A few weeks ago, we did a piece about Fidel Castro, in which we discussed his thoughts on the hydraulic fracking process — not something that immediately comes to mind when one considers the musings of a tenacious dictator who has managed to outlast 10 American presidents.
Since his retirement from day-to-day dictating a few years back, Castro has had a lot of time on his hands. He’s been using some of that spare time to put down his thoughts in an occasional long-winded opinion piece that Cuba’s official media is obliged to publish under the Cuban government’s “free press” statutes, among whose clauses, apparently, include one about Castro being the only person on the island free to have his views published without the taint of censorship.
It’s the kind of constitutional clause that certain individuals among those currently running for the Republican presidential nomination would love to emulate in our Constitution. Which is ironic, considering how each of the candidates falls over backwards trying to portray themselves as the most anti-Castro zealot in the bunch, now that the freak show has moved to the Sunshine State.
Republicans, as is well known, will say anything to any group which they perceive to have a special interest, even if what they are saying today is in direct conflict with something they said to another crowd, with another special interest, earlier in the day. And so it is only natural that when in Florida — which as anyone will tell you is just “90 miles from communism”, and fairly brimming with Cuban exiles — the Republican candidates would gleefully drag the old Cuban Missile Crisis skeleton out of the closet, rattling those dusty old bones in front of the only crowd left in the United States that can still be counted on to go into an involuntary anti-Castro trance-dance, moaning, wailing, foaming at the mouth, and speaking in tongues. It’s the holy rollers of Iowa all over again, except in Spanish. It’s a kind of shameless pandering with is echt Republican, which is why we were treated to all of the anti-Castro sniping between the candidates in the first debate to take place on Florida soil this week.
Naturally, this caught the attention of the Eric Sevareid of Havana, in his most recent column. Castro knew from experience that Cuba would be taking some knocks from the Republican candidates once they reached Florida — both parties have been doing it for years — but this year, even he is appalled by the sheer stupidity of the candidates, especially the part in which Mitt Romney and pompous, erratic, undisciplined, angry, racist, arrogant, anti-intellectual, grandiose, authoritarian, bi-polar, half-man/half-pig mutant hybrid zoophilic microcephalic psychopath and sneering, preening, opportunistic, divisive, self-aggrandizing, all pie-in-the-sky and no follow-through, manic-depressive, ethically-challenged, spendthrift, open-marriage advocate, perennially unfaithful serial husband, all-around überhypocrite, fuck-wad of the first order, and freshly-minted self-styled anti-Castro zealot Newt Gingrich debated the point of whether Castro would end up in heaven or hell once he eventually merges with the infinite.
Castro writes, “The selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is — and I mean this seriously — the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been.”
Jesus.
First Castro slams hydraulic fracking because of its wanton destruction of the environment. Now he issues in one succinct sentence the most clear-eyed assessment of the Republican presidential race that we have read in this entire campaign.
Are we as a nation embarrassed yet?
Do we feel even a twinge of shame that the most long-standing dictator on this planet sees the American political process for what it really is? A media-driven entertainment extravaganza of Jovian proportions, so far removed from the concept of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” that it has become an international joke, and a lousy one at that?
Of all of the problems that are facing America today — problems that this Republican crowd gives short shrift as they debate such issues as whether or not the current president is a socialist, a Muslim, or both, or whether or not convicted felons should be allowed to vote, or whether or not gay marriage will lead to “man-on-dog sex”, or quién es mas conservativo — we can now add to that list that the rest of the world no longer takes seriously our system of government. A system of government which was once a model for the world.
The rest of the world is laughing at us. That is, those who aren’t being kept awake at night by the specter of the country with the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world devolving into a nation of hateful, blathering idiots, with itchy trigger fingers, ready to deliver the entire planet to the armageddon which more and more Americans seem to just want to get over with so that they can have a front row seat for the carnage of Jesus coming back and smiting all of the damn sodomites and liberals and Muslims, and, hell, anyone who isn’t white, rich, and/or stupid like them.
Or maybe the rest of the world isn’t laughing at all of us. Maybe they know who the clowns really are. After America’s international prestige fell to its lowest level in history during the George W. Bush administration, one of President Obama’s great accomplishments (among many, not that you’re hearing the media telling anyone about them) has been the restoration of America’s place in the world as a well-regarded beacon of freedom and justice (Guantanamo and pissing on corpses notwithstanding). It could well be that the rest of the world is laughing at the one political party in this country that is worthy of laughter, primarily because as political parties go, it is nothing but a joke.
So great a joke that even someone as seemingly humorless as Fidel Castro is laughing.
But then, he’s been laughing for a long time now.
