Monday, March 18, AD 2024 9:36pm

Justin Trudeau and Fidel Castro

One source of consolation for all Americans is that Justin Trudeau, that source of hope for airheads everywhere, who hearted Castro after he assumed room temperature, is Canada’s problem not ours.  John Fund at National Review Online gives us the details:

Then there was Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau. The 46-year-old leader fondly recalled that his father, Pierre, when he was prime minister, had frequently visited with Castro. The younger Trudeau lauded Castro for supposed advances in health care, education, and literacy and described him as “a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century.” He confesses that he felt “deep sorrow” at Castro’s death, adding, “While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for ‘el Comandante.’”

Such willful blindness spurred other Twitter users to launch the tag #trudeaueulogies to mock the clueless Canadian leader. “While controversial, Darth Vader achieved great heights in space construction & played a formative role in his son’s life,” quipped Jason Markusoff, a correspondent for Canada’s Maclean’s magazine. Canadian sports commentator Mike Hogan added: “Today we mourn the loss of Norman Bates, a family man who was truly defined by his devotion to his mother.” Australian news columnist Rita Panahi wrote, “Although flawed, Hitler was a vegetarian who loved animals, was a contributor to the arts & proud advocate for Germany.”

Trudeau’s comments infuriated Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the former chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee. Ros-Lehtinen had to flee Cuba as a small child with her family after Castro’s takeover. Speaking on CNN, she directly addressed Trudeau: I’ve been reading his sickening love letter to dead Fidel Castro and I’m thinking, ‘Sure, you did not lose a loved one to an execution squad. You did not lose a loved one to the gulags in Cuba. . . . The only thing that Fidel has been successful in has not been health or education, or human rights or democracy, it’s been holding on to power — which is easy to do when you don’t have elections.

The debate over Castro will rage on, but arguments over him should take account of how unusual a dictator he was. My colleague Andrew Stuttaford has noted at NRO that during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Castro wanted to start a nuclear war. He urged Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to launch a first strike against the United States. In a letter, Khrushchev felt compelled to talk his ally off the ledge thusly: Cuba would have burned in the fires of war. . . . We struggle against imperialism, not in order to die, but to draw on all of our potential, to lose as little as possible, and later to win more, so as to be a victor and make Communism triumph.

Lastly, for all of Castro’s ranting about the exploitive nature of capitalism, it takes a truly mercenary mind to come up with the schemes his regime employed to garner hard currency — from drug-running, to assassinations to, well, vampiric behavior. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reported in 1966 that 166 Cuban prisoners were executed on a single day in May of that year. But before they were killed, they were forced to undergo the forced extraction of an average of seven pints of blood from their bodies. This blood was sold to Communist Vietnam at a rate of $50 per pint. Those who underwent the bloodletting suffered cerebral anemia and a state of unconsciousness and paralysis. But that didn’t stop the executions; the victims were carried on a stretcher to the killing field where they were then shot.

Go here to read the rest.  Leftists, with their Dictator Crushes for any tyrant who mouthes Communist, and anti-American, platitudes, reveal that in their benighted moral universes concepts like freedom and liberty always  take second place to other concerns:
muaddib
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Clinton
Clinton
Tuesday, November 29, AD 2016 6:20am

It’s peculiar how the very same people who are in hysterics over Trump’s
election are simultaneously eulogizing Castro, painting him as a hero. On
the one hand, they breathlessly tell anyone who’ll listen that Trump is
determined to take away our civil liberties, criminalize homosexuality,
and shut down freedom of speech. On the other hand, they wax nostalgic
over an actual tyrant who did, in fact, do all of those things…

Art Deco
Art Deco
Tuesday, November 29, AD 2016 8:11am

Canada is all to far from God, and all to close to their own frivolity, hence Justin Trudeau, whose name is a punchline. After the American electorate put a sometime lawyer / sometime academic who had little or no professional accomplishment in the White House, Canada elected to put a lapsed drama teacher / serial grad school dropout in the Prime Minister’s chair. Defenders of the Canadian body politic will assure you that Trudeau signs what’s put in front of him and leaves the rough stuff for cabinet ministers who know what they’re doing. The best you could say is that he doesn’t seem to carry around the spite that our Alinsky acolyte in chief does.

Was that cartoon an original Watterson?

Paul Hollandar and Thomas Sowell have dissected the Dictator Crushes (and the historical fictions which attend them, of which J. Haggerty gave us a double dose). They do not arise from any decent impulse.

Dave Griffey
Dave Griffey
Tuesday, November 29, AD 2016 11:04am

The cartoon is original, but not the dialogue. It was a section toward the end of the strip where his babysitter takes up the offer to learn Calvinball.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Tuesday, November 29, AD 2016 12:51pm

I don’t think Calvin ever got the better of the babysitter.

Nate Winchester
Nate Winchester
Tuesday, November 29, AD 2016 4:09pm

The comic is from here:
http://calvinanddune.tumblr.com/
.
The closest Calvin ever got to besting his sitter was when he convinced her to play Calvinball (from which those panels are taken). But she won fair and square so he went to bed in probably their most amicable adventure ever.
.
I sometimes wish we got to see future Sitter in the Hobbes & Bacon strips.

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