The 1980s called. They’re sending us their cold war.

I grew up with Reagan as President. And let me tell you, while McCain may be a warmongering old white guy, he’s certainly no Reagan. Nevertheless -

top Russian Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn warned that Poland is risking attack, and possibly a nuclear one, by deploying the American missile defense system,

As Moron Pundit at doubleplusundead says, “I think I’d rather my daughter grow up in a world without savage zombie-mutants.”  So would I, Moron.  So would I.

How big is the threat, really?  Well, maybe not too big, although it’s worth keeping the nukes in mind.

But really, it’s almost like the whole world is conspiring to make me vote for John McCain.  Like this woman, for example.  Because here’s the alternative:

His plan is thoroughly fisked here, and here’s why this uninformed, unqualified Chicago political hack is not the man to put in charge for the next eight years.  Or even for four:

Under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which went into force in 1994, both the U.S. and the USSR made radical cuts in their strategic nuclear arsenals — that is, in weapons of intercontinental range. The 2002 Moscow Treaty pushed the numbers down even further, until each side’s strategic nuclear umbrella was pocket-size.

Yet matters are very different at the tactical, or short-range, level. Here, the U.S., acting unilaterally and with virtually no fanfare, sharply cut back its stockpile of nonstrategic nuclear warheads. As far back as 1991, the U.S. began to retire all of its nuclear warheads for short-range ballistic missiles, artillery and antisubmarine warfare. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, not one of these weapons exists today. The same authoritative publication estimates that the number of tactical warheads in the U.S. arsenal has dwindled from thousands to approximately 500.

Russia has also reduced the size of its tactical nuclear arsenal, but starting from much higher levels and at a slower pace, leaving it with an estimated 5,000 such devices — 10 times the number of tactical weapons held by the U.S. Such a disparity would be one thing if we were contending with a stable, postcommunist regime moving in the direction of democracy and integration with the West. That was the Russia we anticipated when we began our nuclear build-down. But it is not the Russia we are facing today.

Not to mention Iran. And China.  The world is a dangerous place, and Obama’s hopeful naiveté will not serve us well. I bet he’s a nice guy (for a Marxist); if he came over here I’d make him some crawfish etouffe and we could have a good time battling over some of those wacky ideas he’s got about how forcible income redistribution is compatible with Christianity.  He’s certainly not the Antichrist or the boogeyman many conservatives make him out to be. He belongs on a college campus, propagandizing young men and women who imagine themselves independent even though Mom and Dad are paying their credit card bill every month, encouraging them to “speak truth to power.”  That is, right up until they have to join the rest of us in the bill-paying, tax-paying world and they learn the ultimate truth: nothing is free.  Ever.  Somebody always pays.

But he doesn’t belong in the Oval Office.