Alikat's take

I'm going to take the liberty to sound a little like the Deww Mann here and do a little boasting of my own.

I don't have to live in one place, in a homogeneous culture, with a single language, all of the time.  I never have.   I grew up in a large city (New Yoahk), of foreign parents (ooh, thank God they got their citizenship papers on time!), speak 3 languages fluently and can dabble in a few others, spent my college years in Los Angeles and San Francisco and haven't stopped moving around ever since.  For the past decade I have spent a huge chunk of every single year on the west coast and the rest on the east coast.

So I am comfortable swimming around with all kinds of peoples and cultures, and I find it easy to identify with many because in essence, I carry a little bit of everyone inside.

I like people, and I like listening to people, .....really, really listening to all kinds of people, and whenever possible, in their own language.

When I'm in south Florida, I get to listen to many South Americans, who BTW Roky, are very different in culture, race, ethnicity and mindset from what you know as the catch-all name of "Hispanic" or the more unnerving "Latino"(*chalk scratch on board*)                   These are folks, a great many from Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina, etc., who have left their homes for different reasons, but all of them that I know love the United States of America, and some of them love this country so much in fact, that if they could read some of what gets posted here sometimes they would be reduced to tears, and I can only marvel at the irony!  These are honorable, honest, hard working, loving, and *gasp*!!!- - -conservative people.  And they aren't just transient acquaintances, they are close, trusted friends.  I have reason to believe them when over and over I hear the stories of the  situations in their countries of origin.

I say all this to explain that it is an inevitable fact that these bonds have deeply ingrained my thinking, and that I hold a certain disdain for people who assert "facts" about places that they have never been to, nor talked to any its inhabitants.  ie; I can believe DQ's description of Texas far better than what my former neighbor in Queens, NY said he read in a paper about Texas.

So, simplistic summation as follows:  Just because we have a corrupt and idiotic president doesn't mean that everything ever said and done by him, the govm'nt or the nation as a whole is wrong or incorrect.   Fidel Castro has spent the better part of his 50 year dictatorship spewing hate towards the US, exporting anti-US indoctrination and  laughing at the gullibility of Americans  who lap up his schpeal and proceed to shoot themselves in the foot afterwards.  Hugo Chimpvez is his lap monkey, an equally greedy, cynical tyrant, but with less than half of his mentor's brilliance, wit or charisma.   They are both inmensely  wealthy and live off the toils of their deluded charges.

But here's the real kicker:   ALL of these guys.....all of them....have strings on their backs, and all of them, yes that's right,  all, get their strings pulled by the same hands.    Ain't that a riot ? !

That's Alikat's take    ;o)