Lew, your post on the recent anti-Cayman article in The Nation was excellent, and in a word, the answer to your question is “yes.” As one who has read The Nation for more than three decades, I can say that there has been no clearer advocate of totalitarian government than The Nation, outside of the outright Marxist publications.

What is interesting is that this publication, which was beating the anti-war drums during the Bush administration, now is advocating (at last resort, but still an option) invasion of another country simply to find a way to get tax revenue. It also wants the government to make “tax evasion” (i.e., not giving the government enough of your own money to satisfy the Left) a “crime” equal with murder and rape.I am not surprised at all at what we are seeing from the Left. A lot of libertarians believed we could break bread with the Hard Left when both groups were protesting the predations of the Bush-Cheney government, but I was not one of them.

Now that the Left is fully empowered in the Obama administration, we are seeing the fury of these people unleashed. They are demanding ruinous taxation, seizure of businesses, forced labor, and now military invasions, along with restrictions on trade and travel.

I find it quite interesting that The Nation now demands a policy toward the Caymans to be identical with the U.S. policy toward Cuba. No American publication has condemned the government’s Cuba policy more than The Nation, and now we see that it uses the Cuba policy to justify an attack on another country now that the Left is in power.

Leftists are not principled people. They really believe that rights are what the government allows us to have, and that all rights are expendable when the Left is in power. In my lifetime, the single most murderous regime I have seen was the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, yet there was not a single criticism of that government and its atrocities in The Nation.

How do I know? I looked through every issue of that publication during the time of Pol Pot and for many years after the Vietnamese government invaded Cambodia and threw out that evil regime. Furthermore, during that period, The Nation continued to declare that any Marxist-led takeover was a “liberation” of people.

So, no, I am not surprised at all. The Left is only getting started, and since Jim Wallis has declared that God is on the side of the Obama government, we can look for huge support for this regime’s predations from all sides, not just the Marxist Left.