The New Stalinists
by Greg Yardley

The communist opposition to President George W. Bush has begun. On Friday, June 27th, President George W. Bush arrived in Burlingame, California for a fundraising lunch, and the communist Workers World Party was there to protest, with the help of their allies in the labor unions and on the far-left of the Democratic Party. It’s a scene we’ll see again and again in the next year and a half—through their anti-war International ANSWER, the Workers World Party has vowed to follow President Bush wherever he goes. Supporters of Democrat Dennis Kucinich and the leaders of the Service Employees International Union and the Communication Workers of America trade unions believe that their cooperation with the Workers World Party will weaken President Bush’s presidency and defeat him in 2004. After attending this latest protest, I’m convinced that the opposite is true—the protestors have been reduced to an abrasive spectacle, only harmful to their own cause. That’s not to say the Workers World Party and their friends won’t be able to draw large crowds in the future, but if they truly want George W. Bush out of office, they’re being self-defeating.

There’s no doubt that the Workers World Party has gained influence, thanks to International ANSWER’s recent string of anti-war protests. The San Francisco branch of the Workers World Party won the support of much of San Francisco’s Left, and their long list of backers reflects this. Friday’s protest was backed by, among others, the San Francisco Labor Council, AFL-CIO, the San Francisco branch of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, the California branch of the National Organization of Women, the San Francisco branch of Al-Awda (the Palestinian Right of Return coalition), Global Exchange, Peninsula Peace & Justice Center (a Palo Alto-centered anti-war group), the South Bay Mobilization (a San Jose-centered anti-war group), the Children’s Defense Fund, and the other major anti-war coalition, the Revolutionary Communist Party-controlled Not in Our Name Project.

The Workers World Party failed the logistic test: conditions were not optimal for protesting. Burlingame is far from their supporters’ base in San Francisco and the scorching temperatures were unseasonably warm. Instead of gathering in a central, open spot, the demonstration stretched along the sidewalk across the street from the fundraiser. Only half of the protestors could hear and only a tiny fraction could see the event’s interminable series of speakers. The Bay Area might be a center of radicalism, but less than 1,000 protestors attended the demonstration, far less than the organizers’ predictions of “thousands.”

Unlike protests at more centralized venues, this protest featured relatively few literature tables, probably due to insufficient room. Only two tables were present: International ANSWER’s and a smaller, independent table selling miscellaneous left-wing political books and copies of the Workers World Party’s newspaper, Workers World. Two members of the environmentalist extremist group Rainforest Action Network also sold literature, spreading their anarchist books and newspapers along the ground. Perhaps to avoid paying elevated seller’s fees to International ANSWER, the books and newspapers, including the journal of the enviro-terrorist Earth First! were distributed “free,” with recommended “donations.”

In addition to the tables, communists from four different parties were working the crowd, selling their party newspapers: Workers World, Revolutionary Worker, News and Letters, and Socialist Action. People distributed their stickers and flyers to all who passed by; within five minutes of arriving, I was handed an “Arab sympathizer” sticker, a “No God” sticker, and a “U.S. and Israel—Partners in Crime” sticker (the last subtitled “What Crime? Genocide.”) I was also given flyers for several Bay Area fundraising events and conferences. International ANSWER’s flyer (titled “Bush Lies, People DIE!”) advertised their weekly meetings in San Francisco and the upcoming September 26th to 28th “Global Day of Protest Against Occupation and Empire,” a set of worldwide protests being organized to mark the third anniversary of the second (current) Palestinian Intifada. The flyer from “Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal” urged the crowd to support a convicted cop-killer.

While the Workers World Party was lying low, preferring to recruit people who first become involved in one of its many fronts, supporters of two other political parties were busy soliciting support. The Democratic Party was represented by a few supporters of long-shot presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich and three identically-dressed members of “Team Barbara Lee,” the radical Berkeley congresswoman. The Green Party also had a large presence. The first thing protestors saw as they approached the protest site was a large banner for the Green Party campaign of Pat Gray, who will be running against Bay Area Democrat Tom Lantos in the 2004 election. Gray herself was there with a half-dozen supporters to pass out campaign literature and shake hands. Her efforts were supported by the Workers World Party, who were distributing flyers for “Drop Lantos, Not Bombs,” a group organized to force Lantos out of office. In addition to Gray’s supporters, Green Party backers of San Francisco Supervisor Tom Ammiano were collecting signatures for his mayoral bid. The crowd was quite supportive; many sported “Anyone But Bush 2004” stickers and signs.

