FDR REPORTEDLY SAID IT FIRST, though the story could be apocryphal. Sizing up Anastasio Somoza, Nicaragua’s brutal (but pro-American) dictator, Roosevelt quipped, “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

Prescient words, if he in fact spoke them. During the Cold War, America, through sheer necessity, cultivated ties with lots of SOBs, including military regimes in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, Spain, Zaire, South Vietnam, Indonesia, South Korea, and the Philippines. Conservatives often justified such alliances by the lesser-of-two-evils canon. To wit, forging pacts with nasty pro-American dictatorships prevented the rise of even nastier pro-Soviet dictatorships. So it was both moral and pragmatic to prop up “our SOBs,” lest “their SOBs” take power.