Lots of real-life stuff this weekend, and today I need to go fix TG’s motorcycle and one of my own.

But I scanned my Bloglines feeds this morning, and came across one thing you folks probably haven’t read and should.

It’s by Marc Cooper, a man who brutally kills defenseless fishes for fun and between times writes hella smart commentary at the L.A. Weekly and his own blog.

Pajamas Media also has a round-up of blog postings on the Cuban anniversary. All of the links are to conservative or right-wing blogs.
The reason is unfortunate. There are no liberal blogs marking this anniversay today. At least none that can be easily found.

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.