Even a broken clock is right twice a day and we’ve reached that time of day with O. He doesn’t name names here in wondering why Republican hawks seem more troubled by his Russia policy than by Trump’s, but pretty clearly he has two people in mind. One is his old friend John McCain and the other is his new friend Marco Rubio. Both seem to have “concerns” about Rex Tillerson for being friendly with Russia, yet neither wavered from his endorsement of Tillerson’s would-be boss during the general election even though Trump has spun for Putin in loathsome ways that Tillerson never has. Obama’s anti-Russia policy has been pitifully weak, but Trump’s policy is pro-Russia — and yet McCain and Rubio had a bigger problem with the former than the latter (at least once Rubio quit the presidential race and had nothing further to gain personally by opposing Trump, that is). Partisanship, as well as the desperate need to protect one’s Senate seat, can do strange things to a man. The final punchline will come when Rubio ends up voting to confirm Tillerson because, um, Dick Cheney told him to.

But we’re not going to let this guy slide that easily. We’ll only have him to kick around for another 35 days, so to complement today’s lecture about Reagan, enjoy one more trip down memory lane below and relive one of the most notorious soundbites of his presidency. If the Gipper’s rolling in his grave now, he started during that debate four years ago when dopey here and his liberal enablers had the laugh of their lives at Romney’s claim that Russia’s still a core enemy of the United States. I’ll leave you with this:

Absolutely. When @POTUS mocked Romney in 2012 for saying Russia was top threat, I cheered. @POTUS was wrong. I was wrong. Mitt was right. https://t.co/spF0zRZWEG

— Paul Begala (@PaulBegala) December 10, 2016

That’s easy for Democrats to say now that it doesn’t cost them anything. It cost the country a lot that they couldn’t see it at the time.