Travis Peterson, Useful Idiot

Not surprising in any way whatsoever, this horseshit appeared in the Strib last week:

CASTRO STEPS ASIDE - Years of solid leadership

Many Americans hated Cuban President Fidel Castro but they never knew what he did for his country. Castro led a revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista. He brought health care to everyone and free education all the way to the university level. Castro took the big farms of the fleeing wealthy and divided them up and gave them to the people. The people who before lived in dirt huts and barely scraped by now had enough land to feed their families, health care and
college. We should be praising his accomplishments and hoping that his brother can bring as much good to Cuba as he did.

TRAVIS PETERSEN, MINNETONKA

Oh yea, free health care; the single defining principle of the terminally misguided. So good is health care in the Marxist paradise, when Fidel needed intestinal surgery in 2007, doctors were imported from the EU.

Forget the fact that Castro ran and continues to run an island prison. Forget that any growth of Cuba's 'economy' has not enriched any regular folk. Forget that most people in Cuba don't know that Fidel is supposedly stepping aside since the state-run media (the only media in Cuba) hadn't reported it as of late last week. Forget the state-planned economy, the crushing of dissent which is allowed under the legal code, the rationing and black markets of consumer goods, etc.

Forget that endless human rights abuse, including torture, arbitrary imprisonment, kangaroo courts, stifling of religion and travel restrictions which has been standard operation procedure since 1959.

Forget all the pesky and confusing human rights madness says Travis Peterson and useful idiots all over our land, for as a proud Cuban, you can go to college for free! And then, after you graduate, you are restricted to a land where you can't do anything with whatever you might have learned.

When I hear the self-loathing blather of how glorious life in Cuba is and how we should all be crawling to Castro, begging him to enlighten us dummies in the United States, I'm reminded of the good old days of Bill Clinton, Janet Reno and Elian Gonzales and recall the words of John Derbyshire:

Every time I turn on my TV, every time I pick up a newspaper, I see a new one. It’s like a Night of the Living Dead—lefties coming up out of the ground and lurching off across the landscape looking for a Maximum Leader, a Great Helmsman, a Little Father of the People to slobber over. With the centenary of Lenin’s revolution looming on the far horizon, and after all the horrors of our age—mountains of corpses, oceans of lies—these fools are still with us.

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy. Won’t they ever learn? No, their stupidity is impenetrable. They will never learn.

Amen.