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 ...
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.
Amazing!
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.
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,………***
Well said, and a VERY IMPORTANT point.
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.
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