POPE AND REAGAN OFFED THE USSR

You won’t read this in the NYT/Or see it on PBS [which had a segment on the Lehrer NEWS tonight on Birmingham AL in the sixties. Bet it didn’t refer to Condi Rice. That would be soooo....JOURNALISTIC!]

snarksmith also takes us down memory lane:

Was the USSR behind the assassination attempt of Pope John Paul II? An Italian report says it was. (Almost makes me wish Graham Greene were still alive, just to see him reconcile allegiances.)

"This commission believes, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the leaders of the USSR took the initiative to eliminate Pope Karol Wojtyla," the report said.

Soviet leaders "communicated this decision to the military secret service in order that it carry out the necessary operations", it continued.

The commission said the Soviet Union felt the Pope was a danger because of his support for the democracy-linked Solidarity labour movement in Poland, his native country.

The trail went hot thanks to the KGB archive spirited into the West by Vasily Mitrokhin, a character even John Le Carre couldn't invent if he tried. --Michael Weiss

[Mitrokhin’s book SWORD & SHIELD about the KGB is must reading if you want to find out why Ann Coulter is so outraged by US Hollywood liberals' denials of complicity with the USSR]

According to one protein wisdom reader, the following paragraph will "drive barking moonbats mad with rage." Jeff Goldberg says:

From a strategic standpoint, the Soviet attempt proved prescient—as Pope John Paul’s reign helped bring about the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
But that the attempt failed gave the Pope even more power—and, when coupled with Reagan’s military and ideological pressure—may have even expedited the collapse that not many though would occur so suddenly and resoundingly.

That's a thought that the NYT and PBS will avoid even trying to negate. They just wish their lefty past would dissolve like the USSR did.