Hypocrisy on Stilts and Steroids

So then, Fidel Castro, fixture of my Cold War childhood, has now gone where Manhattan elites can do nothing whatever for his reputation. St. Peter does not take the Times. At least not anymore.

Viewed from any conceivable angle, that man was a murderous thug and a one-man poverty-dispensing F5 tornado. And the reality that such obvious and verifiable facts are warmly denied by numerous people—who are nevertheless still allowed to have drivers’ licenses—is a commentary on the state of our education system. Betsy DeVos cannot get to her office soon enough. In fact, not only do Castro-fans display their ninja talents for purblindness on places like Cuba, they still have some left over to use on Venezuela. There is nothing they can’t explain away.

But there is a bright side, one that reveals once again the marvelous sense of humor that a beneficent Providence does like to display from time to time. While the progressive left has been busy beclowning itself with hysterical prognostications about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, as though they somehow thought that were a bad thing, they were then caught mid-syllable by Castro’s death, and they had tumble all over themselves to eulogize the authoritarian strong man. Wut?

Pro tip: Anybody who blows sunshine in their eulogies of Latin America’s premier hooligan is someone who deserves to be fully ignored in any discussion of possible threats to our liberties here.

Nothing daunted, they have acted as though they were entirely up to the challenge. Old grainy photos of Castro kicking puppies would not have fazed them—for we do have photos of him doing worse things than that. Shoot—they would have to have footage of him skinning the puppies that were recently brought to the Student Union Building here at the University of Idaho (Idaho!) at the behest of the Bias Response Team—hey, Idaho State Board of Education, UI has a Bias Response Team that you are paying for—in order to provide a little happy-time therapy to students who were traumatized by the election.

And so now I come to my real point. The reason progressives get away with this kind of imbecilic hypocrisy is that they have persuaded themselves that the outrages in Cuba were caused by a hostile and aggressive American foreign policy toward Cuba. But this is just the kind of toggle switch thinking we must not allow. The foul treatment of Cubans by Castro is a simple fact. The possibility that American policy made things worse is a reasonable position to take—which is why I take it, incidentally. But what on earth does that have to do with whether or not Castro was a vile man? To praise Castro while condemning Trump is simply hypocrisy on stilts and steroids.

If a nutcase with a gun is holed up in a house with ten hostages, it is certainly within the realm of possibility that the commander of the SWAT team outside is a nincompoop. He might mishandle the situation thoroughly, in such a way as to cost the lives of half the hostages. His handling of the crisis might come under severe criticism by a departmental review board, and other SWAT team experts might weigh in with pointed negative observations as well. Great. Let the criticisms flow. But is that any reason for Justin Trudeau to release a statement saying that “while Wayne Footnik had his critics, there is no question that he was a towering figure in the field of helping to promote hostage awareness”?

The United States has in fact been a feckless galoot, from the Bay of Pigs on down. We have consistently displayed enough hostility to make the lives of ordinary Cubans even more miserable than a life under communism was already making them, and not hostile enough to bring about the necessary change. But to acknowledge our high incompetence must not become a surreptitious way of giving Fidel the Fine Fellow Award. To acknowledge the fact that JFK wrongfooted us for a generation or more cannot transform any socialist sinkhole into a mountain paradise.

I believe there are effective ways to bring about change there, apart from any use of the military. Many years ago, the conservative senator from Idaho (Steve Symms) suggested that we could solve the Cuban situation by bombing them . . . with Sears catalogs. I am entirely of that mind as well. If Cuba were a military threat to us, then we should fix it militarily. But if it is just a tyrannical and murderous nuisance 90 miles offshore, then we should fix it by other means. Time for a little soft power! The next president should offer a defense contract to the first tech company that can propose a workable way to provide free WiFi to everyone in Cuba who wants it, along with a viable plan for smuggling in free devices for said people to use in accessing said Internet. And we should offer significant tax breaks to any company that can prove they have used the new trade deals to smuggle in more than 10,000 Bibles. Let’s lead from behind on this, people.

The foregoing paragraph obviously means that I do not believe that our policy of hostile isolation worked. It did not destabilize the regime there. Why do I say this? Because the regime is still there. You might say that I am simply being a hawk, wanting to rattle sabers in such a way as to risk another Cuban missile crisis. Do I want to bring us to the brink with the Soviet Union again? Well, that really was a reasonable argument back when the Soviet Union was a thing, I would point out rather mildly, but it isn’t anymore. And, I would also point out, also mildly, that if a nation like the United States wanted to destabilize a near neighbor like Cuba in such a way as to bring that despotic regime down, we have had a free opportunity to do so, without threat of global war, for the last two and a half decades.

The only reason it hasn’t happened is that a communist nation that close to us has been politically convenient in a bipartisan kind of way. If a nation like ours could not bring about regime change in a jitney place like communist Cuba, the only conceivable reason (or so it seems to me) is that we didn’t really want to. The progressives didn’t want to because they are in love with national projects that don’t work, great leaps forward that do no actual leaping, and the conservatives didn’t want to because having Cuba there as a rhetorical punching bag during elections was useful.

But I don’t want to overthrow the commies militarily. Not at all. I want to do it by unleashing the bandwidth buccaneers. The one thing we must not do is use the new trade deals opened up by Obama as a prop to keep the current communist system viable.

Once the regime there is unstable enough to match the idiocies of, say, California or Illinois, I would be ready for the next step, which would be to propose statehood for them.