One Little Victory

I think that the only saving grace of John McCain being the Republican nominee for President is that his penchant for sticking his feet into his very large mouth will likely result in many “Moron of the Moment” opportunities over the next nine months. God help us if this jackass actually becomes President.

In the spirit of “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb…Bomb, Bomb, Iran” and “let’s stay in Iraq for the next hundred years,” McCain now shows us what he moonlights as… Death. This asshat actually wished that Fidel Castro meets a speedy death now that he has resigned as Cuba’s leader. “I hope he has the opportunity to meet Karl Marx very soon,” McCain told a town-hall style meeting of about 150 people. Never miss a chance to curry favor with the idiots among us, eh John?

Frankly, every President since Cuba’s revolution has been dead wrong on Castro and Cuba. This has far less to do with the government of Fidel Castro than it does the desire of politicians to kiss voter’s asses in south Florida. And the hysterical thing about it, as depicted in the cartoon below, is that the Cuban ex-dictator has to be laughing his ass off at the United States, and that is what really burns McCain. Castro’s reign spanned ten U.S. Presidents and demonstrated that the United States was completely incapable of acting like a mature neighbor.

Barack Obama is right in stating that we have to engage with our enemies as well as with our friends. And so it should have been with Cuba for all of these years. Funny how we could find it in our own interests to constructively engage with Apartheid in South Africa… hell we were able to constantly engage with the Soviet Union and even sat at the table with North Korea, but could manage to ignore a nation only ninety miles from our shores. The answer? Two-fold… money and pissed off voters. South Africa was worth engaging in because they were far more profitable to do business with than Cuba, and we didn’t have thousands of exiled South Africans living in Florida.

But I can’t help imagine what life would have been like if Bush Sr., Clinton or any of the presidents in the past twenty-five years had acted like a mature adult and engaged the Cuban leader. My guess is that by now we would have normalized relations, trade and open tourism with our Caribbean neighbor. The Cuban people are good, industrious people… their leadership has been a mixed bag. In some ways Cuba is prosperous and in others they it is more akin to a third world nation. And we have passed up the opportunity on countless occasions to be a good neighbor and contribute to the development of this nation (and thus win friends) because politicians don’t want to disenfranchise Cuban American voters.

What I would love to see, just once, is a politician stand up for what is right (and actually be right, Dubya) and explain thoughtfully to Americans why it is that we need to change our mindset. Al Gore has been able to largely do this with respect to the environment but he was robbed of the presidency, but he is the closest example I can find. Dubya thinks he is right on everything, but of course fails any test of being able to produce credible evidence or convince even a large minority of Americans that he is right.

Maybe that explains McCain. He has watched a nutjob like Bush rule for the past eight years and call us all idiots without any accountability whatsoever. I guess he thinks that it is his turn now.

Thus, John reclaims his rightful place as a Moron of the Moment recipient. And I’d bet anything that it won’t be for the last time.

Oh, and John… if I were you I’d be real careful about wishing death on someone else… Karma is a real bitch.