Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Reid to Bolivia, grim milestones, and other items

Reid to Bolivia
Elephants in Academia emailed with this news, Sen. Harry Reid Traveling to Bolivia This Week

Incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will join a bipartisan delegation on a trip that includes stops in Bolivia and Ecuador, two members of Latin America’s recently emerging left. International trade and anti-drug efforts are among the topics on the senators’ agenda.

As Academic Elephant said,

I’m sure Amauris Sanmartino is top on their agenda.

Amauris Sanmartino’s the Cuban dissident critical of President Evo Morales’ ties to Havana. Even when he’s a permanent resident in Bolivia, he was arrested and will be deported to Cuba. Babalu has where to contact Harry Reid on behalf of Dr. Sanmartino. (Update: Dr Sanmartino’s going to Gitmo)

Harry will miss the funeral

Grim milestones
Barcepundit says, WHAT A MORONIC REPORT. Go read about it.

Moral exhibitionism
Dr. Sowell writes,

Progressives are in the business of complaining and denouncing — as a prelude to seeking sweeping powers to control other people’s lives, in the name of curing the ills of society. The last thing they want is to discover and discuss how millions of people rose out of poverty by entirely different methods, often by freeing economies from the control of people with sweeping power over other people’s lives. Poverty and economic disparities are the raw materials from which the political left manufactures a sense of moral superiority, self-importance and political power. Against that background, it is understandable how they strive to keep poverty alive as an issue, even as they claim to want to end poverty, by playing lady bountiful to the poor. Even as they define deviancy downward, many of the progressive intelligentsia define poverty upward, so that people with amenities that even the middle class could only strive for, two generations ago, are still called “the poor” or the “have-nots.” Except for people who can’t work or won’t work, there is very little real poverty in the United States today, except among people who come from poverty-stricken countries and bring their poverty with them. Talk about “the working poor” still resonates in politics, but most of the people in the bottom 20 percent of American households are not working full-time and year-round. There are more heads of household who work year-round and full-time among the top 5 percent of American heads of households than among the bottom 20 percent. The left has striven mightily to make working no longer necessary for having a claim to a share of what others have produced — whether a share of “the nation’s” wealth or “the world’s” wealth. They have also striven mightily to inflate the number of people who look poor by counting young people with entry-level jobs, who are passing through lower income brackets at the beginning of their careers, among “the poor,” even though most of these young people have incomes above the national average when they are older. The real obsession of the left is in gaining power or, at the very least, engaging in moral exhibitionism.

Peace Prize, you ask?
Via Larwyn, Arafat’s Orchestration of 1973 Murders Acknowledged by State Department

How much different would the history of the Middle East be if the world had been forced to face the reality of Arafat’s involvement in the murder of American diplomats over 30 years ago?

Update Doug Ross has The Friends of Terror Scrapbook

Two podcasts
Louisiana Conservative interviewed Wild Bill. You can listen to the podcast here

If you haven’t listened to it yet, go to Eternity Road and listen to Francis Porretto’s wonderful tale fo the Census taker

Last, but not least
a truly beautiful post.

Update
Edwards Enters Race

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The Spanish surgeon

The Spanish surgeon’s been in the news, not to be confused with the Spanish Prisoner,

The Spanish Prisoner is a confidence game dating back to 1588
…
Key features of the Spanish Prisoner are the emphasis on secrecy and the trust the confidence artist is placing in the mark not to reveal the prisoner’s identity or situation. The confidence artist will often claim reputation for honesty and straight dealing, and may appear to structure the deal so that the confidence artist’s ultimate share of the reward will be distributed voluntarily by the mark.

Of course one’s stretching the imagination when trying to find any similarities between the Spanish surgeon and the Spanish Prisoner ploys. What’s clear is that the Cuban free-healthcare apartheid system doesn’t even work for the big honcho:
Reuters says, Spanish surgeon rushed to treat Castro:

Jose Luis Garcia Sabrido, an intestinal specialist, traveled to the Caribbean island on Thursday aboard an aircraft chartered by the Cuban government, according to Spain’s left-leaning El Periodico de Catalunya newspaper.

The plane carried medical equipment not available in Cuba in case the leader needs further surgery due to his progressively failing health, the newspaper reported.

By the way, in Spain, conservative politicians questioned the use of Spanish funds to pay for medicines being sent to the Cuban leader since June (h/t Val). But I digress.

