re: More from The Great Communicator

We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion now in slavery behind the Iron Curtain, "Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skin, we are willing to make a deal with your slave masters." Alexander Hamilton said, "A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one." Let's set the record straight. There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace--and you can have it in the next second--surrender.

Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face--that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand--the ultimatum. And what then?

- Ronald Reagan, A Time for Choosing

And although this speech was given at the height of the cold war to refer to the evils of Communism, I believe it holds true to terrorism today, and directly confronts the historic blunders that come with appeasement.

For those who want to watch the Great Communicator tell it like it is, here you go.

And before your go to the polls, or choose to avoid them to make a point, I challenge each of you to think of what Ronald Reagan would have us do? Punish the GOP for disappointing you and putting appeasers in power? I don't think so. For to do so, as RR would say, could "or sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness."