The Liberal Media’s Gorbasms Over the Last Soviet Dictator

[See NewsBusters for more.] The late talk radio star Rush Limbaugh coined the phrase “Gorbasm” for the ecstasy that many reporters felt when covering Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev, who died at age 91 on Tuesday. It’s true that Gorbachev was obviously less brutal than previous communist rulers. But his Soviet Union was hardly an enlightened, peace-loving democracy. While Gorbachev relaxed the repression of previous years, he did not shut down the Gulag, allow a free press, or permit the free expression of religion. When the Baltic republics pushed for sovereignty in early 1991, Moscow’s Brezhnev-esque response was to use tanks to suppress pro-democracy forces in Lithuania and Latvia, killing eighteen. Yet journalists elevated Gorbachev far above the freedom fighters, dissidents and democratic, anti-communist leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher; indeed, the media assigned the Soviet party boss nearly all of the credit for ending the Cold War. Time magazine thought it insufficient to name him merely the “Man of the Year,” so in 1990 Gorbachev became their “Man of the Decade.”