A brief comment after another woefully long hiatus. (My current endeavour often demands a huge percentage of my time, leaving very little else for phone, friends, and answering e-mails, much less reporting and editorializing.)

I was reading a review of "Gulag" in the Weekly Standard -- tipped off by a Lileks rant about us not understanding how truly good we have it, and what a dictatorship is actually like -- when I came across this little snippet:

Applebaum doesn't chronicle just the deaths of Gulag prisoners, but also the brave and honor-filled survival of those anti-Soviet writers--Ukrainian, Baltic, and Georgian nationalists, Helsinki Watch Group members, Jews, Tatars, Christian clergy--and others who were imprisoned, in that quintessentially totalitarian way, for "who they were" rather than "what they did."

Perhaps I'm making mountains out of molehills here, and perhaps I'm being partisan when I ought not, but am I not seeing the beginning, or worse, of this trend today in the left?

When I ask my leftish friends why they so hate our current president, I get allegations, suspicions and hallucinations. In the end, it usually shakes out to: We don't like him for who he is. Perhaps for his clumsy manner of speech. For his faith. Perhaps for being a southerner. Perhaps because he's a Republican, or all of the above.

It's not that we went to war. That would have been fine under Clinton. It's not about Enron. Clinton received far more cash. It's not about his superficial appearance of faith -- Clinton toted a huge bible to a church of the same denomination, and regularly quoted the bible in his speeches. It can't be his vastly increased funding for education, expansion of gov't bureaucracy, or desire to grant citizenship en masse to Mexican illegals. No, these are dear issues, supposedly, to his critics.

No, he's just not the right kind of guy. Not our kind of guy.

In short, he's not an avowed liberal and humanist. Regardless of his actions.

In contrast, I wasn't a huge Bush fan. I didn't vote for him. But, overall, I think he's done a decent job, and I modify my former dislike because I assess his performance against what I would expect from others, putting them in the same position. Would Clinton have turned the economy around by now? I seriously doubt it. Would Gore? Carter? (Stop laughing!) Again, I don't see how. What about Iraq? Or Al Quaeda? (I don't have to hypothesize on these.) Perhaps Woody Harrelsen or Barbara Streisand would have done a better job?

And at the same time they laud Castro?

Because of who he is.

I was a critic of Clinton. But not because he was a Democrat -- at the time I still revered Jimmy Carter. (Sigh.) No, instead I criticized him because of a long list of things he did. Things he actually did -- such as sending top-secret long-range missle technology to China and receiving campaign contributions from the same -- not some fond fantasy I have about his nefarious, far-flung connections, akin to leftish linking Bush to Big Oil via Condaleeza's former employment.

And of course, I write this because I am painfully aware I am also not the right sort of person. I have a list of not-the-right-kind-of person credentials, including my adherance to things I think are true rather than fashionable, and my somewhat literal reading of the bible, unsufficiently modified by the latest directives from bastions of liberalism.

I'm not saying we're going to become a totalitarian society, but in the struggle bewteen those who want to ensure individual liberty and rule of law, and who think an abitrary, capricious, invasive and God-hostile state would be an improvement, it's interesting that many on the left behave like... uh... classic socialists.

The crime isn't what you did. The crime is who you are.

It's too bad they can't see what they're doing.

(And racism? Please, let's remember that the KKK wasn't for rule of law any more than Hitler was. Also please recall they were largely southern Democrats, not Republicans. Also remember that Hitler, although not a Marxist, was indeed quite the socialist. Sure, he was a "patriot", but that doesn't make him a right-winger any more than Mao or Stalin.)