Like Chet, I find myself wishing that I'd written this post by Rick Perlstein. Sadly, I haven't even written the best blog post reacting to Perlstein -- that honor goes to Robert Farley.

It's truly mystifying that, in 2007, a country of 300 million with thousands of nuclear warheads is whipping itself up into stroke over a country of 90 million with no nuclear weapons and that would pose exactly zero threat to America if the US government hadn't put hundreds of thousands of Americans within arms' reach of Tehran.

So yeah, here's Perlstein:

Let me put before you an illustrative example: one week in September of 1959, when, much like one week in September of 2007, American soil supported a visit by what many, if not most Americans agreed was the most evil and dangerous man on the planet.

Nikita Khrushchev disembarked from his plane at Andrews Air Force Base to a 21-gun salute and a receiving line of 63 officials and bureaucrats, ending with President Eisenhower. He rode 13 miles with Ike in an open limousine to his guest quarters across from the White House. Then he met for two hours with Ike and his foreign policy team. Then came a white-tie state dinner. (The Soviets then put one on at the embassy for Ike.) He joshed with the CIA chief about pooling their intelligence data, since it probably all came from the same people...