No one group stood out in the crowd. The Senior Action Network/Gray Panthers, the Service Employees International Union, and the Communications Workers of America had all made an effort to mobilize their activists; therefore the protest was peppered with senior citizens and union staffers. At least a few were making and distributing preprinted picket signs, emblazoned with the name of the California Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO. Another handful carried “No Blood for Israel” signs. A group of four dressed as aliens, their signs reading “Where’s the WMD? Abducted by aliens!” Another group, clad in white protective coveralls, claimed they were weapons inspectors here to inspect America. One man carried a Palestinian flag; another, a Cuban flag labeled “Bush, kiss my a**.” A third man waved a Baathist-party era, post-1991 Iraqi flag, the version with the Islamist “God is great” added between the stars. Che Guevara t-shirts were worn by a few; a Rainforest Action Network member wore a t-shirt praising the terrorist EZLN. At least four people wore the standard green armbands of National Lawyers Guild observers.

Two protestors were insane by any, even communist standards, carrying signs full of gibberish; one was obviously a schizophrenic off his medication. A black-clad contingent of anarchists were present, but they were relatively small in number and dressed flamboyantly, for style rather than combat.

The only thing uniting this crowd was their absolute hatred of President Bush. A large number decided to trivialize the Holocaust by comparing the President to Hitler, either by adding a Hitler moustache to his picture or drawing a swastika on the forehead. Their favorite chants, repeated endlessly over the two-hour-long event, were “George Bush—war criminal,” and “Bush lied, people died.” The presence of a couple dozen supporters of President Bush, dressed in patriotic garb, caused many protestors to lose their reason; when one patriotic couple walked through the crowd, protestors surrounded them, drowning out their cheers with shouts of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” Several young people screamed themselves red-in-the-face, fists clenched, eyes closed, shouting with all their might. Fortunately, there was no violence.

Every public protest organized by the Workers World Party or any other leftist group centers on a long string of monotonous speeches, and this was no exception. No fewer than fourteen different radicals took the stage to deliver rants. A few focused on single issues, often peripheral to the main purpose of the protest. For instance, a Workers World Party event wouldn’t be complete without a long harangue on Columbia, so Workers World Party-front supporter and promising new recruit Natalie Alsop used her speech to condemn the United States’ opposition to the FARC, Columbia’s armed Marxist drug pushers. Of course, the City College of San Francisco student was only identified as a volunteer for International ANSWER.

Similarly, long-time Workers World Party member Alicia Jrapko was identified only as a member of the National Committee to Free the Cuban Five. She briefly discussed America’s detention of five Cuban spies before accusing Cuban-Americans of being terrorists themselves, accusing the population of Miami of being “good terrorists, the kind supported by the government.” And speaker Azania Howse, a Workers World Party member since at least 1996 and likely back to the first Gulf War, spoke primarily about her work to protect an arts center in Oakland. Although praised by the master of ceremonies for reneging on her obligations as a voluntary, paid member of the military, refusing to fight in Desert Storm, and contacting a Workers World Party front for help deserting, Azania’s party affiliation was never mentioned.

Speakers unaffiliated with the Workers World Party (yes, there were a couple) who also chose to speak on single issues included Karina Moreno of the Children’s Defense Fund, who wanted the Child Tax Credit extended to families who don’t pay taxes to begin with, and John Iverson, director of the East Bay branch of the radical homosexual organization ACT-UP, who wanted to destroy medical research and development by forcing pharmaceutical companies to give up their patent rights to their competitors.

And those were just the moderate speakers.

Michael Lyon of the Senior Action Network and San Francisco Gray Panthers, compared the Republican medicare plan to medicine in fascist Germany, where the old were referred to as “useless mouths.” Lyon’s speech was interrupted by the arrival of the President at the Marriott Hotel; the crowd yelled and booed quite loudly for a few minutes. When Lyon returned, he led the still-energized crowd in a chant of “Bush is lying, people are dying”—perhaps it was a Freudian slip when he mischanted, saying “Bush is dying....” He concluded his speech on a hopeful note. American troops in Iraq had tremendous potential for resistance, he said—after all, in Vietnam, many troops shot their officers.

