Of course - because freedom is something that only highly educated, elite people need anyways...for the masses, free health care and condoms passed out in school will suffice.

You could just as easily replace "well-heeled Western liberal" and "free health care and a high degree of literacy" with "affluent American conservative" and "free trade and a high degree of personal responsibility.

Do you really mean what you wrote? If you don't really mean it, why would you write it? If you do really mean it, then why would you have this site at all.

Either way, I'm appalled and disappointed.

Dean is right, John. Be as appalled as you like. At least, when conservatives are taken to task about the excesses of a Lee Kuan Yew or an Augusto Pinochet, they don't try to pretend they don't exist, or that they're in harmony with the True Expressed Will of the Pee-Pul. Liberals will attack you personally for even mentioning the gulags, or Castro's dungeons.

The previous post's headline might have been a tip-off.

Free health care and a high degree of literacy:

always means Cuba.

A story that starts out to be about music and turns into one about casual violence:

     Cuba is full of contradictions:
       - An educational system that has produced a relatively high degree of literacy but lacks pencils and paper;
       - A two-tiered medical system, one for Cubans that provides free health care but lacks basic medicines and one for foreigners that has the latest technology;

and Lileks:

But the Castro-worship just fascinates me. Why? Some applaud the way he thumbs his nose at the US, which always strikes a certain crowd as the hallmark of integrity; if you wrap your derision in the big red flag you?ll always have a claque of bootlickers eager to excuse whatever you do. (The enemy of my enemy is my President for Life.) The usual gang of collectivists admire the way he organizes society from the top down to the city block, because they love power; they love force; they have a romantic attachment to anyone who uses the cudgel to hasten the arrival of heaven on earth. My favorite defense, though, is "free health care" and "literacy."

Let's see, free health care, but no medicine; literacy, but nothing to read, and lately all the writers are in jail.

But I'm a liberal, and I recognize that totalitarian regimes are an offense to humanity, regardless of their literacy rates or the relative availability of health care. I know that Lenin and Stalin did horrible things to their own citizens. I know that in China people are still executed for criticizing the government or exercising religion.

I know all these things, yet I'm a liberal.

At least "religious right" only impugns the character of some religious persons on the ideological right. Statements like the above are oversimplifications that fail to recognize the difference between social liberalism and economic liberalism and the difference between governmental policies that protect individual liberties and governmental policies that violate them.

"Think what you want: it's still true" is an inadequate justification for the smearing of an entire ideological spectrum. Imprecise reasoning might feel good at the end of the day ("I just don't get why all those darn liberals just love Castro so much. Heh. Zzzzz.") but it doesn't meet the criteria for what Esmay calls "liberal tradition".

As some atheists have come up with a new word -- "bright" -- perhaps Esmay needs a new word for liberal, because a liberal he is not.

So, John, why DO all those darn liberals just love Castro so much?

Dean,

What bothers me the most, as a Cuban, about the msnbc story is that, despite the fact that the girls dad got mugged, despite the fact that the population lives in intellectual squalor, despite the fact that any tourist that goes there can clearly see the injustices and prejudices of the regime, the girl states she "loved" the trip and would go back.
This drives me nuts. Geez, after witnessing first hand the crap that goes on there, she wants to give the regime more tourist dollars. In my eyes, that makes her an accomplice to the inhumanity that is Cuba.
Now, we Cubans aren't free from fault either. We send money to the island to the tune of 1 billion a year. But the difference is that, the majority of this money we send goes to our families. Mind you, I do not agree with sending a single dime there. Nor do I think Cubans and Americans should be allowed to travel there from here at all. Not until the TOURIST and the CUBAN are equal, not economically, but socially.
All the people that travel there with the "but I'm giving money to the Cuban people" attitude are either just complete and total asshats, or live with their heads in the sand.

Dean,

You ROCK DUDE!!! You just made my week.

Tim the Soldier

Dean:

What is with your inconsistent use of the term "liberal?" You spend an inordinate amount of time working to reclaim that term from the Left, then whip around and use it as a term of derision describing the Left.

I agree with the substance of everything you're saying here, but your inconsistent term use is hurting your own cause.

Well put. What's the point of having a high rate of literacy under a government that won't let its citizens read anything but propaganda? The fate of the free libraries in Cuba under the most recent Castro crackdown on free speech is all you need to know about that subject.

The recent "suicide" of three men caught by the Cuban border patrol trying to escape to the States may signal a change in the wet feet/dry feet policy in place for Cuban refugees since 1995. Is Castro angling for Boatlift III?

