Welcome to the Three Martini Lunch.

Grab a stool next to Greg Corumbus of Radio America and Jim Garrity of National Review.

Three Martinis coming up.

Hey, really glad you're with us for the Wednesday edition of the Three Martini Lunch.

We have good, bad, and crazy Martinis for you today.

We really have four Martinis because we're going to start with a significant discussion

that doesn't actually qualify as a Martini.

Most of you probably know, if you were paying attention to the news yesterday, that former

Soviet Union General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev died at the age of 91.

And so there's going to be quite a bit of coverage of this over the coming days.

And Jim, on the one hand, Gorbachev is going to get a lot of credit for ending the Cold

War and some mainstream media sources he's going to get virtually all of the credit.

And he deserves some because when the wall came down and people demanded freedom, he

could have rolled the tanks in like he did at other times during his time as General

Secretary in Lithuania and Georgia and some other places.

But he didn't when the big revolution push happened.

And so what could have been very bloody was not.

His predecessors absolutely would have done that.

They did do that.

Brezhnev and Czechoslovakia, Khrushchev in Budapest and Stalin, of course, slaughtered

tens of millions of his own people.

At the same time though, he didn't just walk away from the Soviet Union and he was forced

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