It looks like I hit a raw nerve. Well, that was exactly my intention. You see, I feel the same way about the Hermann Cains of this world as you feel about the Al Gores and the Warren Buffetts. Except unlike me, you don't recognize it for what it is, a distrust and dislike of a certain personality type and personal bombast. You justify it all under lofty philosophical motives.

Stalin did hold a real job. He was a revolutionary. That's very dangerous and not very rewarding work for the most part. Unlike pizza peddlers, most who do it die horrible deaths and accomplish little. Remember, as we used to say in the 60s, John Hancock was a revolutionary, not a fucking insurance company. Whatever you may say about them, and whatever political vision they fight and die for, it does require some dedication and love of a cause above and beyond their own economic self-interest.

Che Guevara, a 1st class SOB and mass murderer if there ever was one, obviously never felt that way about himself. He felt strongly enough to leave a comfortable and revered position in a successful revolution and put himself again in harm's way (and the eventual and inevitable horrible death)for what he believed in. He wasn't in it for the money, or personal self-aggrandizement, or even power. By the way, he studied medicine as a young man.

Your tantrum against the occupiers and your hymn of praise to the teabaggers notwithstanding; they are basically the same people: they signed on to the American dream, played by the rules, got lied to and royally screwed by the suits. And now they can see that they are not only going to fail to collect what's due to them and which they feel they are entitled to (there's that word again!), but that they have been taken for a ride by those who are now in the top "1 percent"... except the 'baggers have somehow convinced themselves the "1 percenters" are all liberal elitists and left wing mainstream media intellectuals.

Could your own little tantrum we have just witnessed betray perhaps just a wee bit of identification with both of these parties? Relax, Tom. There is no great conspiracy out to get you. This is real history, not some paranoid ideological model of it. What you are really facing is an infinite number of little conspiracies that are totally indifferent to you. In a way, that's even worse.