Good Lord. I thought it was bad when they used the Janis Joplin song back in 1995, but this takes tone-deafness to a new level.

Didn't the Bader-Mienhof gang used to assassinate German businessmen who drove Mercedes?

Mercedes has cachet but they now have the engineering qualities of an MGB.

Again: when someone finally has the guts to make a poster of Che with the word "Asesino!" (Murderer!) at the bottom of it, some people will finally get it.

***

Somewhat related: I met a girl at a college course who was from an Orthodox Jewish family, and told us one day that many Jews would not buy any German products - ever. Not a Mercedes. Not a BMW. Not anything with the name Krups on it. If it has the words "Made in Germany" or has any hint of Germanic hands in it, they avoid it like the plague.

Maybe Cuban-Americans (and all lovers of Freedom) should take a hint from that and apply it to other things.

Wow! Mercedes has managed to cheapen themselves and Che at the same time. Friggin' Geniuses.

I was friendly with the former manager for Simon & Garfunkle. Mort was a Jew. He drove an old Rolls and told me a joke that went something like this--

A Jewish man sees his friend driving up in a new Mercedes and says "What are you doing driving a German car?"

"Forget about all that, get in, we'll go for a drive."

The friend gets in.

The seat says "Oy, so heavy."

Yeah, whenever some German does or says something stupid -- which inevitably will happen on a regular basis, given that we are about 80 million -- it absolutely must me linked in one way or another, whether plausible or not, whether directly or indirectly, to the Nazi past. Positively unavoidable. No way around it.

Nothing has changed in the meantime. Nothing whatsoever. We are all little Hitlers here. That goes without saying.

German stupidities, however trivial, can't just be criticized, the criticism at all cost must frame the stupidity as related to Nazism. That truly serves to shed light on the matter; on any matter German. Of course. A truly enlightening approach.

Oh, and if Americans vote Obama out of office come November, that of course can't have any reason other than that they still and truly and irredeemably are racists, right?

My favorite line from the article: "whom many political conservatives and Cuban-Americans consider a mass murderer". That's a very subtle way of saying that "only these silly conservatives think he's a murderer". The record is clear about how many people he killed and how much he enjoyed killing. Read Che's own writings and it's crystal clear.

There are probably millions of people who see Che as a hero. Which is the real reason Mercedes used Che in the advertising campaign.