You Know What--He Probably Should Have Won It

Jerome Doolittle has a handy compendium of predictable conservative responses to the new Nobelist (h/t, James Fallows), including:

7. No thinking person has taken the Nobel Peace Prize seriously
since Reagan didn’t win one for ending the Cold War.

Cute, but you know what? Reagan probably should have won the prize for ending the Cold War--in company, of course, with Mikhail Gorbachev, the Pope, the price of West Texas Intermediate Crude, all the other forces (human and otherwise) that converged to generate such a happy result.

Not, perhaps, for the reasons usually set forth in the conservative folklore, and specifically not for running an obscene defense budget--a threat which, by all the evidence, Gorbachev never took seriously anyway, because he knew the Americans had no intention of a first strike. Rather, Reagan deserves the prize for something more ambitious and radical--for making it all conceivable, and in particular, for doing a 180 on all his conservative allies who thought he had gone all Alpha Centauri on them and had to scramble (and grind their teeth) for years as they tried to adjust to the new reality.

Recall Will Bunch's Tear Down this Myth: How the Reagan Legacy has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future, where he demonstrates how how both his friends and his enemies misremember Reagan and deploy him for lesson she had/has nothing to do with. And stipulate that nothing in this version requires you to concede that Reagan was anything other than a bumbling old fool; specifically not that Reagan really understood what he was doing; you are permitted to continue recalling that this is the president who thought World War II was a movie. But wouldn't you enjoy savoring how crazy it would make Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perl, whoever, to have their nose rubbed in the fact their hero achieved immortality by his openness to the new world and his willingness to abjure war?