Another speaker, Joey Johnson, worked with the Not in Our Name Project, the Revolutionary Communist Party front group. It’s no surprise that Johnson, whose real first name is Gregory, is in fact a long-time member of the Revolutionary Communist Party; he set some important case law when he was arrested for burning the American flag outside the 1984 Republican convention. Although he served a year in jail, he appealed the constitutionality of the charge, and his conviction five years later was overturned by the Supreme Court. In his speech, he discussed how the protestors were “standing in the streets with the people of the world, where the people of the world need us to be,” and read the Not In

Our Name Project’s “Pledge of Resistance” to the crowd.

Riva Enteen, director of the San Francisco chapter of the National Lawyers Guild and frequent speaker (along with her thirteen-year-old daughter) at earlier anti-war protests, used her speech to mourn the demise of constitutional rights in America. She informed the crowd that no one had to speak to a federal agent; she was joined by a protestor named Clint Buttler, who said he was approached by the Secret Service as someone who “looked like a threat,” and was asked for identification. This was described by Enteen as nothing but intimidation, and part of a “slippery slope to fascism;” it certainly couldn’t have been Clint’s resemblance to a known terrorist, as the Secret Service claimed.

An unidentified speaker, one of five from an organization called Code Pink, told the crowd about her organization’s extensive efforts to harass fundraiser attendees . Five members of Code Pink had purchased rooms in the hotel where the President was speaking, and were on hand in pink gowns and sashes to greet fundraiser attendees as they entered the hotel lobby; anti-war and anti-Bush slogans were written on the sashes. Despite Enteen’s claims about eroding civil liberties, Code Pink had been allowed to remain in the lobby for an hour, only being ejected from the hotel when they, ticketless, tried to enter the fundraiser itself. In their speech to the protest, they stressed the difference between rich and poor, and how the Bush administration was only the “president of the rich.”

The most comical speaker was probably Jim Long, of the Veterans Speakers Alliance and Veterans For Peace. After claiming that Bush was a deserter during the Vietnam War (wait - wasn’t desertion being praised just a few speeches ago?), Long contrasted him to that most benevolent of speakers, Fidel Castro. While at a rally in Cuba, Long observed how Castro was loved by his people, in contrast to President Bush, who had to be protected from protestors in a “quasi-military” operation. He then claimed that “it’s hard for me to determine where the police state is and where the free state is.” According to Long, every November 11th he goes to Cuba to take part in a special commemorative ceremony to honor Cuban veterans. While this sort of speech says more about Long than it does about America, the protestors applauded and cheered it.

By far the biggest cheers were reserved for the angriest speaker of the event, Kevin Danaher of Global Exchange. Danaher opened by claiming that President Bush had “stole Florida,” and “isn’t the constitutional President of the United States—there is a coup d’etat in this story.” The crowd loudly cheered its agreement. Danaher then stressed the need for the protestors to become recruiters, mobilizing en masse to approach others on the bus, at work, and in other locations.

Most disturbing of all, Danaher implied that the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, which killed 124 on the ground and 64 on American Airlines flight 77, was not a terrorist attack, but a U.S. government-organized conspiracy. The crowd cheered. This exercise in anti-American paranoia was overseen by two masters of ceremonies, who led the crowd in chants between

speeches. Although neither identified themselves, they were two of the Workers World Party’s most prominent members, Richard Becker and Gloria La Riva - possibly the most powerful communists in the party to be excluded from its leading body, the seven-member Secretariat.

Becker made several impromptu speeches of his own; when one speaker accused the Bush administration of favoring the rich, Becker, who hates both Republicans and Democrats alike, took the time to accuse the Clinton administration as being as “bad as Bush” and responsible for just as much suffering: the killing of a million people in Iraq through sanctions. Becker also made a fundraising pitch for International ANSWER; as buckets were passed through the crowd, he announced that those wishing to make tax-deductible donations to ANSWER were invited to make their checks payable to the “Progress

Unity Fund,” a San Francisco-based, Workers World Party-managed non-profit. And in one particularly memorable quote, Becker told the crowd that they had to stop the United States from acting militarily again, “not against Cuba, not against [North] Korea, not against Iran - because people around the world have a right to self-determination.” One wonders how much self-determination the people truly have in North Korea’s Stalinist hell.

