SO...
MEChA, a separatist group preaching a reconquista or "liberation" of the American Southwest, whose ideology most closely resembles Communism (according to some old-hand MEChistas), borrows its singular, most offensive phrase from Fidel Castro.
And the very liberal who dug this up thinks it's no big deal. In fact, he excuses it:
In 1969, the true nature of Castro's attitude toward artists and intellectuals would certainly not have been known to the Chicano organizers whose documents were used in the founding of MEChA, and given this clear context, I think we can now assume that the slogan in question was meant to be a revolutionary unity statement. The fact that it was ripped from a now-infamous speech by a now-disgraced dictator is historically unfortunate, but it's meaning should at least now be clear.
Why would MEChA's organizers know of the offending phrase and its call to "revolutionary unity," yet not know of Castro's brutality? Isn't it just as likely that they not only knew what Castro did, but that they also approved of it? They were Chicano militants, after all, as Linse admits. In Castro perhaps they found a fellow traveller, an ideological leader, and that's why they borrowed his phrase. No?
Look, Ain't No Bad Dude, Communism is bad, dude. It actually eclipsed Nazism for sheer meanness, accounting for about 20 million dead in the old USSR, several million dead in China, a couple million dead in Cambodia and countless other millions dead in little Commie hell-holes around the world. It's nasty stuff. I'm sure you know all this; I'm just providing a bit of context.
MEChA's borrowing words from Castro doesn't mean that California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante is either a Castro-ite nor a Communist, but it doesn't automatically let him off the hook either. If Trent Lott were tied to some little known group that had some tenuous ideological tie to Nazism, you guys would be all over him like a cheap polyester suit in mid-August. Wouldn't you? You know you would. You folks try to tie GOPers to racism, and the more irritable amoung you constantly try and tie us to the Nazis, whenever you need a fix for some old time liberal religion.
Ever seen the "Bush=Hitler" signs? Ever run across the term "Bush Reich?" The latter was until recently a frequent fixture on Democrats.com. Democrats.com, as I have demonstrated countless times, isn't fringe. One of its founders worked in the Clinton White House. It gets Josh Marshall's stamp of approval, or, Bustamante-like, he refused to criticize it when I confronted him in an email exchange a while back. In fact, he objected when I dubbed them "radical."
So you can't in good faith deny that your side would climb up one side and down the other of any Republican that you could possibly, however weakly, tie to the Nazis. You folks do it all the time.
Yet Bustamante is tied to a group that borrows the words of Castro, refuses repeatedly to renounce it, and you excuse it. Pardon me while I search for the last ash of your credibility and stamp it out.
Fact is, in Bustamante you folks have a very big problem. Bustamante is your great hope in CA. He has a murky past with a fringe, possibly terroristic, organization--one that borrows at least the germ of its ideology from Fidel Castro. If you and Bustamante don't renounce MEChA pronto, you're de facto accepting it as a legitimate part of your ideological coalition.
That's bad, dude.
MORE: It turns out that the "until recently" clause regarding Democrats.com's "Bush Reich" and its variants is too generous. They're still calling the Bush administration either "Bush Reich," or the "Fourth Reich." Just go to their site, run a search on "reich" and you'll see what I mean. You'll also see that they call the Bush admin the "Busheviks." Intellectual consistency isn't their strong suit, obviously.