I Concur...

The right way to honor Ronald Reagan

Washington (CNN) -- We're approaching the 100th anniversary of the birthday of Ronald Reagan: February 6, 2011. It's time to begin thinking seriously about an appropriate national commemoration of this good man and great president.

To date, the main attempts to honor Reagan in the nation's capital have gone askew. A government office building second in size only to the Pentagon? An airport from which Washingtonians cannot fly to California? These do not seem very appropriate monuments to a president who fought bureaucracy and yearned for home.

Frum proposes a memorial to the victims of communism, which certainly seems appropriate. Despite the best attempts of the left to pretend that Reagan had nothing to do with the fall of the Iron Curtain, he's a central figure in the fall of the Berlin wall and the crumbling of the Soviet empire. Reagan out-spent, out-bluffed, and just plain outlasted the Russians in our war of ideologies. He showed the world that capitalism, while far from perfect, at least made accomodations to the human nature - as opposed to communism, which either hid human nature (in the inner party workings) or crushed it under a military boot.

The world saw the contrast: the United States, that paean to capitalism, had Elvis, Disneyland, the Corvette, and men landing on the moon in the post WWII time frame. The Russians had secret police, gulags, Ladas, and Sputnik. Hardly a fair contrast. From a military standpoint, we learned from our mistakes in Vietnam just as the Russians invaded Afghanistan; while both nations stockpiled nuclear weapons, the United States didn't require its people go hungry in order to accomplish this aim - rather, our defense contractors employed hundreds of thousands of Americans working overtime to keep up with demand.

In short, Reagan's vision of people living under freedom rather than the Red Curtain helped liberate a good chunk of Eastern Europe. As it turned out, we didn't have to defeat the Russian bear, we merely had to wait it out - eventually, the system proved too costly to survive, and the state-sponsored communism as practiced in the Soviet Union was shown to be untenable. People yearn to be free - Reagan knew this instinctively - and when efforts are made to countermand this most basic principle, it is destined for the ash heap of history from inception. Reagan knew that the communism as practiced by the Russians was not a viable long-term strategy, and chose to accelerate their demise by pushing them on spending and spreading their forces too thin.

Erecting a museum that showcases the truth about the enemy he faced down would be a fitting tribute to the man who defeated the Evil Empire indeed...

That is all.