Castro joins Chavez in praising Obama, bashing 'right wing racist' critics

Earlier this year, I was the only panelist on a Toronto television show who admitted (or rather, boasted) that I had deliberately avoided watching President Obama's "historic" inaugural address.

To the audible gasps of my fellow guests around the table, I explained:

"If I wanted to listen to a Marxist professor talk for an hour, I would have gone to college."

For some reason, Obama's admirers balk when others call his policies "socialist, or "statist" (to employ Mark Levin's preferred locution) or, as Rush Limbaugh started saying this week, "fascist."

That last term seems unduly incendiary. But how do Obama's fans explain the obvious admiration that self-described socialists express for their hero?

For example, let's look at Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's recent (albeit guarded) praise for Obama. While disappointed that President Obama "does not want to change the U.S. political and economic system," Castro continued:

In spite of that, the extreme right hates him for being African-American and fights what the president does to improve the deteriorated image of that country. I don't have the slightest doubt that the racist right will do everything possible to wear him down, blocking his program to get him out of the game one way or another, at the least political cost.

"Castro sounds like some Democrats in this country," quipped Hannity. Castro's comments bring to mind remarks made by that dictator's Venezuelan counterpart, Hugo Chavez. In June, Chavez joked:

"Hey, Obama has just nationalized nothing more and nothing less than General Motors. Comrade Obama! Fidel, careful or we are going to end up to his right."