Look at their "Package!"

Last night, Kay and I curled up in front of the TV-box to watch Gene Hackman in "The Package."

Released in 1989, this film was an unveiled, unnuanced tirade against the MAD doctrine (Mutually Assured Destruction) in particular and the concept of peace through strength more generally. It was a love letter to complete and immediate nuclear disarmament, suggesting that this was the only way to secure world peace and U.S. security (despite the inevitability that dictatorships around the world would eventually acquire nukes of their own). Advocates of a strong U.S. defense policy and the retention of a nuclear deterrent against the larger conventional war machine of the Soviet Union were presented as conspiratorial madmen.

Wait. Did I say 1989?

The same 1989 in which the Berlin wall fell? The same 1989 in which the totalitarian and expansionist Soviet Union began to crumble under the impossible pressure of matching U.S. defense spending? The same 1989 that followed eight years of a Reagan administration that, whatever its faults, unabashedly denounced Soviet communism as the evil empire it was (for which Reagan was derided and ridiculed by the Left)?

Yup. That 1989.

Some timing, huh?

Given his well-known positions on U.S. defense policy during the 1980s, I imagine John Kerry must have enjoyed this flick back in '89 almost as much as modern anti-warriors are enjoying Fahrenheit 9/11.