Your predictable fallback position on the evils of Stalinism whenever you're cornered shows a philosophical position that is intellectually tenuous at best, bankrupt at its worst. Any ideology, carried to its extremes, yields contradictions. Are we to reject Catholicism because there was a Spanish Inquisition? Are we to place contemporary America on trial for crimes against humanity because of what it did to the Indians and the slaves?

Your position is demonstrably incorrect precisely because it is so rigid. It refuses to accept even the possibility that insights or analyses from the "other side" might contain something of value. You are afraid to even consider them, and simply refuse to listen. Although I have often been critical of capitalism, I have never rejected it outright, and have often conceded it has many advantages and benefits worth preserving, that indeed, it should form the central focus of our economic system. Can you in all honesty claim to have come anywhere near that position approaching from your end of the spectrum?

You, on the other hand, argue for adoption of a governmental/economic ethos which you yourself concede has never been perfectly achieved anywhere, (because of the greed and rapacity of its practitioners and champions, I might add) at any point in history, and which you yourself concede has led to abuses and injustices in the past. When pressed, you simply bring up the Stalinists and Maoists and their ilk, and conveniently dismiss any points against your ideology as too far back in the past to be worth considering, or simply better than the worst excesses of your opponents' side. End of argument. Period. In other word, you are opposed to differences of political opinion on what sound very much like quasi-religious grounds. This is political Intelligent Design; ideological Creationism. And you have identified your own memetic Satan.

This is what makes you and your brand of conservatism dangerous, TB, not just quaint and colorful, or even useful as a valuable counter to the excesses and exaggerations of the current majority opinion. Oh yes, it is possible for me to value the criticism and occasional oversight even of those that disagree with me. Sometimes they are even right, and I certainly can't claim my partisans to be right all the time. Hell, even I disagree with them most of the time, in degree if not in kind. You're dangerous because you have forgotten that politics is the art of the possible, it is best practiced in a an arena of compromise and debate and concession. THAT, was the great contribution of our founding fathers.

So go ahead and tell me how awful Fidel is. Believe me. I already know much better than you ever possibly could.