Quite real, I assure you, Hippikos. If you're not just funning me, then I'd suggest you get yourself a more expansive set of paradigms. You can't cope with or understand the likes of me otherwise.

Let's see, there were the elementary-school textbooks adding revolutionary fighters to grenades; there was the new national anthem literally calling the U.S. "the enemy of mankind." There was the hurry-up-and-attack try at exporting a Sandinista revolution to neighboring El Salvador. We helped, without the assistance John Kerry should by rights have rendered, to remove the Sandinistas before they became more than a national problem. I accept that Sandinista Nicaragua was an enemy, and a Soviet client state.

It was also totally incompetently run. They couldn't keep the lights on in Managua. You could have run the place better yourself, as could I.

Give 'em their due, Communists were well aware the United States is not only their antithesis, but the one operation that can completely destroy collectivist totalitarianism, and invalidate that philosophy merely by existing. Communism anywhere must acknowledge the greatest capitalist success story as its greatest enemy in the profoundest sense.

I only expect an aged Daniel Ortega to screw things up in Nicaragua again, but what's different is he has fewer opportunities -- I hope -- for that now. I haven't heard that he's been spending the last twenty years learning better.