Oh, Lord have mercy!

The New York Times just never lets up. I mean, may God have mercy on this poor woman's soul, but please, stop already. She was a bleedin' communist -- who cares if she opposed Pinochet, who seized power precisely to stop people like her from laying ruin to another society.

The Times, hiding behind an obit picked up from Reuters, allows that obituary to say she was "a well-known human rights advocate." What in God's precious name does a communist know about human rights? Did she oppose Castro? No, apparently she didn't, because when her illness struck she "went to Havana twice for surgery under the auspices of Fidel Castro, her friend and longtime political ally."

Would anyone go around accepting the pretense of Nazis as "human rights advocates?" The Times also accepts the Reuters obit's reference to her, as if this could mitigate her ideological predilection, as the leader of Chile's "small Communist Party." Get that? It was only a small Communist Party. But it wasn't that small was it:

Ms. Marín came from a humble family and joined the Communist Youth Party in the 1950's when studying to be a teacher. She became a congresswoman and supported the Marxist president, Salvador Allende, at the time of the 1973 military coup.

She was the leader of but a small Communist Party, but somehow she wound up being a key supporter of Chile's Marxist president. Are the readers of the Times supposed to be fooled by that? Is calling Allende a Marxist still supposed to mean something other than that he was a Communist? It certainly is reassuring, however, that she "came from a humble family." That makes her close alliance with Castro so much more understandable, just as her alliance with Castro makes her small Communist Party so much more chic.