Completing the speeches took a full two hours; by this time, the fundraiser was ending. Protestors did not see President Bush nor most of the attendees leave, and although International ANSWER brought out their giant, inflatable, missile-shaped balloon, also used when President Bush visited Santa Clara county in early May, the crowd’s energy had faded. They slowly dispersed, most driven back to the nearby transit hub by shuttle buses.

Both the crowd and the speeches were so extremist that any news coverage could only help the President. I’m beginning to suspect that this is the Secretariat of the Workers World Party’s secret intention; in terms of resources, publicity, and membership, they’re faring far better under the Bush administration than they did under Clinton, or would under the administration of any left-leaning Democrat. Therefore, another term for President Bush is in the Workers World Party’s interests; therefore Workers World Party demonstrations against President Bush are going to be as angry and militant as possible. This allows them to recruit the truly radical while alienating the nation’s undecided swing voters, giving them street credibility.

As next year’s campaign heats up, and the number of television cameras at these protests grows, the speakers are going to get angrier and angrier. The Democratic Party has put itself in this unenviable situation by refusing to denounce the Stalinists in its midst, in their efforts to generate “mainsteam” opposition to President Bush. In the future, these party hacks should take note: when you cooperate with the communists, you always get burnt.

—FrontPageMagazine.com, June 30, 2003

Ford Foundation and the Old Left
by Neal B. Freeman

It’s not always true that the good that men do lives after them: Many of the great fortunes of modern capitalism have been turned to the service of anti-market forces. Their great foundations, born of good intention and high purpose, have become the private bankers for modern liberalism. Exhibit A is the Ford Foundation.

At mid-century, the Ford family was confronted by three influences: its own awakening sense of charitable obligation; the mounting concern among its lawyers that the estate tax could dislodge the family from control of the Ford Motor Company; and the urgency felt by Ford PR executives to associate the family name, then clouded by controversy, with good works of the warm and fuzzy sort.

Thus was born the first American mega-foundation. Tens of millions, then hundreds of millions, and by now billions of tax-advantaged dollars were secured in a charitable endowment. The later history of the Ford Foundation has been one of trust betrayed—and audacity rewarded. Consider the problem of the American Left at mid-century. They had grand designs, as ever—vast plans for what other people should do with their time and their money—but precious few resources. The truly left-wing capitalists—the Cyrus Eatons and so forth—were famous in a man-bites-dog way, but they were always few in number. To reshape the American economy in its own image, the Left resolved to use the assets of America’s proto-capitalist, the first great entrepreneur of the American century: Henry Ford. Now that is audacity squared.

How did they pull off the ideological heist of the century? As they say on the TV cop shows, here’s my theory of the crime. The patriarch of the Ford family at the time was Henry Ford II, to whom it fell to superintend not only the car company but also the new sideline activity, the Ford Foundation. He needed help. And of all the young executives recommended to him to

tend the family’s philanthropy, one in particular caught his eye: Wilbur H. “Ping” Ferry. Over the succeeding years, Ping Ferry would become such a cultish figure among philanthropists of a certain age that he was referred to with the same one-name reverence as Hollywood in the 1980s would bestow on Frank, or, today, Barbra.

What did Henry Ford see in Ping? First, like Henry, Ping was an Ivy Leaguer. Second, like Henry, Ping had grown up in the fancy suburbs of Detroit. Third, and most important, Ping was the son of a president of the Packard Motor Company, another automobile manufacturer. In other words, at least by bloodline, Ping represented to Henry Ford that highest of all human life forms: a car guy. There were, however, a few things Henry Ford didn’t know about Ping Ferry. First, he never got along with his father. Second, he had no use for the automobile business. And most important, he was a dedicated leftist who despised corporate America and the rapacity of its market system. He found much to admire in world socialism and would soon become a leading figure in the unilateral-disarmament movement.

The key moment occurs in 1950, and it is described in Ping’s authorized biography. Henry Ford and Ping meet for lunch in a private dining room at the Detroit Club, the downtown refuge for generations of industrial captains. Henry Ford has a couple of drinks before lunch and appears distracted by business concerns. He is, in fact, getting punched around in the marketplace by a little outfit called General Motors. Ping pulls out a huge bundle of paperwork. Ford asks, “What the hell is this?” Ping replies that they are grant applications and that each one will have to be read and evaluated. Ford responds: “Are you crazy? Just tell me what’s in them.”

