Ted Turner Won The Cold War

At least that what he thinks. I was always prone to believe that Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II had a lot to do with it, especially Reagan's decision to spend the Soviets into bankruptcy.

However Turner has straightened it all out for us, and informs us that it was his Good Will Games that brought the Soviet juggernaut down. John Podhoretz talks a little bit about Ted Terrific in The Corner:

Check this out: Speaking on the occasion of the network's 25th anniversary, CNN founder Ted Turner told Christiane Amanpour, "I'm absolutely certain I did" play a major role in ending the Cold War. How, exactly? By sucking up to Soviet puppet states from Cuba to the Sandinista-dominated Nicaragua? By paying the Soviet government millions to host a counter-Olympics called "The Goodwill Games"?

Turner is a perplexing figure. On the one hand, he's a brilliant businessman -- and if his former colleagues at Time Warner had listened to him instead of sending him to the glue factory, the company wouldn't have made the ridiculously ruinous merger with AOL. On the other, he's a loon.

I have personal experience of his lunacy. In 1994, I attended the annual confab of television critics in Los Angeles. One evening, Turner hosted and sponsored an event to promote a documentary series called The Native Americans. This was the most politically correct program imaginable, and the event featured a Sioux dance-and-drum troupe putting on an endless performance in a hotel ballroom. We all watched in respectful silence. Then Turner got up and said, "I want to thank you all for coming. But I better thank the entertainment first. After all, I don't want them to scalp me."

One of the show's producers, Jonathan Taplin, put his head in his hands. The musician Robbie Robertson, who wrote the score and was sitting next to me, coughed in astonishment, tapped me on the shoulder and shook his head in disgust. And then Turner laughed at his own joke. And kept laughing. Like a hyena.