And of course the greatest shame for everyone on the planet was that Stalin got to put a prosecutor and a”judge” on the War Crimes Tribunals prosecuting the Japanese folllowing the end of hostilities – while more Japanese died in the gulags in the years after the war than they killed or mistreated via prisoner abuse atrocities during it.

You have to go by what they do, not what they say.

He isn’t really very bright, either. I got into a minor dispute with him some years ago over the Westmoreland libel suit against CBS, which was interesting in and of itself, but by far the most interesting part of it was the justifications up with which he came in CBS’ defense. The man is not capable of logical, straight-line reasoning, let alone the rather more tricky abstruse variety. The inability to stay on point in a discussion was as fascinating then as now – had he interviewed Hitler we would indeed have found out he liked dogs, some children, and was a good guy because he encouraged those around him not to smoke with a standing offer of a gold watch for anyone who’d quit. Therefore he clearly MUST have been a good guy.

Not much critical thinking there.

I occasionally wonder how these people get these jobs. By an odd confluence of coincidences I knew most of the previous generation of network news anchors, and these were not especially intelligent or gifted people. Not one of them was impressive in, really, any way. (And, as we all know, Brokaw couldn’t even speak English. And I don’t say that as a joke or a cheap shot! Excuse me all to hell – TV is a COMMUNICATIONS medium! You should really be able to pronounce the damn language! But he at least had a talent: office politics. Which is how a second-string reporter for a third-rate newspaper in the middle of nowhere in the mid-west who couldn’t enunciate English got the job at NBC – for those of you who, listening to him, ever wondered.)

Anyway – not much capacity for critical thinking there, and not much intellectual curiosity, either. Wallace is pretty routine for the group from which he comes. Within that group he is, in fact, respected.

Anybody here have any respect for him?

Stalin was just “A little bit of a squirt,” Truman would recall later. Author David Mcullough described Stalin as standing 5ft. 5in. tall. He was dressed in a lightweight khaki uniform with red epaulets and red seams down each pant leg. He wore no decorations except a red-ribboned gold star – The Order of the Hero of the Soviet – over his left breast pocket. His eyes were small and squinty, his face was badly pockmarked, and he had streaks of gray in his mustache and course, black hair. During his conversation with Truman, he smoked one cigarette after another and his teeth were badly stained from tobacco. Truman had heard about Stalin’s crippled left arm that was caused by a childhood accident, but this handicap was hardly noticeable. Truman knew also that Stalin was born in Georgia, in 1879, in abject poverty, and was the son of a semi-literate, drunken shoemaker.
During their first encounter, Truman found Stalin to be most polite, good natured, and businesslike. He liked the way Stalin looked him in the eye during their conversation with each other. Truman figured that here was the kind of man he could deal with at the conference table.
Truman soon learned, however, that Stalin was no easy man to deal with. In a letter to his mother back home in Missouri he wrote that the russians were the most “Pig Headed” people he had ever encountered. He knew them now to be relentless bargainers – “Forever pressing for every advantage for themselves”. And yet, Truman would say that he liked Stalin: “I like Stalin, he is straight forward,” he wrote to his wife, Bess, near the end of the conference windup.

Mike Wallace – Oh yes, that guy Ahmadinejad is not such a bad guy after all; and he’s easy on the eyes. Did I say that already? Not quite the swan song I would want. Personally I think the guy looks like any given villian from the Bruce Willis Die Ha…