Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 11:26 AM by Gene

The right's favorite dictator needs some get-well wishes.

In a rare slip of his keyboard, Victor Davis Hanson wrote:

[I]t is also time to take a hard look at the heroes and villains of Hollywood, liberal Democrats, and the Euro elites. Many are as obsessed with damning the senile dictator of Chile as they are with excusing the unelected President for Life Fidel Castro. But let us be frank. A murderous Pinochet probably killed fewer of his own than did a mass-murdering Castro, and left Chile in better shape than contemporary Cuba is in. And the former is long gone, while the latter is still long in power.

This is not frank. (When a writer uses politicospeak he is definitely not being "frank.") Mr. Hanson forgets that conservatives had a feckless tradition of condoning dictators, most notably with Hitler. Pinochet's brutality became such that even Ronald Reagan had to acknowledge it, but then in the form of Ms. Ambassador Kirkpatrick's silent -- er, "QUIET diplomacy." At least Jimmy Carter, for his manifold flaws, had the right idea: he wanted a moral foreign policy. Of course who could know what his definition of "morality" would be. The surpassing glibness of liberals in endorsing Castro does not excuse the conservatives' past failures of will, and of the heart.