A good example was Cuba. Cuba had a corrupt, but relatively mild dictator named Fulgencio Batista, who was overthrown by a really nasty totalitarian regime — Fidel Castro’s — that enslaved all of Cuba and imprisoned and killed thousands. For years, Communist sympathizers and other leftists idealized Castro (some still do) and, to the extent that they saw any flaws, blamed the U.S. because of “our support for the corrupt Batista regime.” This showed a serious lack of perspective; Communists didn’t overthrow governments because they were corrupt; they overthrew them because they weren’t Communist (beginning with the Bolshevik overthrow of Kerensky, who was not corrupt). And even if two wrongs made a right, nothing Batista or the U.S. had done justified Castro’s reign of terror.

This practice of blaming the West for really bad non-Western conduct because the West isn’t perfect, is, I think, a sort of intellectual perversity. That’s what I was satirizing.

Jeff Renz: Actually I think conservatives have been fairly complimentary, if grudgingly so, about the President’s conduct in this situation.

Are the Somali pirates really working for human rights…or just trying to steal?

But does that mean it is off limits to discuss the serious concerns that have been raised about what has been happening off the coast of Somalia? If European nations really did take advantage of Somalia’s anarchy to plunder her territorial waters, were the first “pirates,” by some accounts the fishermen pushed out of their own waters, wrong in interferring with those illegal trawlers?

If Europeans and others were actually dumping nuclear and other hazardous wastes in Somalian waters, shouldn’t that be of some concern, possibly of more concern than what a handful of bandits in leaky boats are up to? Make fun of a non-existent over-reaction all you want, but don’t pretend this is nothing more than a cut-and-dried melodrama in which Western countries are the heroes.