This was a sad and important moment in the history of bureaucracy. It was the birth of the executive summary: the one-page cover sheet that presumes to distill the essence of the 40-page document to which it is affixed. In the hands of the skilled practitioner, the executive summary would become the Swiss Army knife of modern bureaucracy: a single tool capable of performing 28 discrete operations. It was at this moment in Detroit, in that dining room, that philanthropic

power—the power to advance certain ideas while starving others—passed from the donor to the nonprofit manager, and—in this case—from the capitalist to the socialist. Over time, of course, these summaries began to reflect less and less the distilled essence of grant applications, and more and more the political agenda of Ping Ferry.

How many miles did Ping take when Henry Ford gave him that first inch? By the mid 1950s those same Ford PR executives who had been so happily present at the creation of the foundation were up in arms. They were getting an earful from their network of dealers around the country. The controversy stirred up by Ping and his left-wing grantmakers were now spilling back onto the company. Something had to be done to protect the franchise. In 1956, the extended Ford family—in all its dysfunctionality—gathered its declining influence and pushed through the board of directors a resolution forbidding the foundation’s affiliates from hiring or awarding grants to members of the Communist party.

With the keen corridor sense of the veteran bureaucrat, Ping understood that the game had changed, and he turned immediately to his exit strategy. Here, again, he proved to be a philanthropic innovator. To my knowledge, he was the first philanthropoid to achieve procedural efficiencies by fusing the roles of grantor and grantee—tracing smoothly the arc from benefactor to beneficiary, as if, in a baseball game, he had served as both pitcher and catcher on the very same pitch. Nice work if you can get it, and Ping could. His soft landing was something called the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, and it was richly upholstered with millions in Ford money.

The idea behind the center was this: If you could gather in one place the greatest minds of the era, free them from the quotidian pressures of time and circumstance, and then turn them loose on the vexed questions of the human condition, our seemingly intractable problems of life would soon melt away before the power of their sustained insight. Right. For the center’s home, they picked some pricey real estate: a hilltop in Santa Barbara overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Each morning the fellows, as they were called, would make their way up the hill to join The Conversation (yes, some of them capitalize it). It proved difficult to sustain much insight early in the morning, however, so The Conversation would begin at eleven o’clock and the fellows would add uninterruptedly to the sum of human knowledge until, oh, 12:15 or so, at which time they would adjourn for lunch on the terrace. Lunch would be accompanied, first, by a local wine and then, as one

participant remembered, by the big wine. Some fellows found these sessions so stimulating that by mid-afternoon, back in their offices, they would be so lost in thought as to appear to be asleep. Other fellows would be hunched over their typewriters banging out interoffice memoranda, many of them attacking other fellows. These memos make for fun reading—full of wit and personal venom.

Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that none of the era’s great minds had any intention of showing up, so the fellows began to turn on one another for keeps. Ping, of course, excelled in the composition of vicious memos, and outlasted most of his colleagues. But as it did ultimately for all of the fellows, his number came up one day, and he was expelled from paradise. Some years later, the center itself withered, and died an unlamented and virtually unnoticed death.

The Ford family came, over time, to understand that they had made irrevocable, multibillion-dollar mistakes in the central questions of mission and governance. In 1977, Henry Ford II resigned in frustration from the board, severing the last connection between the family and the foundation that will bear its name in perpetuity. For the Ford Foundation, the victory was complete, establishing a model for the subsequent capture of America’s other great foundations. But the episode was also sobering: Henry Ford II’s public criticism brought unwanted scrutiny to the foundation, so, for most of the 25 years since, it has embraced a relatively quiet, trendy liberalism rather than the rowdy radicalism of the Ping Ferry era. Even so, the ideological enthusiasms sometimes break through the institutional restraints. Just this past February, for instance, Ford gave $500,000 to the National Sexuality Resource Center in the rough Mission District of San Francisco. The purpose of the new center, according to director Gilbert Herdt—editor of the book, Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia—is to “make America safe for sexuality.” (I have always thought that the best way to ascertain donor intent is to imagine the grant applicant making a face-to-face appeal to the founding donor. In this case, Mr. Herdt might have begun his pitch to the great automaker, “Mr. Ford, may I assume you’re familiar with my classic study, Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia?”)

