One of my fondest childhood memories in the late fifties is going to the Cinema Saturday afternoon in – of all places – Moscow, capital of the now defunct USSR. The cinema was in the American Embassy, with popcorn and – upto that point unknown to me – Coca Cola produced on the spot out of syrup and soda water. Glenn Ford became my hero but somehow I learnt to root for the losers, the Indians, a habit I obviously have not been able to break ever since. That’s why my heart goes out to all the principled conservatives that did not make it last time in the election.

Other memories from Moscow – “with love” – were the nights when somebody hammered at the apartment door to get my dad out of bed and to our embassy. One Berlin crisis was chasing the next, and we could very well tell where politics stood from the response of our Russian playmates: when things went badly, they would disappear, if there was a thaw, we could play along. And I am quite sure, playing with them made me into the “socialist” I am today.

President of the United States at the time was one Dwight D. Eisenhower, even to us non-Americans known as “Ike” and as revered as the bulwark against the very real threat of a communist take-over of Germany and Western Europe.

It is with sadness, then, that I have to conclude from the current political discussion in the U.S. that Ike after all must have been a communist in disguise, suckering everyone, particularly innocent children like me, into believing he was anti-communist. How so? Well, Obama is leading the U.S. right now onto the path of socialism, or even communism and Stalinism by raising taxes, more specifically, the marginal rate in the top bracket to 39.6%. But that pales to the 91% marginal rate that was in place during the Eisenhower years. True enough, he did not raise it – I mean, there was little room for raising, wasn’t it? – but he did little to lower it. Funnily enough, the liberal MSM of the times made us believe that the U.S was in pretty good shape during the Eisenhower years – sure, there was the recession towards the end of Ike’s tenure. But it took a democratic president – JFK - to lower the rate in 1963 by a whopping 14% to – well, still whopping – 77 % (1965 it was lowered to 70%).

But, you might argue, wasn’t Eisenhower confronted with an overwhelming Democratic Congress? It just so happened that from 1953 thru 1955, Republicans held the majority in the Senate. And the massive Democratic majority came about only in the 1958 election. Looked-up closely, the Democratic party had a very strong Conservative wing – the influential post of Chairman of the Finance Committee after 1955 was in the hands of austerity preaching Harry Byrd – but one has to concede, as divided was the Republican party.

You object: “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives;”? But again, from 1953 to 1955 the House was in the hands of the Republicans, and only after that Democratic again. And yet, the Democratic House voted for the Kennedy tax “relief”. Why wouldn’t Ike get that done?