Yglesias totally Nails National Review Online

You really do want to read this post by Matt Yglesias

It is too good to excerpt, especially because the best part is the screen capture.

There are many things one could say about this comparison, starting with the fact that unlike a proper caudillo such as Augusto Pinochet, Obama hasn’t had thousands of people detained and tortured without trial. Or, indeed, that it was actually Obama’s predecessor who was having people detained and tortured without trial. But perhaps the strangest thing about it is that when American conservatives analogize Obama to a Hispanophone military dictator, we are meant to understand this a criticism when the historical reality is that American conservatives have generally been quite enthusiastic about caudillos.

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Indeed, thanks to the miracle of modern-day traffic recirculation methods, old National Review content singing Pinochet’s praises falls directly adjacent to complaints about Obama’s caudillismo.

He has the screen capture to show this in all it’s Orwellian duckspeaking blackwhite glory (one odd thing is that the post contains 0 (zero) references to “1984” which is doubleplusungood).

And in conclusion

It is certainly possible that conservatives, genuinely terrified by the totalitarian menace of insufficiently vigorous deportations, have simply changed their minds on the merits of caudillismo. But it looks an awful lot like throwing Spanish words around for no real reason.

Ah snark. Nobody does it better.