I don't believe for one moment that this owes to some sort of liberal "softeness" on Castro (though there's certainly a sweet spot for him among the more stridently leftist folks). No, the silence on Cuba owes to something else: a smothering parochialism that has set down upon much of the liberal left and extinguished much more honorable traditions of internationalism. Liberals and progressives nowadays are defined more than anything by their sheer opposition to George Bush and no longer feel themselves part of a bigger cause - like, say, freedom.

For too many of them it's a simple formula: Whatever Bush is for, I'm against. Period. Next question?
The result is a strange liberalish mirror-image of Buchananist isolationism: "I can't be criticizing some foreign government I have no control over when I have to spend all my energy fighting the ills of my own government," as some have crudely and previously put it on this blog. Or, worse, "I'm not going to gang up on Fidel when we Americans have created such a horror in [fill in the blank] Iraq or Haiti or Afghanistan".

I see. Well, at least during the lulls in your ongoing heroic struggle against rampant Republicanism, take a moment out to quietly remember those prisoners of conscience who languish in Cuban prisons. They deserve your support and solidarity, even if it isn't George Bush who put them there.

It become - sadly - very rare to read commentators on either side who won't do or say anything to score points on "the opposition". I'm slowly losing interest in them; it's the iconoclasts - who I believe might actually let a fact stand in the way of a good opinion - who are the folks I'm most interested in listening to.