Wotka World Wide

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

A must read from Jay Nordlinger on foreign policy. A few choice nuggets:
Funny how the parties have flipped. Time was — not so long ago — the Republicans were the party of a crude, cold “stability,” in which dictatorships were propped up or schmoozed; it was the Democrats who intruded principle and that jazz. My, my.

Whoever is in charge, this much is true, I think we can say: In order to be effective, and safeguard the national interest, American foreign policy does not have to be morally sickening.
On certain black Democrats' infatuation with Castro:
The other week, three congressmen had one of those visits with Castro. Afterward, Rep. Laura Richardson (D., Calif.) said, “He looked right into my eyes, and he said, ‘How can we help you? How can we help President Obama?’” Rep. Bobby Rush (D., Ill.) reported, “In my household I told Castro he is known as the ultimate survivor.”

The ultimate survivor. Isn’t that sweet? How many of Castro’s prisoners survive? How many of them survive the hell that is inflicted on them day in, day out?
...
Jesse Jackson once went down to Cuba to chant, “Viva Castro! Viva Che Guevara!” Bill Buckley, debating Jackson on television, said, “By wishing Castro and Guevara long lives, were you wishing short lives to their prisoners?”
And on the propensity of the Left to offer "both sides" when discussing dictatorships like Cuba:
In the mid-1980s, I heard Armando Valladares, the Cuban dissident and memoirist, speak at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Valladares is sometimes called “the Cuban Solzhenitsyn,” and he spent about 20 years in the Cuban gulag, eventually writing Against All Hope. The school did not let him speak — give his testimony — alone. They paired him with a professor of government, to give the Castro side: the side of Valladares’s torturers.

Would they have done the same in the case of Nazism? Apartheid South Africa? Etc., etc.

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