Yes, I’m quite serious. Which of the facts in that article do you dispute, and on what grounds do you dispute them?
Well, the source! You know as well as I that Front Page has a decided slant and an agenda, hence your pre-emptive strike demanding that I accept it as being as objective as Wikipedia. Why else would you need to?
C’mon, guy, fight fair!
Again, which of his facts do you dispute, and on what grounds do you dispute them?
How does this work again? You can brush aside my questions and cites, and demand answers to your own? Not sure of the protocols.
Just to be clear, this note sits atop the wikipedia article’s section on Sandinista rule that you linked to:
And it looks like the “discussion” page is longer than the article, as the pro- and anti- sides bash each other over alleged bias.
Wikipedia is good for technical articles, but not so good for political ones. I wouldn’t count on this being an unbiased source.
In comparison to Front Page? Further, I think it speaks well of them that they note that.
The quotes I will provide here will come from the Freedom House report on Nicaragua. I trust this cite will be acceptable.
I will gladly look up statistics about the domination of the Nicaraguan military by Sandinista officers. The Ortega rape case and the difficulties Violeta Chamorro faced during the Sandinista years in publishing La Prensa are fairly well known, though I will happily cite them as well, if needed.
Given that Freedom House continues in the mission of its estimable founders, which included Eleanor Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie both, I’m sure you won’t dispute that source.
Okay, one more time. Which of his facts do you deny, and on what grounds do you deny them?
An uncited piece is an uncited piece. The guy who wrote the FrontPage article has a PhD in history, at least, so maybe his post is his cite. As for speaking well of “them”, let’s just be clear about who “them” are: it’s not the folks who write the wiki articles who post those notices-- it’s the administrators.
Somoza regime, contrast and compare, and tell me then that some progress has not been made.
Again, no claims of perfection have been made, only that the concept of Communism as a universal and unmitigated source of evil is wildly exaggerated. Our own hands, as I have pointed out, are not free of innocent blood. As above: Trujillo, Batista, Uguarte, Pinochet…
If the Sandanistas are evil what then is our excuse?
As previously noted, the pile of corpses produced by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and their ilk is at least nine or ten times as large as that produced by the Nazis. If you can send more than one hundred million deaths down the memory hole to make a statement like that, you are beyond the reach of reason. Or perhaps you’d care to say that the revulsion most people feel for the Nazis is wildly exaggerated?
Let me be clear about something. I didn’t really think the Sandanistas would do as well as they did, the aftermath of revolutions are a wretched business. Its not that they did so very well, but that I expected so much worse. I was stunned…stunned!..that they went ahead with an election, and even more stunned that it was fair (they lost, after all) and flabbergasted that they complied with that election.
The current running thread on the CIA’s mea fuckup is timely. Our ideology is excellent, an ideology I wholly embrace. But look to what ends that ideology has been perverted! If we are to say that the source of Communists commiting crimes is their ideology, aren’t we obligated to focus the same light on our own actions?
This was a current report, talking about the current government. The Sandinistas indeed used those censorship powers during the 1980s.
And again, this report was talking about the current period, where elections are being held with some regularity, not the 1980s, when they weren’t.
And even with all of that, Freedom House still classifies Nicaragua as only partially free - and a lot of the problems they cite are because of the Sandinistas.
Moreover, and I do not know if this is a result of changing methodology, Nicaragua today scores lower on Freedom House’s metric than it did during both the Sandinista regime and the Somoza regime going all the way back to 1973. And I remind you that the Sandinistas are back in power there.
So it probably isn’t a great idea to paint the Sandinistas as harbingers of any kind of progress.
Compared to the Somoza regime, I ask again? Compared to regimes as noted above, regimes that we fostered and supported? Have we some cause for pride in such men as Trujillo, Batista, Somoza, Uguarte, and a list as long as your arm? Is it our ideology that is to blame?
Ah, the soft bigotry of low expectations. 
Anyway, the extent to which they complied has been documented. It’s as if I were to sell you my Toyota but hang onto the drivetrain. I guess you’d have something of value, but it wouldn’t move much.
Let’s just be realistic about things, shall we? I don’t defend Somoza, except to say that there might be worse bastards out there. You seem to have the same notions about the Sandinistas when push comes to shove.
As commies, they didn’t kill as many people as they might have. And they went quieter, and we might get rid of them yet. That’s the best you can say about them.
You didn’t answer my question: the evil done in our name, is that a direct result of our ideology?
So all you’ve got is the old “we’re-no-better-than-they-are” moral equivalency gambit?
Not quite. Not a bit, actually. If you suggest that an ideology is inherently evil, and use as proof the evil things done by that ideologies adherents (again, without even going into whether such men as Stalin and Mao were ideologues or simply monsters…) then aren’t you compelled to ask the same question of ourselves? We are inheritors of the most noble ideology the world as ever seen, and yet…
… and yet we did not amass a pile of one hundred million corpses.