How does one from the Cold War era answer this?

[keep_left]

10. Yeah, I know. I grew up during the Cold War, and was one of the many GenXers who wondered...

...whether we would get to grow up before being incinerated in a nuclear holocaust, so I get it too.

Actually, this has been noted about Republicans for a while now (their sucking up to Putin and the Russian mafia state). Eric Alterman (I think) wrote a piece--I believe when he was still with The Nation--that had a title like "Where is a good anti-Communist Republican when you need one?". This had to have been at least a decade ago (and probably longer ago than that). I think Alterman was writing about the neocon unwillingness to recognize both Chinese and Russian human-rights problems as long as they were favored in our foreign policy calculus. At the time, neocons like Bill Kristol had become pathetic apologists for really horrific human-rights abuses in those countries.