This I did not expect

I don't mean to turn this here blog into the all-Pinochet-apologetics-all-the-time channel, but the Washington Post-the Washington Post!-has a particularly nauseating example of the genre up as their editorial response to the general's death. It's got everything-the mealymouthed tut-tutting about the disappearances and torture, the comparison with Castro, the faux-worldly realism of the "of course, look at the economy" paragraph.

Then they go on to uphold Kirkpatrick's theory in an absolutely extraordinary final paragraph. Behold it, in all of its grotesque glory:

The contrast between Cuba and Chile more than 30 years after Mr. Pinochet's coup is a reminder of a famous essay written by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the provocative and energetic scholar and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who died Thursday. In "Dictatorships and Double Standards," a work that caught the eye of President Ronald Reagan, Ms. Kirkpatrick argued that right-wing dictators such as Mr. Pinochet were ultimately less malign than communist rulers, in part because their regimes were more likely to pave the way for liberal democracies. She, too, was vilified by the left. Yet by now it should be obvious: She was right.

As has been pointed out by several other commentators, this conveniently ignores places like Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. It also ignores places where right-wing strongmen left behind chaos and poverty, like Haiti or Zaire. It's dunderheaded on its face. It also ignores evidence present earlier in the piece, where the Post's editorial team points out that

It's hard not to notice, however, that the evil dictator leaves behind the most successful country in Latin America. In the past 15 years, Chile's economy has grown at twice the regional average, and its poverty rate has been halved. It's leaving behind the developing world, where all of its neighbors remain mired.

Yeah, it's too bad for Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay that they didn't have generalissimo wannabes torturing their citizens and liberalizing their economies. Except, of course, that they did, and their regimes, defended ardently at the time by people of Kirkpatrick's ilk, were merely less successful at making their countries safe for capital, and so less worthy of eulogies from the Washington Post.

The final thing that irritates me about the final paragraph is the sly way it insinuates that Pinochet, like Kirkpatrick, was "right." I mean, look at it: an entire editorial devoted to Pinochet, before an abrupt transition to Kirkpatrick, with an appoving citation of her theories about authoritarianism, a note that "she too" was hated by the left, and a final sentence proclaiming her "right." The obvious insinuation is that Pinochet was as well. But these realists, these men of the world who know that you can't make a market economy without killing a few thousand Chileans, lack the even the minimal courage to forthrightly come out in favour of murderous tyrants who happen to have US-friendly economic policies, though they quite clearly think that they're a necessary cost of doing business.

It's absolutely revolting-I sort of think that the open fascism of the likes of Mark Steyn is preferable to this sort of "reasonable" authoritarianism. I remain amazed that that the media in the US is supposed by many, including liberals, to be biased towards the liberal side of the political spectrum: if this is the sort of coverage we get from people who are biased towards us, we must be terrible indeed.