Here's a pic taken from a Fox news clip that briefly showed an Obama campaign office. Notice anything odd? Anything that would tell you something about the sort of people who find Obama's candidacy the fulfillment of their dreams and hopes?
HT: Hot Air
If you're over forty you'll recognize the poster on the wall as bearing the image of Che Guevara, one of the most murderous of the communist revolutionaries to have plagued the Western hemisphere in the 20th century, but a man who nevertheless achieved iconic status among the left simply because he was a "revolutionary".
Eugene Volokh describes the man whose image adorns the walls of these Obama supporters:
Recent books by Humberto Fontova and Alvaro Vargas Llosa describe the real Che, and will hopefully cut down the number of his admirers. In those accounts we learn that:
1. Che was responsible for the execution of thousands of political prisoners in Cuba (most of them purely for their opposition to Castro's communist policies, or for no reason at all).
2. Che enjoyed torturing and abusing the prisoners, including children.
3. Che was instrumental in setting up the Castro regime's massive forced labor camps and secret police apparatus.
4. Che tried to organize campaigns of terrorism against civilians in the US and elsewhere (though he largely failed in these efforts).
5. Far from being merely a Third World nationalist or pragmatic leftist, he was a committed, hard-line Stalinist, even going so far as to call himself "Stalin II" early in his career.
However, as Vargas Llosa points out in a New Republic article, Che was no uncritical admirer of the Soviet Union. To the contrary, he thought the Soviets had not taken communist totalitarianism far enough. In his travels through the Soviet bloc, Che was, by his own account, most impressed with North Korea - not coincidentally also the most oppressively totalitarian of all communist states at the time. Later, as Vargas notes, he criticized the Soviets for giving the private sector too much scope, and for their unwillingness to take even greater risks of touching off a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
As Fontova points out, during the 1960s alone, the regime Che helped set up executed over 100,000 people, and incarcerated some 350,000 political prisoners out of a Cuban population that numbered only 6.3 million in 1960 (for more detailed figures, see the chapter on Cuba in the thorough Black Book of Communism). Undoubtedly, there would have been even more executions and political prisoners if not for the fact that so many Cubans were able to flee to the nearby United States.
It would be unthinkable, today, for hip college students to wear T-shirts praising a functionary from a right-wing authoritarian military regime, even though few if any such governments committed crimes on the same scale as Castro's. One small step towards putting the crimes of communism in proper perspective would be to finally consign Che to the ignominy he so richly deserves.
This is the man these Obama workers wish to honor. What does that tell us about what they see in Obama? What conclusions would we draw about John McCain if people who worked on his behalf had posters of David Duke or Adolf Hitler on their office walls?
RLC