For those involved in a foundation or thinking of becoming so, the lesson is clear: The time to prevent a hijacking is before the plane takes off.

—National Review, June 16, 2003, p. 26-27

Fidel’s Many Friends
by David Limbaugh

The Left’s infatuation with communist dictatorships dies hard. Why else would intellectuals and Hollywood’s finest still be supporting Cuba’s brutal tyrant, Fidel Castro?

About a month ago, the aging communist clamped down on Cuba’s opposition movement. Mr. Castro’s government prosecuted and convicted three men in “summary” trials for hijacking a ferry to escape to freedom in the United States. The regime’s state-run television reported that the men were given several days to appeal their sentences. Due process, Cuban-style.

Within three days of the convictions both Cuba’s Supreme Tribunal and the ruling Council of State rubber-stamped the ruling, and the government executed the men by firing squad.

Around the same time the government prosecuted and convicted—again, in summary, one-day trials—75 dissidents for allegedly collaborating with U.S. diplomats to undermine the communist government. The activists, artists and economists were sentenced to up to 27 years in prison.

What specifically did these “counterrevolutionaries” do? About half of them organized a petition drive, called the Varela Project, aimed at peacefully reforming Cuba’s one-party government.

Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque defended the sentences. “We have been patient, we have been tolerant. But we have been obligated to apply our laws.” Speaking of tolerance, one of the offenses for which the journalists were punished was having such books as “Who Moved My Cheese?”

To their credit, some European leftists finally criticized Mr. Castro’s oppression. But others abroad and in the United States merely reaffirmed their longstanding, fawning allegiance to El Comandante. Likewise, the United Nations Human Rights Commission voted against condemning Mr. Castro’s oppression and even rewarded him by re-electing Cuba to another three-year term on the commission. Cuba triumphantly proclaimed its re-election as “undoubtedly a recognition of the Cuban Revolution’s work in human rights in favor of all our people.”

White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer expressed the administration’s contempt for the decision, saying: “Cuba does not deserve a seat on the Human Rights Commission. Cuba deserves to be investigated by the Human Rights Commission.”

Many “intellectuals” and a number of Hollywood actors saw

it differently. A group of more than 160, including singer Harry Belafonte and actor Danny Glover, issued a declaration critical of the United States and supportive of the Castro regime titled, “To the Conscience of the World.”

“A single power is inflicting grave damage to the norms of understanding, debate and mediation among countries,” said the declaration. “At this very moment, a strong campaign of destabilization against a Latin American nation has been unleashed. The harassment against Cuba could serve as a pretext for an invasion.”

So it’s America’s fault for opposing this murderous regime’s continued farcical participation on the Human Rights Commission because it is an egregious violator of the very rights the commission is charged with overseeing? Just like we provoked Osama bin Laden’s September 11, 2001, attacks? Well, at least these morality-deficient kooks are consistent. They harbor the same mentality that gave rise to:

*Director Oliver Stone’s obsequious documentary on Mr. Castro, “Comandante.” Yes, HBO pulled it, but why did they undertake the project in the first place? Mr. Castro’s brutality is nothing new. Mr. Stone said of Mr. Castro, “We should look to him as one of the Earth’s wisest people, one of the people we should consult.” I agree, should we ever decide to implement torture techniques against convicted terrorists.

*Director Steven Spielberg gushing over his November powwow with Mr. Castro as “the eight most important hours of my life.”

*Kevin Costner describing his meeting with Mr. Castro as “the experience of a lifetime” and Jack Nicholson calling him “a genius.”

*The hard Left’s support of the Nicaraguan communist Sandinistas over the Contra freedom fighters.

*The hard Left’s adulation of former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev to the point of crediting him—though he desperately tried to hold on to communism until the final hour—instead of Ronald Reagan with the disintegration of the Soviet regime.

What do you suppose could motivate these curious people to glorify such a man as Mr. Castro and such a universally failed, inhumane and corrupt system as communism? Why do they repudiate the United States for denouncing such evil? It has to be either an irrepressible love for communism that rejects all rationality, that defies all evidence, that still fantasizes longingly for the dictatorship of the proletariat, or, an unquenchable revulsion for the United States—or both. It’s your call.

—The Washington Times, May 10, 2003, A 12