REAL liberals are not the people we call liberals nowadays. Real liberals believe in the sanctity of the individual, and that his rights are greater than the demands of the government, except in unusual cases. Real liberals believe in real freedom, not the freedom to have an abortion while the freedom to smoke indoors or own a personal weapon is proscribed. I don't think I really need to go on, but I'll wrap it up by saying that today's liberals are statist, something which would have horrified traditional liberals. Why do you suppose today's liberals try so hard to conceal the fact?

What is with your inconsistent use of the term "liberal?" You spend an inordinate amount of time working to reclaim that term from the Left, then whip around and use it as a term of derision describing the Left.

How so?

I didn't say all liberals did this. I didn't say most of them did it. Yes, by the way, I am a liberal. A rather embarassed one. What of it?

J.P.

Castro may very well be angling for Boat Lift III. Every time he needs alittle political leverage he opens the flood gates.

Not quite. The well-heeled Western liberal doesn't really care if the face being stepped on really enjoys literacy and health care. He (the liberal) merely cares that the rulers *talk* about such things. Today's liberal intellectuals evaluate people by their words, rather than by their actions.

Hi Dean:

I had been under the impression that you considered the people misappropriating the term "liberal" for leftists causes to be of some total other political grouping.

If you consider yourself to be in the same general political grouping as the Castro enthusiasts, and are embarassed because of their conduct, then I now understand and apologize for my confusion.

I don't believe all liberals cheer for Castro, Jonathan, and I never said any such thing.

Am I of the same "political grouping" as the Castro apologists? In some areas, I am. In some I'm not.

But maybe you're right. Maybe I should just have used the term "well-heeled leftist" rather than "well-heeled liberal." Because Castro apologists don't really deserve to be called liberals, do they?

Perhaps we missed where the shot was aimed, and Dean is not necessarily reffering to someone from the left side of the spectrum?

Otherwise I, too, am confused. I had become so aquainted to the proper use of the term 'liberal' that I had to re-read the sentence once or twice.

Strike the above post for me, and chalk it up in the "Refresh before posting catagory".

I don't see how John Kusch can fail to see the exact identity of "social liberalism" and "economic liberalism". How is a society different or distinct from its economic system? Wasn't it Marx who defined societies by their economic structure? Why can't liberals see that "free" government health care or education or housing or food or soma is the product of economic AND social tyranny?

The actual quote is: "Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy." And Dean didn't make it up -- John Derbyshire is the author, and it's from this old column on Cuba and the Elian Gonzalez situation. Derbyshire, as I am sure some of you know, does not think much of liberals in general -- to say the least. Someone brought it up recently, I forget who -- and it seems to unfortunately be true, at least of the certain type of "liberal" that Derbyshire is complaining about, which is the celebrities and academics who fawn over Castro. And yes, I think that he is lumping actual leftists in with liberals here, but as I have said, he doesn't care much for liberals as a whole.

John:

The point is still valid. There is a large subset of people who define themselves "Western Liberal" that do nothing but make excuses for leftist dictators, and anyone criticizing those dictators are labled "Facist," or worse.

Dean is correct in saying that conservatives don't make the same active defense of reactionary dictators. Of course, it simplifies things when there are few reactionary leaders left! :)

Conservatives did, at one point, defend reactionary leaders, although (to my recollection) they never reacted with the same level of hostility as do modern liberals: recall Mussolini, and how "he made the trains run on time."

But grant conservatives this; once they realized how vicious facist regimes were, they made no bones about condemning them. They were also honest about their previous support.

You can't say this about modern liberals. To this date, the vast majority of liberals have never "come out of the closet," as it were, to admit that the left not only supported, but advocated communism. Hell, to this day it's still "cool" to like Che Guevara; can you say the same about Himmler, or Bagdoglio?

Free health care in Cuba? Free, if your think your life and thoughts are worthless. I have a threshold criteria for a country's health system, do they have aspirin? The answer in Cuba is NO. The first experiment I did in freshman chemistry was to make aspirin...I made aspirin and the entire governmental apparatus of the Cuban government can't. I think that also puts the Cuban "education" excuse to bed.

it obviously makes you feel good to stomp on already well thrashed strawmen/women...

but good and proper liberals would have never ended slavery, ended jim crow, ended child labor, won the eight hour day, secured unemployment/health insurance for workers, etc. etc.

liberals believe in themselves, with an extreme emphasis on "self" as in MYself. the left, or socialists - unlike you i'm not afraid to say the word, because i will actually deal with the whole realm of facts available - believe in society, which is recognized as a multuality inextricable part of the self. Neither can healthily exist without the other.

