Pizza with some Lenin on the side

A DC-style restaurant war brought to you by the Washington Post:

Blakeman was enjoying the pizza at the Shirlington outpost of Shallal's small restaurant empire last weekend when he happened to look around at the decor. There, amid images of MLK Jr., Gandhi and President Obama, he saw a silk-screen poster of Che Guevara and Vladimir Lenin. He decided to write a letter.

Blakeman is a GOP consultant and occasional pundit who worked in George W. Bush's White House. Shallal is an Iraqi immigrant and liberal activist who established Busboys and Poets (there are two others, both in D.C.) as a sort of lefty clubhouse -- a popular gathering place for Democratic causes and fundraisers.

Dem patrons' appetites are apparently unaffected by images of the owner's heroes, Lenin and Che.

Blakeman, who says he didn't know the restaurant's leanings, e-mailed Shallal to express disgust over the poster of communist revolutionaries, "two of history's most notorious and infamous figures who dedicated their lives to bringing misery and death to thousands of their political enemies," and urged Shallal to remove them: "They are offensive and inappropriate."

Shallal e-mailed back: Guevara and Lenin "represent the struggles of working people. . . . They fought against the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few." He forwarded the e-mails to us.

Perhaps we're wrong in assuming that Mr. Shallal's restaurants are run for profit, but there's no mention in the article that he gives pizzas away for free. Anyway, he rightly sensed an ally in the Post.

Blakeman says he'll never eat at Shallal's place again. "To give the private conversations of a patron to the newspaper is outrageous." Shallal should know better, he said: "A guy who fled oppression and built a business in the U.S. -- he never would have been able to do that under Che Guevara or Lenin."

Shallal's return slap: "Bush caused more death and destruction in the world than Che or Lenin." [emphasis added]

Okay, we're not going to play peacemaker here. We'll step aside and let some cable-news talk-show booker take it up with them.

Notice that, by letting the last charge stand uncontested, the Reliable Source "journalists" imply a moral equivalence between George Bush and Vladimir Lenin. That's pretty egregious, even by Post standards. (And when will the media, and lefties like Mr. Shallal, let go of Bush? There's some kind of pathology at work here.)

Meanwhile, Mr. Shallal's restaurants get some free publicity and fellow travelers know where to go for a tasty capitalist-produced pizza with some Lenin on the side to assuage the troubled socialist conscience. And the dozens of conservatives who read the Post know where their business will not be appreciated. Fair enough. Though after looking at the restaurant chain's website I don't imagine Busboys gets a lot of return patronage from non-leftists. http://www.busboysandpoets.com/

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