OK, sure, you may have thought that Gabriel García Márquez, who died last week, was a pretty good writer, but the Washington Post's Charles Lane just wants to remind you that García Márquez was also a communist, and entirely too close to Fidel Castro to actually count as someone worth remembering. Lane, the genius who in 2011 decided that a then-comatose-from-gunshot-wounds Gabby Giffordswould not have approved of all the mean things liberals were saying about Scott Walker, understands that a lot of "intellectuals" thought García Márquez was pretty cool, but he regrets that an obituary couldn't have been written by exiled Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, who died in 2000. Because García Márquez killed him. Or wait, because García Márquez didn't advocate vigorously enough for his release from prison in Cuba. Same thing; Lane claims that Padilla was perfectly suited to assess "the weird blend of literary brilliance and political rottenness that characterized García Márquez’s long career."

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