Sunday, February 17, 2008

Obama, Che... Che, Obama

Jeff Jacoby on the Che/Obama dust up.

Excerpt
Obama has been widely compared to JFK, most notably by the late president's brother and daughter. President Kennedy, a stalwart anticommunist, despised Castro and his gang of totalitarian thugs. But when word broke last week that Obama's supporters in Houston work under a banner glorifying Che, the campaign's reaction was to brush it off as an issue involving volunteers, not the official campaign. After two days of controversy, the campaign issued a statement calling the flag "inappropriate" and saying its display "does not reflect Senator Obama's views." Would JFK have reacted so mildly?

In December 1962, Kennedy offered a blunt summary of the Castro/Che record. "The Cuban people were promised by the revolution political liberty, social justice, intellectual freedom, land for the campesinos, and an end to economic exploitation," he said. "They have received a police state, the elimination of the dignity of land ownership, the destruction of free speech and a free press, and the complete subjugation of individual human welfare." Eleven months later, in a speech intended for delivery on the day he was assassinated, Kennedy regretted that Castro's "Communist foothold" in Latin America had "not yet been eliminated."

Were he alive today, it's hard to imagine JFK feeling anything but contempt for those who extol a dictatorship that has been crushing freedom and human beings for nearly 50 years. And it would surely pain him that so many of the cheerleaders are members of his own party.


More......

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Taxman --

So how do you feel about the dictatorships that we do consort with? China comes to mind as a place with a rotten and vile communist regime that towers over Castro in all aspects of tyranny. Would you have less, or more, displeasure if a Chinese flag was hanging in that office? Or a Saudi flag? Is Cuba somehow more repressive that China, more repressive than Saudi Arabia?

Mark_McNally said...

Hi Bill,

I don't think you'll see any McCain offices with either the Saudi flag or the Chinese one. If you think Republicans carry pictures of Chariman Mao, we're not going to get through to you anywhow.

But everything's gonna be, alright.

gordon gekko said...

You guys are making my point for me. You are not going to see a flag from some dictatorship in a GOP office. See, Republicans don't worship other counties governments because we think our society is the one others should be like.

To think the GOP has a monopoly on relations with dictatorships is a farce and you need look no further than the contributors to The Billary library down there in Arkansas. Plenty of Saudi princes kicked in to that think not to mentioned all the Chinese nationals supporting the campaigns.