Reality Check For The Right: Reagan Did not Win The Cold War

This is just a simple little bit of truth that should go out to people like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and that whole crowd, who I have been hearing repeat it over and over, that it was Ronald Reagan who won the Cold War. Stop lying to yourselves and the rest of the planet. The worst kind of dishonesty is the kind that one first purpetuates upon himself and then attempts to spread to others. Ever since the Berlin Wall fell we have been listening as a nation to this lie about how Reagan did that for us from people on the right who have repeated it to themselves so often that its just some kind of reflex action now every time they speak about the man. For the last time, Ronald Reagan did not win the Cold War. The American people won it. It took the people of this country nearly 70 years to do it too. All that time we were primarily involved in trying to keep the Russian's in check all over the planet through actions like the creation of the N.A.T.O. alliance, among other things. Ronald Reagan just happened to be the President who was in the White House when all those years of effort finally culminated in the fall of the Communist Empire, that's all. He was the night watchman on duty for the American people when it happened and for that, for some reason, he got all of the credit. Presidents are just caretakers for the people of this country, or they are supposed to be anyway, everything they do is on behalf of the people they serve. They never do anything on their own and it's wrong when they end up getting the credit for doing something that it took decades to do and cost the lives of countless others who's names are not printed in our memory like Reagan's is. When someone says that Reagan won the Cold War they deny credit to those people by never mentioning them and it diminishes and downplays their enormous contributions in favor of handing all the credit to an old man who spent most of his time in the White House in his 70's, keeping bankers hours, and taking naps.