In our day and age, it takes less than zero chutzpah to dis "the left." we live in an era when collective action is dismissed with fashionably cyncial disdain. At the same time, few recognize the irony that this occurs even as the military is trumpeted as the true ideal of america. well, some have noted the irony as it has become inescapable thanks to the "army of one" PR campaign.

On the rare occasions i've stopped by here due to John's links, I've found this sight to be a somewhat interesting place to see thoughtful conservative Catholic musings... but this latest post is simply banal preaching to a one-note choir singing one sad, drab and lonely song.

BTW...Jesus was most certainly redder than your average liberal. but since he wore sandals, i guess he wasn't "well-healed." Are poor-heeled leftists okay?

If you think that dean is a conservative catholic, well, I suppose you're about as right as you are in assuming that slavery is compatible with the ideals of liberalism (hint: preserving individual rights != grabbing as many rights as possible for MYself at the expense of all other selves).

The terms "liberal" and "conservative" continue to be so poorly defined as to make adequate cover for any kind of pseudo-intellectual grandstanding one prefers. By that token, conservatives don't complain about state-run dictatorships when they're doing business with them. Hello, Halliburton.

What good is it to point out the hypocrisy of one group while conveniently ignoring the hypocrisy of another?

All of these "Liberals do this and liberals do that" statements, when broken down to their component parts, are meaningless. How about making your arguments more specific, i.e., people who support Castro simply cannot support human rights. That's something I agree with -- ascribing such beliefs to specific groups (groups which comprise a significant slice of the population) is intellectually dishonest.

In short: Are you talking to make a point or are you talking to reinforce your feelings?

I'm a conservative Catholic? News to me.

As for the statement: no, it's not one-note, and no, it's not preaching to the choir. It's a sad comment on the state of affairs in this world.

The people who do the defending of Castro and other despotic Socialist regimes invariably call themselves liberals. Except the few who snort that liberalism is nowhere near left enough for them.

It would, of course, be true that some conservatives don't criticize regimes they do business with. But some do--indeed, criticism of China, Saudi Arabia, and other such countries is withering on the political Right. But it's true that some on the political right are mute on these things. So the statement is equally accurate. What of it? Isn't it sad?

What a load of horseshit, Kusch. Name THREE well-known conservative political leaders who have publicly announced positive support for a repressive regime in the past (say) five years. You can include actors and such since folks have been blasting Danny Glover for his support of Cuba's regime. :)

Or, alternatively, cite instances where conservative leaders vociferously attacked those who criticized particular regimes, or the conservative support of those regimes (again, Cuba is an obvious example on the left).

And no fair bringing up some nutbar reactionary militia-type; it has to be someone reasonably in the mainstream, the same as the major players on the Democratic/liberal side, such as the nitwit representative (from Oregon or Washington I think) who said that bin Laden did such a great job building hospitals, or the two weenies who went to Baghdad to announce they put more faith in Hussein's word than Bush's.

To use Dean's example, some conservatives may do business with the Sauds, but they don't go around telling people how enlightened Saudi rule is, or attacking those who criticize the Sauds. And WTF does Haliburton have to do with any of this!? It's a private company that has nothing to do with conservative political thought.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: what Dean brought up relates directly to Democratic/liberal/left's refusal to come to terms with the fact that they've been supporting vicious regimes for over 50 years. To this date not one major leader on the left (with the exception of "converts" like Horowitz) has stood up and said "when the Left supported Communist or Socialst states, they were wrong, and provided support to regimes that were responsible for the deaths of millions of people. We now take responsibility for our actions." Conservatives, on the other hand, have acknowledged that many of them supported Facist regimes in the first half of the century, before the evil of that ideology became apparent. They've also admitted that it was wrong to have supported repressive regimes during the Cold War. But even then many conservatives publicly opposed that support at the time. In fact, many conservatives have argued that they finally have the freedom -after the end of the Cold War- to actually employ some sort of ethical standard to determine which states to support.

Liberals, for the most part, are still stuck in some sort of wierd Frankenstienian binary world where "conservative Baaad. liberal Goood..." holds sway.

Now I'll be the first to admit that the converse of that (i.e. conservative good, liberal bad) is just as silly. In general. But at least many conservatives have learned to differentiate between various liberal positions. Have you tried reading (say) National Review Online? It's amazing some of the stuff they're saying there. I never would have expected a place like that to up and admit that the "War On Drugs" is a failure.

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