While Vaughn Ververs is right to have nostalgia for the good old days (or at least just plain old days) when “Crossfire” was a rare chance to conservatives and liberals battle it out on television – indeed, my college roommates would quickly discover that for me, it was appointment television – the nostalgia can travel a bit far. In fact, even then, I felt the show’s first liberal host, Tom Braden, was regularly unimpressive, a dream opponent. That’s judging what he said, not even noting the fact he looked about 40 years older than Pat Buchanan back then. Here’s two tiny tidbits out of the MRC dustbin.

Pat Buchanan: “What I want to know about you is why you are not as concerned about the freedom of Nicaraguans as you were about the freedom of Frenchmen?”
Tom Braden: “Because our civilization depended on winning World War II, and this [Nicaragua] is a tin-horn, chicken-shack country.”
– Crossfire, May 2, 1988.
Robert Novak: “Ask the dead people in Beijing about the menace of communism: right through the head. That’s the menace.”
Tom Braden: “That’s not communism, that’s fascism and it’s a dictatorship, and that’s all it is.”
– Crossfire, June 5, 1989.

As for the show being remembered as more civil then, Braden also uncorked lines like this one in 1988: “Most conservatives are stupid.”