The latest effort of the Republican right and the leader they vigilantly rallied around not that long ago and have now forgotten is reminiscent of a ploy that occurred regularly within the now defunct Soviet Union.

When a former leader became too huge a burden to explain then he would be banished. Children would no longer study this leader’s period of history. An effort would be made within top leadership circles to erase that leader from memory.

The most celebrated example of Soviet attempted erasure came when Nikita Khrushchev took great pains to erase Joseph Stalin from memory. There were all those gulags, those knocks on doors in the middle of the night, then the transporting of opponents to undisclosed locations never to be heard from again.

The strategy was to treat the embarrassing historical period and the leader behind it as if those events and that individual never existed. Those Russians initiating that strategy are tactically similar to the Republican right and the eight years when they not only rallied mightily behind George W. Bush.

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