The Louisiana lege is in session, which is why it’s time for our erstwhile Governor to trot out his Presidential fever dreams to distract attention from his unpopularity at home. Wingnut attacks on President Obama have gotten so shrill that in order to attract attention, PBJ has trotted out a right wing whipping boy from the past, Yalta. Specious attacks against FDR’s deal making at Yalta with Stalin were a staple of the American right from 1945 to 1965, so PBJ has gone back to the future:

Sixty-nine years after the American president traveled to the Crimean peninsula to capitulate to a Russian strongman, Barack Obama’s weakness is pushing the United States to another generational conflict with Moscow.

In exchange for some phony promises of future, multilateral cooperation, Franklin Roosevelt in 1945 sated Joseph Stalin’s appetite to expand the population of subjugates under Moscow’s thumb. Eastern European innocents would pay for that mistake in the cold, dark shadow of totalitarianism for nearly half a century. And Americans paid for it with a multibillion-dollar cold war that strained our budgets, dragged our economy, and posed an ever-present threat to the national psyche.

Roosevelt’s failure was to believe a land-grabber could be coaxed, instead of confronted, into submission. Of Stalin, he said, “I think that if I give him everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.” Sound familiar? President Obama’s performance in the current Crimean crisis bears all the marks of that same naïveté.

Bobby’s intern obviously researched this National Review piece by using the google and doing so badly. Or maybe he/she/it read some ancient red scare tracts to come to this idiotic conclusion. FDR was, of course, no inexperienced naif but a wily and cynical operator who knew that the Red Army occupied Eastern Europe and to “rollback” these inconvenient facts would have required continuing the war. Nobody wanted that except for the great grand daddies of our current generation of neo-conservative chicken hawks.

It is also hilarious to read this drivel, which is a 5th Grade level essay posing as the work of a statesman. As always, PBJ has contempt for his audience and talks down to them. Actually, considering that this was published by the National Review, he probably hit the nail on the pinhead.The analogy is wildly OTT as the stakes at Yalta were much higher: the fate of Eastern Europe was on the line as opposed to one region that is historically within the Russian sphere of influence. But details don’t matter to Bobby, he’s trying yet again to prove that he’s the smartest guy in the room. Anyone with this compulsion is an insecure silly billy as opposed to Presidential material. That’s why Charlie Pierce calls PBJ “that warped piece of Presidential timber.”

It is a mark of PBJ’s ignorance, insularity, and many other i words that he thinks that he can insult Barack Obama by comparing him to the most venerated Democratic President of all, FDR. Ronald Reagan never pretended to be the smartest guy in the room, but he knew that attacking FDR was a fool’s errand. Besides, Reagan was a former New Deal Democrat so he praised the parts of FDR’s record that comported with his born again Republicanism. Bobby’s intern is merely a fool on an errand for his foolish and boring boss. Or maybe he/she/it is a full fledged staffer. I hope not, given the caliber of the NR article.

Misusing history to make a political point is as old as the Republic itself. The right is fond of thinking of the US and A as so omnipotent that all world events either flow from us or can be effected *and* affected by us. They are wrong. It’s very much like the “Truman and Marshall lost China” canard that paralyzed US Asian policy from 1949 to 1972. Tricky Dick was among those who perpetrated that pernicious myth and then destroyed it when it suited his political purposes. Not everything in the world is our business and the “weakness” of Barack Obama and John Kerry has nothing to do with what’s happening in Ukraine. I do, however, wish the wingnuts could get their story straight: how can Obama be a ruthless dictator at home and a feckless weakling abroad?

There have been calls in the Gret Stet for Governor PBJ to stay home and do his job. I beg to differ. His health care and education policies have been so catastrophic for Louisiana that I urge him to stay away and pursue his delusions of Presidential grandeur. Our lege is pretty horrible but they care more about the state than this fast talking pipsqueak. Let him spend his time patronizing the voters in Iowa and New Hampshire so we can get on with the business of crawling from the wreckage of the Jindal years: