Gawker, of all places, striking back at National Review's Andy McCarthy, for writing that "as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society.":
Andy McCarthy is well-educated enough to know that a theocratic dictatorship is not compatible in any way with Leftism. He knows, when he writes that the "hard-Left... was more comfortable with the Soviets than the anti-Communists," that many of these anti-Communists were, in fact, fascists, theocratic totalitarians, and dictators. (Like the heroic Afghani freedom fighters who beat back the Russians! Now we call them "the Taliban.") He knows that a ridiculously inequitable oil state that throws occasional sops to its massive underclass is more or less the opposite of the Socialist ideal. And yes, of course he fucking knows that Barack Obama is not even close to being "a man of the hard Left." (Why did President Barack Castro over here appoint Geithner?) Any idiot knows that the President of the United States would obviously rather see a non-insane moderate in charge of Iran, because seriously, how does Obama benefit by having Ahmadinejad still in power, again? He just likes the dude because they both hate America so much? In fact not a single one of the sinister insinuations made in that one simple sentence should even require any sort of rebuttal, because it is all just half-assed trolling.
UPDATE: Hilzoy, too:
None of the people I have known, in a long life of knowing leftists, has been "fine with dictatorship". None of them has the slightest interest in the "suppression of freedom", or "intrusiveness in all aspects of life". Like most people, they would prefer that the policies they think are best get adopted, but none of them would want to impose those policies by force if they lost the political argument.
UPDATE II: LGM has more.