It has been a little more than fifteen years since I had the pleasure of laughing at vintage, Soviet-style, anti-American propaganda.  I had forgotten how ridiculously funny the posters, newsreels, and stories translated from Pravda were back then, even though I remember feeling bad for the honest, hard working Soviets who had no choice but to endure.  I was a boy, what could I do?
 
We never had a bomb shelter at the Newcomb house but, like most of the kids in my generation I practiced "duck and cover" in school.  America had no missile shield then, just a desk, a chair, and Mrs. Marshman tapping that huge yard stick on her desk as she counted down to our imaginary, impending doom. Geography was not a strong subject for me, but I never understood why they would want to drop an atomic bomb on White City, Oregon. None of the other kids complained so I just went along with the crowd.
 
Several years later, when the iron will of Ronald Wilson Reagan and Lady Margaret Thatcher finally broke through the wall in Berlin and the end of the Soviet Era began, I was well on my way to forgetting the deviousness and treachery that had taken the lives of tens of millions of people whose only crime had been being born into a nation led by a brutal Communist regime. 

I believed Soviet aggression to be dead, buried in what President Bush would later refer to as the "dustbin of history," until I read the Russian version of recent events in the nation of Georgia.  Charles Bremmer reports from Moscow in a Times.co.uk story entitled "Kremlin dusts off Cold War lexicon to make US villain in Georgia."

Russians were told over breakfast yesterday what really happened in Georgia: the conflict in South Ossetia was part of a plot by Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, to stop Barak Obama being elected president of the United States.

The line came on the main news of Vesti FM, a state radio station that - like the Government and much of Russia's media - has reverted to the old habits of Soviet years, in which a sinister American hand was held to lie behind every conflict, especially those embarrassing to Moscow. Modern Russia may be plugged into the internet and the global marketplace but in the battle for world opinion the Kremlin is replaying the old black-and-white movie.

The Obama angle is getting wide play. It was aired on Wednesday by Sergei Markov, a senior political scientist who is close to Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister and power behind President Medvedev.

"George Bush's Administration is promoting interests of candidate John McCain," said Dr Markov. "Defeated by Barak Obama on all fronts, McCain has one last card to play yet - the creation of a virtual Cold War with Russia . . . Bush himself did not want a war in South Ossetia but his Republican Party did not leave him any choice." The Americans were now engineering an armed conflict between Ukraine and Russia, Dr Markov added.

What the Russian propagandists fail to see is that this line of thinking may be normal and/or acceptable at websites backed by George Soros and Moveon.org, but it hardly represents anything resembling the truth.  The audacity of those words are so peculiar that it makes me want to laugh again like I did as a boy, except it isn't funny anymore.  It's not funny at all if you live in the Ukraine, since that seems to be where the propaganda says the next trouble spot will be.  Time will tell.

(Jeff Newcomb is an intern for Gingrich Communications and posts regularly under the moniker Concepts2)