Joe Biden talked about how America was once respected in the world, and people looked to the U.S. for leadership. John Kerry talked about how we once had a bipartisan foreign policy — and George W. Bush went and ruined that. Will anyone buy this stuff? I’m afraid people will. There was always a golden age, if you listen to contemporary speakers. But it was not so. There have always been struggles and scrapes. The 1970s, for example, were a very bad time for the United States, internationally. And a bipartisan foreign policy? Liberals and conservatives were terribly at odds, constantly. For example, John Kerry fought Reagan every step of the way: on arms control, on SDI, on Nicaragua, on everything else. Kerry and his ilk said that Reagan would incinerate the world. They said that the very idea of winning the Cold War was fanciful, obscene, and outright dangerous. We had to learn to coexist, and even to become a partner of the Soviet Union. When Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” liberals said that the president had committed an unpardonable outrage. Henry Steele Commager said that this was the worst presidential utterance in history.

Anyway . . . politicians depend greatly on forgetting and ignorance, and they usually — they often — get their way.