'WTF?' Sarah Palin Thinks The USSR Won The Space Race? (VIDEO)
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2011/01/27 20:05:31
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'WTF?' Sarah Palin Thinks The USSR Won The Space Race? (VIDEO)
Ryan J. Reilly | January 27, 2011, 9:00AM
Sarah Palin thinks President Barack Obama needs a history lesson on the space race between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union.
"He needs to remember that, uh, what happened back then with the communist U.S.S.R. and their victory in that race to space," the Fox News contributor said Wednesday night, reacting to Obama's reference to Sputnik in his State of the Union speech. Palin called the Sputnik name drop one of the "W.T.F." moments in the speech, a play of the President's call for "winning the future."
"Yeah, they won but they also incurred so much debt at the time that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union," Palin said.
Not quite. Yes, the Soviet Union won many of the early contests in the space race (including putting the first man in orbit, which may have been what Palin meant by "race to space"). But it was the U.S. that walked away with the biggest trophy in the space race when it put a man on the moon.
While the Soviet Union did eventually collapse, that wasn't until 1991 -- a full 22 years after the U.S. put a man on the moon, and the collapse came amid stagnant economic growth after years of unsustainable Soviet defense spending of which its space program was a relatively small part.
Palin's comments on Sputnik are in the second part of the interview, embedded below.
Read More: http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/01/wtf-sar...
Top Opinion
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JamesOberg 2011/01/28 04:46:19Undecided
+11I'm seeing up close how 'Palin Derangement Syndrome' can compel otherwise intelligent people to foam at the mouth and babble nonsense to prove they're right and she's wrong. The historical view is that the early Soviet victories in the Space Race led to the US response of the Apollo program, whose triumph validated the superiority of US space technology -- which had profound diplomatic, military, commercial, and cultural consequences. When Reagan challenged the USSR with Strategic Defense in the 1980s, Apollo had given that challenge credibility -- and the same pundits in the West and in Russian who pooh-poohed SDI had also pooh-poohed the odds of Apollo working. Proven wrong once, they lost credibility when Gorbachyov had to decide when/.if to pull the plug on the USSR's own hideously expensive space weapons programs (eg, Polyus-Skif and Buran). Soviet leadership came to believe, rightly or wrongly, that SDI was a lethal threat to them, based on the success of Apollo that had only been made possible by the stinging US defeats in the early Space Race, It's more complicated, but the essence is, Palin was right: the Soviets sowed the seed of their own collapse by setting off the Space Race.
Rent "The Right Stuff" if you need to.
In the context of history, yes, the Soviets won the first few trophies.. But the US was able to endure because, well, communism sucks.
The Russians DID win the race "to space" - http://history.nasa.gov/sputn...
His theme last night in the State of the Union was the "WTF," you know, "Winning the Future." And I thought, "OK, that acronym, spot on." There were a lot of "WTF" moments throughout that speech, ...
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You must be a communist. Calling someone a "comrade" means you are also a comrade.
Definition of COMRADE
a : an intimate friend or associate : companion b : a fellow soldier
It's a European name for "close friends."
It is a term commonly used by military veterans to refer to their 'comrades at arms.' It was also used heavily in the Soviet countries during the cold war to address one's peers.
Please, I'm not your lowly peer and we are not friends. There's quite a few of you on this site.
The woman is a dunce.