The Beeb‘s a little more specific about Dr Garcia Sabrido’s skills:

Dr Garcia is an expert on intestinal ailments, particularly cancer.

If you do a Google Scholar search, here’s Neoadjuvant Chemoradiation With Tegafur in Cancer of the Pancreas: Initial Analysis of Clinical Tolerance and Outcome and Dr. Garcia Sabrido also presented a paper at the 2nd World Congress of the World Federation of Surgical Oncology Societies, Naples, Italy, September 19-22, 2001: the doctor’s a cancer specialist.

Therefore, when the doctor categorically says,

“He hasn’t got cancer,” Garcia Sabrido said, adding that he believed Castro could be physically capable of running the country again. “While respecting confidentiality, I can tell you that President Castro is not suffering from any malignant sickness.”

one must believe him. You can even watch him say it.

After all, as Taranto points out,

Of course, Spanish doctors have lots of experience dealing with dictators who are still dead.

This is all speculation on my part, folks. Nothing to report … for now.

Digg!

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The Che myth

Michelle Malkin blogs that Target’s pulled the Che CD case but still carries the Che Calendar.

Nothing shows what an ignoramus you are like having a Che Calendar hanging on your wall.

Yesterday I was talking to Mary Anastasia O’Grady of the WSJ, and I asked her, what book would she recommend for a quick primer on Che? Mary’s choice is The Che Guevara Myth and the Future of Liberty by Alvaro Vargas Llosa, published by The Independent Institute. I read the whole book (67 pages of text) in one sitting last evening.

As it turns out, Alvaro had an epiphany because of Che’s image hanging on a wall (page 2):

A few years later, I spent a semester studying at an American university. Che Guevara made a new attempt to seduce me. This time, my friends were mostly politically active Puerto Ricans who wanted their land to be independent.

It never ceases to amuse me how many independentistas come to the continental USA for college. But I digress.

One of them hung a poster of Che Guevara on his wall and, next to it, a picture of “Comrade Gonzalo”, the genocidal leader of Shinning Path, Peru’s Maoist organization.

And that’s another thing: the rich Marxists. When I was at the University of Puerto Rico, one of the most Marxist guys around drove a convertible Jaguar. Now, when you realize that a Jaguar in Puerto Rico at that time cost twice what it cost in the continental USA, you really appreciate the meaning of the word irony. Alvaro continues (emphasis added),

As I came into the room one afternoon and this couple [Che and “Comrade Gonzalo”] faced me from the wall, I was paralyzed. It suddenly downed on me why my South American friend from boarding school had never been quite able to persuade me to take up Che.

There it was, pure and simple: just like Abimael Guzman, Che was the negation of what I most seemed to long for in this complicated word – freedom and peace. I must have vaguely sensed this at school, but now, for the first time, I was able to fully grasp a precious truth: one should never be confused by the many variations of that species: the tyrant. Stalinist Che Guevara and Maoist Abimael Guzman belonged to different camps and represented contrasting attitudes to life – the former being the quintessential pinup, the latter a bizarre recluse – but what they had in common, their lust for totalitarian power, was much more important than their differences.

I had experienced firsthand Shining Path’s campaign of terror against the very poor peasants in whose name it purported to act. Like millions of Peruvians, I had personally been affected in different ways by this unlikely reincarnation of Cambodia’s Pol Pot in the middle of the Andes. Seeing Che Guevara next to Guzman on a chic campus wall brought to light the ugly truth about the Argentine hero of the Cuban Revolution, but, more importantly, it inspired the poignant realization that all those prepared to use force to take life and property from their fellow men are soul mates whatever the ideological or moral subterfuge used to conceal their real motives. “Really, you should rip that off. You have no idea,” I said to my friend, and I left the room quite disturbed.

Many years later, when I had the chance to encounter numerous other disguises for tyranny, some on the left but others on the right, I focused on that image from university as the starting point of a larger reflection. The conclusion I reached continues to haunt me today: there are myriad forms of oppression, some much more subtle than others, sometimes adorned with the theme of social justice and at other times obscured by the language of security, and recognizing and denouncing the deceitful psychological mechanisms with which the enemies of liberty attempt to bamboozle us into voluntary servitude is one of the urgent tasks of our times.

I highly recommend The Che Guevara Myth and the Future of Liberty

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