Borat: A good friend of mine from school was Italian, and his grandfather was from Italy, and had grown up in Napoli during the 1930s and early 1940s. His recollections of Mussolini were fairly benign, and I think he sort of viewed him as somewhat comical. He mentioned the trains running on time as well.
I spent 3 years as a military advisor in Central America in the 1980s, and got to see some of those self-same f****d up Third World countries firsthand. I have opined more than once that as bad as Somoza was, Ortega and the Sandinistas were worse. Same with Batista and Castro. Of course, this doesn’t play well with the more liberally inclined among us, but it is a very different world down there.
Mission creep. Yeah, it is a bitch. Start out protecting Western Europe from the Soviets, and the next thing you know we are tending an empire! How’s that for mission creep?
