Every Democratic Administration since World War II has gone out of office with a foreign policy crisis. Harry Truman was involved in the hopeless, draining Korean War when his Administration ended in January of 1953.   

The Truman Administration got us into the Korean War in 1950. Then the Democrats do what they've always done since World War II. After getting us into the war, they refused to fight the war seriously, so the Korean War bogged down into bloody hopelessness. The Democrats were thrown out of office in 1952, losing the White House and BOTH Houses of Congress. It was left to Truman's Republican successor, Dwight Eisenhower, to bring the Korean War to an end.

The Democrats got the White House back in 1961. The Democratic Administrations of Kennedy and Johnson got us into the Vietnam War in the early 1960's. Once again, liberal Democrats got us into a war with the Communists and then refused to fight it seriously. Vietnam, like Korea, became an exercise in bloody hopelessness.

So in 1968, the Republican Richard Nixon won the presidential election and Republicans took over the White House again.

It was not until 1977 that the Democrats took the White House back under Jimmy Carter. Carter promptly got the United States into another foreign policy disaster.

In 1979, Iranians seized the United States Embassy and took its staff hostage. They held on to them until January, 1981, when another Republican, Ronald Reagan, took over the presidency.

Since World War II, we have had three Democratic Administrations, and each of them went out of office in a major foreign policy crisis.

Since I lived through the history I have just recited, I have been waiting for Clinton to get himself into a foreign policy disaster he couldn't get out of. Haiti should have been the catastrophe, but Jimmy Carter pulled that out of the fire for him. If Clinton had actually got into a serious war with Saddam, it would probably have proved a hopeless draw. But Saddam kept backing down.

Clinton keeps getting into ridiculous situations, but he keeps lucking out of them. Being an American watching Clinton's foreign policy is a lot like riding with a wild drunk at the wheel. Like a drunk driver, any time he sees something really dangerous, he swings around and heads for it.

As I have pointed out before, the two places all sane men avoid getting into are the Middle East and the Balkans. Kosovo is right smack dab in the middle of the Balkans, and Clinton wants to get American troops in there so bad he can TASTE it!

Normally, I would freely predict that our present move to get troops on the ground in Kosovo would be a sure disaster in the making. But I am afraid to bet against the Clinton luck. And, frankly, I am praying that he has a LOT of luck this time.

As I said before, the Kosovo situation has brought us closer to a nuclear confrontation than we have been at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 (Please see "Observation", March 6). What makes this situation particularly dangerous is that, in contrast to our attitude in 1962, we are not taking the Russians seriously today. Russia feels our contempt, and our contempt is a major provocation to them.

The Russians may end up going to war over our treatment of their fellow Slavs in Serbia. They have made it very, very clear that they are totally on the Serbian side, against the US. Add to this fact that many Russians feel they have little to lose today, and the fact that we are making their attitude worse by not taking them seriously.

Further, the Russians don't have the same central control over their missiles that they had under the Soviet Union. Add to this the fact that the man with his hand on the nuclear trigger is a terminally ill alcoholic with little control over his subordinates, even on the rare occasions when he is in good enough condition to exercise it.

So what happens if some Russian does launch a nuclear missile? Aren't their nuclear forces out of date? Wouldn't we just shoot such a missile down?

No, we would not. We have no defenses against any kind of nuclear missile.

If a maverick Russian sends a nuclear missile our way, it will hit its target. All ten megatons of it will explode in the United States.

What would happen next is anybody's guess.

So I am hoping our drunk-driving president has luck once again.

Granted, if there were another Democratic foreign policy disaster it would once again elect a Republican president, as Democratic foreign policy disasters have already done three times since World War II.

But I am not willing to hope for a possible nuclear war to get Dole or Bush elected.

Reporters are getting killed a lot these days. CNN had a special on this rising death rate a short time ago. Even more recently CNN announced that another of their producers had been killed.

This is not completely new. Bill Mauldin, the famous World War II cartoonist, was killed at the front at the end of that war.

A foreign reporter was killed when the United States Army enforced integration at the University of Mississippi on the orders of President Kennedy in 1962.

But recently the death rate among reporters has risen substantially. The Liberated Peoples, the people we right wingers said shouldn't be running countries, are now murdering reporters in record numbers. Their leaders, the people us reactionaries said were a bunch of mindless thugs, are suppressing reporters all over the world, and jailing them, and killing them.

During all those years we were warning against these "emerging" leaders, the media championed those folks. They were leftists, and the media championed anybody on the left.

Back during World War II, the enemy was right wing, so the press was solidly on the side of the United States. That seemed an obvious side for them to take, since the fascist enemy was against freedom of the press.

But we have been told, over and over, that things got "complicated" after World War II. We are told, again and again, that the enemy was no longer nearly so clear and obvious.

TRANSLATION:

Suddenly, the enemy of the United States was now on the political LEFT.

The media could not come down so hard or so clearly against the Communists as they had upon the fascists.

They tell us that all the time, though they don't use those words. They just say, "After World War II, things were no longer so simple. It was harder to tell the good guys from the bad guys."

Hitler was bad. But Stalin was "complicated."

The post-World War II Communist enemy was just as solidly against freedom of the press as any fascist. All that had changed was that this enemy was on the left. That is the only reason things were suddenly so "complicated."

Exactly the same thing happened with the trendy attitude toward the atomic bomb. When it was to be used against Nazi Germany, everybody from Einstein to Oppenheimer to Fuchs was all for it, no problem. By the time Germany surrendered, the momentum was there, and it was used against Japan.

Then, suddenly, Communism rather than fascism was the enemy. Suddenly, the atomic bomb was Evil.

Once again, the media makes no secret of this.

Recently I was watching a show about Oppenheimer, a scientist who helped develop the atomic bomb during World War II. He switched to opposing the US having the bomb when Communism became the enemy. He was especially friendly to the Communists, and many people suspected that he gave Stalin atomic secrets. There is no doubt that his fellow scientist, Klaus Fuchs, was in fact a Communist and did give Stalin nuclear secrets, so there was nothing impossible about this suspicion. Naturally, this program, like all of them, was dedicated to proving that Oppenheimer did not give secrets to Stalin. To demonstrate how he resisted the temptation to give atomic secrets to the Reds, it showed Oppenheimer at a party in his home, being urged by his Communist friends to give secrets to Stalin.

In order to show how patriotic Oppenheimer was, Oppenheimer was represented as refusing to yield to his Communist friends' open incitements to treason. To the people producing the show, resisting your Communist friends' demands that you commit treason shows you are a true patriot.

I am a fellow from rural South Carolina, so this struck me in an absolutely different way than it did anybody who makes television shows.

My first reaction was to wonder what in the hell a man with a top secret clearance was doing LISTENING TO somebody who was urging him to commit treason?

Well, to the media, this was not so "simple." This was a very "complicated" matter. These were Communist friends, not fascists.

Translation: it's not treason, it's leftism.

I am not joking here. This is how our real national dialogue is determined.

It is just that no one dares put it in plain English. Any respectable conservative who put it this way would quickly cease to be respectable.

And all this is the policy of the American press. They sanction enemies of freedom of the press, provided those enemies are on the left. And, in the world they have created, a lot of media people get killed.

As a South Carolina boy who has no reverence at all, I am not that upset that the media is getting what it gave the rest of us. They have never shown any outrage when Americans were killed or betrayed by their pets on the political left.

When the third world masses and their thugs took over and suppressed freedom and killed people and seized American  property, the media said that was just fine. But now that they are killing media people, too, it is suddenly horrible and disastrous.

Or it may be simply a case of what goes around comes around.