"Tear down this wall"
You're welcome
The Republican daydream that it was Reagan playing tough that brought down the wall is laughable. Tough militaristic posing helped keep the wall in place for longer than it would have been otherwise. It was only once Gorbechov really got assurances that the West didn't want any of the Eastern Bloc that he started to loosen his grip. The final opening of the Berlin Wall was actually triggered by a mistake made in a press release by the East German foreign minister.
Oh c'mon Russell, if a Democrat had said it, you'd be singing their praises. 
Has nothing to do with Democrat or Republican. It has to do with history. Lots of documents from the Stasi (East Germany spy agency) were released after the Re-unification. Because of the West's posturing and threatening stances many of the Soviet officials were pushing for the East to start a war before they couldn't do it anymore. If they hadn't gone totally bankrupt, we'd still have the wall and the Warsaw Pact.
The Wall was opened because thousands of people crowded the checkpoints after hearing the Foreign Minister's gaff. The guards there didn't know what to do and opened the gates before they got crushed under the weight of the crowds. Once the people were through there was just no way to stop it.
Moscow looked at what it would take to shut everything down again and realized they just didn't have the resources to do it.
I'm not a Democrat. I listen to what the folks say and listen to the quality of the argument. You can normally tell who has the better idea from that.
Example: In the energy debate windmill folks want tax breaks, so that they can write off the cost of the windmills as an operating expense as opposed to amortizing them over the expected life of the windmill. This basically makes it so that the companies get a huge tax advantage that year, but they're still putting up the money themselves.
The nuke folks want hundreds of millions in unsecured loans from the government. If the company building the reactor goes broke, the government gets nothing back. This is what they did in the 70's. Companies were set up to build the reactors, they borrow the money, and they went broke. They never paid the money back. The companies who sold the reactors made a fortune in budget overruns.
The nuke folks say windmills can't work financially, but the windmill folks are the ones who are willing to do it without government money. That tells you the nukers are full of shit.
This has been the quality of the Republican's arguments for about 15 years. That's why I sound like a Democrat. I criticize the Dems too, but Republicans never seem to remember that.
