Yes, Nancy supported it for about a nanosecond before Abu Ghraib got sand in the thongs of all his NYT buds, and *poof* went his support. Did it ever make it deeper than his epidermis? Plus the GWOT isn’t nearly as important to the nation as gay marriage in Silly Sully’s mind.

The other day some salsa spilled on my Pol Pot shrine (ok, splattered), and from that I extrapolated that polpotology, and to a greater extent liberalism in general, has morphed into Vibeology. Paula Abdul never had it so good.

’splain Japan & Germany, then, Einstein. Bombed out orders of magnitude flatter than the relatively light war damage to several Chinese coastal cities, but fully in the prosperous ‘first-world’ by the 60s.

Wot was the big diff wit China? Hmmm…couldn’t have been Mao, could it?

Funny that you think the form of gov’t has little to do with eco progress, since Chinese technology was the world leader for a thousand or so years, until bad gov’t set ‘em back a few centuries ago.

The Shanghai stock market is fueling a monster boom, alright–the index is up 50% in ‘07, and 60% above its 200 day moving average. Great work, for PRC AND the world.

Mao, though, would’ve put a bullet in anyone’s head, who ever mentioned a stock market.

Seriously?

What on earth would possess you to believe that under some alternative form of government, China in the 1960’s could be enjoying the Beatles or a moon landing?

Certainly 1960’s India wasn’t enjoying the Beatles or a moon landing.

Given the sad, bombed-out state of 1949 China, only a Chuck Norris or Brian Boitano-led government could lead them to this level of affluence by the 1960’s. And Brian Boitano wasn’t skating at the time.

This is an outrageous statement.

You have absolutely no way of knowing whether this is true.

And I wish it *was* true. I wish that democracies always outperformed dictatorships as well.

But in the real world, authoritarian, evil China has consistently outperformed quasi-democratic India, raising living standards for a billion people. Despite India having started off with a better British-developed infrastructure.

You don’t have to “apologize” for Mao to acknowledge the enormity of the Chinese Communist accomplishment. After years of famine, division, and utter chaos, they defeated a kleptocratic dictatorship (Chiang Kai-Shek) to finally bring unity, peace and stability to a destroyed nation.

The error is in the static analysis. It’s the same error that the left makes invariably on every issue–including the universal health care, worker’s rights, and minimum wage items you mention above.

The error expresses itself in your obvious believe in historical determinism (which in any event conflicts diametrically with the ‘great man’ theory of history); that because things were as they were, they could’ve been no other way.

FYI, the future will work that way too –unmoored utterly from the ‘inevitability’ of Marxist analysis. It always has, so far–a fact which for the life of me I cannot understand why the left ignores. Unless the left–and this may be seen in the physical fences around the flow of movement of people and information inside the “worker’s paradise”–the left is not “for” the people after all, but rather just “for” their control.