most troubling aspects of Obama is his consistent misreading of history. McCain pointed to one of these misunderstandings this afternoon:

[Obama] suggested that the end of the Cold War proved that there was, "no challenge too great for a world that stands as one." Now I missed a few years of the Cold War, as the guest of one of our adversaries, but as I recall the world was deeply divided during the Cold War--between the side of freedom and the side of tyranny. The Cold War ended not because the world stood "as one," but because the great democracies came together, bound together by sustained and decisive American leadership.

Obama also misread the Cuban missile crisis, mistakenly believing that Kennedy's meeting with Khrushchev was a foreign policy success.

It's difficult to correctly understand today's world when you don't understand how that world was made.