The Conservative Cat

You can't get a decent tan or Margherita in North Korea, and most of the middle-eastern despots have too much beach and not enough ocean.

The next dictator of choice will be from a country that either has good weather, or good skiing. You think Oliver Stone would have been so eager to cozy up to Castro if he'd been ruling Greenland with an iron fist?

Did you prefer Batista?

If you feel capitalism and ultimately property rights is preferable to communism, fine. But let's not act righteous, as if all the despots claim communist ideology. The US and Britain have backed and continue to back despots and dictators throughout the world. The only requirement is that the rescources of the country be open to corporate enterprise from ours. Repression and murder are not what put a country on the list of "bad guy's" for conservatives to demonize. It's land reform and redistribution of wealth that motivate that ire.

If your going to join this "evil axis" touting bandwagon, you cannot claim to be in search of truth. The truth is economic warfare. If you are willing to take the position of victory at all costs - an amoral stand - you can espouse this truthsayer retoric. Otherwise, you are as convoluted as the other spindoctors and ideologues you claim to be rebeling against.

Excuse me, but I have every right to be self-righteous. I'm not trying to apologize for an economic system that's been a disastrous failure every time it's been tried.

There are dictators who are not communists, but they don't have the popular appeal among the intelligentsia of people like Castro and Chavez, so making fun of them is not relevant to the topic of this particular article.

And yes, the United States has supported some pretty awful people because of the belief that containment was the proper response to communism. The current administration is trying to change that, and I support them.

I admit, it's not as romantic as seeing the world through the lens of the Diminishing Value Theorem, but I've never been very romantic.

Come on man. The US supported awful people because dictators and repressive regimes are good for business. Communism has nothing to do with it, except in terms of the threat of some the idea to our business interests. It is not really about containment and it is certainly not about human rights - which I believe should be at the core of foreign policy. We have traded with China for example because it is in our economic interest. We overthrew Arbenz in Guatemala (who was democratically elected) because he was not good for business (at least the United Fruit Co.)

As for what is happening now, if you really believe that it is a push for democracy, you're more naive than I thought. Hugo Chavez was democratically elected. It is capitalism we want, not democracy. If these new democracies choose communism, which can be democratically chosen though history has few if any examples, we will not support them.
Now your self righteousness is based on Capitalism? Capitalism is successful for the few and damaging to the majority. Capitalism is behind our support of dictators throughout history. What has really made the US successful is robbing natural resources from others starting with the Native Americans and going on through Hawaii, the Phillipines, Latin America, you name it. Weapons and war have made us successful. If you want to be seklf righteous about being a bully, your moral understanding is worth examination.
I think Human rights, compassion, and Humility are noble. Don't you have a bunch of Christian stuff on your page. Who would Jesus exploit or bomb or torture?
Al Qaeda? No, honestly I don't think Jesus would use these tactics even in the worst cases such as Al Qaeda.

You act as if America were some single-minded leviathan instead of a republic whose foreign policy has flipped and flopped all over the map according to who controls the White House. For example, under Nixon we were bribing Iranian clerics to keep the Shah in power. Carter stopped the payments and the Shah was overthrown.

And then there's China.

Both the corporations who were looking for Chinese cash and the progressives who supported communism wanted us to recognize China. Kissinger and his ilk believed that Communism's victory was inevitable and that playing China against the Soviet Union was our best chance to prolong our survival. How, then, is our recognition of China evidence of anything other than a consensus of competing interests? I don't think I'm the one being simplistic here.

My point is that the interests are economic and business oriented, not righteous; they are not concerned with the human suffering that communist dictatorships may cause. There is no inherent reason that communism has to be tyranical, but it would be opposed by the US even if it were democratic because it proposes a distribution of wealth that limits concentration (theoretically). While we indeed have competing interests in this country, they are limited. The fact is that the wealthy and powerful have control and dictate policy. While there are various permutations of that policy, there is a general consistency, and that concistency is not only devoid of human rights concerns, but often effectively corrosive to human rights. Carter was somewhat of an anomoly in recent history. My original point was that we don't really hold any moral high ground. There are certainly good things about the US, but there are good things about Cuba as well. There educational system is far better and more accessible than ours for example.

I hold the moral high ground because I'm a free individual. I don't believe in overthrowing democratically-elected governments. Sometimes the people in Washington, DC agree with me and sometimes they don't. Castro NEVER agrees with me. He's spent his life trying to turn every country in South America into a dictatorship like his own, where nobody EVER gets a voice in foreign policy. The fact that the trains run on time is cold comfort at best.