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Hollywood's Darling, Liberals' Blind Spot
The Washington Post ^ | April 8, 2003 | Richard Cohen

Posted on 04/08/2003 5:18:42 AM PDT by Cincinatus

If the valiant Michael Kelly had not been killed in Iraq, he surely would have returned to whacking liberals and liberalism in his newspaper column. I would have read these columns -- it was hard not to read Kelly -- with some irritation but often with chagrin as well. When he said -- and I paraphrase him here -- that at the heart of American liberalism was a deep and inexplicable hole, I knew he was often right. Had he lived, he might have turned his attention to Cuba.

Just recently the government of Fidel Castro arrested about 80 dissidents and almost instantly brought them to trial -- if it can be called that. Foreign journalists and diplomats were excluded from the proceedings, in which 12 of the accused face life sentences. All of them are undoubtedly guilty of seeking greater freedom and on occasion meeting with visiting human rights activists. In Cuba, those are crimes.

(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: castro; cuba; hypocrisy; liberals
Fidel Castro is a thug and a fool.

Today, the sun didn't rise in the east, Al Jazeera was fair and balanced, Hillary Clinton is loveable, and lion laid down with the lamb. Welcome to Bizzaro World -- Richard Cohen makes sense.

1 posted on 04/08/2003 5:18:43 AM PDT by Cincinatus
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
Bump to you, darlin'. This is one for your archives!
2 posted on 04/08/2003 5:19:48 AM PDT by Cincinatus (Omnia relinquit servare Republicam)
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To: Cincinatus
Castro's island prison is every liberal's wet dream.
3 posted on 04/08/2003 5:22:17 AM PDT by moyden2000
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To: Cincinatus
This is now two columns in the past few weeks from Richard Cohen that were sensible. Could it be that even this historic arch-fiend is moving to the light? Unbelievable.
4 posted on 04/08/2003 5:23:45 AM PDT by speedy
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To: Cincinatus
*** So I would like to hear some moral outrage about Castro. I would like to see the vilification of Cuban Americans cease. They have as much right to lobby the government as do, say, Jewish Americans on behalf of Israel or Greek Americans on behalf of Greece. I'd like to see anyone interrupt one of Fidel's marathon soliloquies to ask about human rights violations.***

Amazing!

Fidel Castro - Cuba

5 posted on 04/08/2003 5:26:18 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: Cincinatus' Wife; Cincinatus
A pig just flew past my window...

;-)
6 posted on 04/08/2003 5:28:37 AM PDT by EternalVigilance
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To: Cincinatus
Cohen is flirting with the truth, but doesn't quite realize the import of his words. He says that it isn't that the left lacks outrage over injustice, but that they are "inconsistent." Well, yes, but he fails to observe that their inconsistency is systematic - their "compassion" extends only to cases that support their agenda and ideological predispositions. Pathetic cases that can't somehow be interpreted to support the agenda are a matter of indifference, or even active hostility. Now "compassion" that does not extend beyond what serves the agenda is not really compassion at all: it is emotional manipulation and self-indulgence. It is the perversion of true human compassion. A French leftist with impeccable credentials of having served the suffering of the third world, Pascal Bruckner, wrote a book called "Tears of the White Man" some years ago, in which the key point was his disgust over the phony compassion of the left.
7 posted on 04/08/2003 6:54:31 AM PDT by thucydides
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To: thucydides
Cohen is flirting with the truth, but doesn't quite realize the import of his words.

Now, now. We must be patient. He's come a very long way. He needs time to adjust. Funny thing about lifting the blinders of liberalism -- if he can see this hypocrisy, it's only a matter of time before he sees the rest of it.

8 posted on 04/08/2003 9:14:27 AM PDT by Cincinatus (Omnia relinquit servare Republicam)
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To: thucydides
The perils of designer tribalism***In 1983, the French writer Pascal Bruckner published Le sanglot de l'homme blanc, an astringent, intelligently disabused attack on recent European efforts to sentimentalize the Third World. Duly translated into English a few years later as The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt (Free Press, 1986), the book excited a brief spark of interest among conservatives and then sank without trace into the tenebrous limbo of the out-of-print.

It was an unfortunate, and undeserved, fate. Bruckner's book is a vigorous indictment of "Third Worldism"-the odious species of romance that glorifies everything foreign, exotic, and primitive while simultaneously railing against civilization, science, and modernity. (That other social philosopher, W. S. Gilbert, was right to save a place on his famous list for "the idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone/ All centuries but this and every country but his own.")

The very power of Bruckner's indictment helps to explain its neglect. The message he brought was distinctly unwelcome music to the ears of politically correct intellectuals, whose smugness and sense of moral superiority, then as now, was inextricably bound up with the mendacities of Third Worldism and kindred specimens of emotional blackmail. (Just listen to Susan Sontag on Kosovo or Michael Ignatieff on Rwanda.) "Solidarity with oppressed peoples," Bruckner wrote,………***

9 posted on 04/08/2003 9:55:33 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: EternalVigilance
Bump!
10 posted on 04/08/2003 9:56:10 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: thucydides
Well, yes, but he fails to observe that their inconsistency is systematic - their "compassion" extends only to cases that support their agenda and ideological predispositions.

Well said, and a VERY IMPORTANT point.

11 posted on 04/08/2003 10:00:02 AM PDT by Ronzo (BOYCOTT HOLLYWOOD!!!)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
Thanks for the wonderful citation. It is a great summary of Bruckner's work.
12 posted on 04/08/2003 5:32:53 PM PDT by thucydides
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
The stupidity continues....

La Fiesta de la Gulag: Why are a group of high-powered "New York-based VIPs" -- as reported in A.L. Bardach's Newsweek International "Global Buzz" column -- joining Yoko Ono in traveling to Cuba to meet with Fidel Castro in the middle of Castro's repressive campaign to throw scores of dissidents in prison? ... It's one thing to go to visit Cuba. It's another to go now, when Castro will use the publicity as cover for his anti-democracy drive. It's especially ironic that press and publishing executives are paying an apparent premium to meet with a man who is busy jailing journalists and writers for being journalists and writers. (The trip's cost, -- a reported $6,500 per person -- is inexplicable, unless you consider that Ono's presence guarantees an audience with Fidel.) ... P.S. Does it matter that the trip was scheduled before Castro's crackdown? No. It can be cancelled. It's as if the Lennonist junketeers were determined to prove Richard Cohen right. ... P.P.S.: Why do so many U.S. big shots like go to Cuba anyway? It can't be that much fun to hear Castro pontificate for hours. I'm reliably informed by multiple sources that one potential lure for some (not all!) is ... well, let's just say the prostitution scene is reportedly a shopper's paradise. That motive emphatically does not apply to the current Yoko Ono trip, which seems to be a short businesslike visit. So what's their excuse? ... ... Mickey's Asignment Desk: Some good could still come of the trip if those on it can be shamed into either speaking out against Castro's clampdown or meeting with some of the beleaguered dissidents. Where's the N.Y. Post when you need it? ... 10:53 P.M.

SOURCE.

13 posted on 04/09/2003 5:22:18 AM PDT by Cincinatus (Omnia relinquit servare Republicam)
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To: Cincinatus
May God Bless Richard Cohen.
14 posted on 04/24/2003 3:26:35 PM PDT by David1
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To: Cincinatus
God Bless Michael Kelly too. May he be in a better place now.
15 posted on 04/24/2003 3:27:53 PM PDT by David1
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