The Best of Times, The Worst of Times...

There are some people who will insist that they know what’s best, at least what’s best in some things near and dear to them.

Heck, almost everybody shares a strong opinion on what’s best. Football teams, baseball teams, soccer teams - at least at the start of the season.  Actors just before the Oscars. Horse races. Politicians. Cars.

Know someone who insists their car is the best - be it a Lexus or a Classic Chevy - or who stands loyally behind their morning cereal?

Then there are some people who feel everything they have and everything they use is the best. They will tell you proudly that they have the best refrigerator, go to the best doctor, send their child to the best college.

Or the worst. It’s really the same thing. “He was the worst contractor ever” or, maybe, “I’ll  never eat here again.”

And, as we fall deeper into this kind of idiocy, we get into Trump Territory.

An exaggeration? Well, lets look at some of his recent claims. You can look at any one you want - after all, you could have the best opinion - but I am kind of fixated on his observation that relations between Russia and the United States have never been this bad. The Worst. His words, not mine.

Anyone ever hear of the Cold War? Anyone old enough to remember it? Well, once upon a time - oh, half a century ago - there was a great battle across the whole world, and Russia and the United States were allies against something called the Axis powers.

Then, seemingly overnight, Russia turned around and closed its borders - we called it an Iron Curtain - and America and its allies started competing with Russia and its puppet nation supporters (they called it the Soviet Union) to see who could be more powerful.

Russian scientists could not study in American colleges. Americans couldn’t see traveling Russian ballet troops. At the end of World War II, America was the only nation in the world with an atomic bomb, but after a few years both the United States and the Soviet Union had atomic and hydrogen bombs, and we had B-52 bombers on 15-minute standby at a lot of airfields, and some on endless patrol just outside Soviet airspace, with enough nuclear weapons to turn every major city in Russia into radioactive rubble 10 times over.

They could only destroy eight or ten or maybe twenty of ours. Then, Russia decided to build a missile site in Cuba, just 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Nuclear-tipped missiles  that could strike parts of America in less than 10 minutes.

And John F. Kennedy declared a naval embargo of Cuba, and Russia sent its cargo ships in to test American resolve. For 13 days, the world watched and waited to see if we would all be killed in a massive nuclear war.

Oh, yes, things have never been this bad. Ha. 

If I were Vladimir Putin, I’d ask for my money back. But, probably not much more. After all, we did spend about $60 million sending missiles to blast an airfield in Syria that had been used to attack people with poison gas, but we were nice enough to give all the Russians there a 90 minute warning to get out. And, just in case, we carefully avoided hitting the poison gas stockpile at all.

We certainly didn’t use any of our weapons that would have burned hot enough to destroy any gas that was released, but that’s probably only of interest to military buffs. I’ll save it just in case relations between America and Russia get worse.

You know, like for a whole week.