Tuesday, December 23, 2014
From: Gary L. Bauer
A Good Week For Tyrants
Castro is crowing in Cuba. The mullahs are merry in Tehran. Kim Jong-un is kicking it up in North Korea.
Saturday, Cuban President Raul Castro delivered an hour-long victory speech before the Cuban National Assembly. The communist spies released by Obama were given a hero’s welcome. A gloating Castro declared, “Now we’ve really won the war.”
He went on to state that any economic reforms would be intended to promote “prosperous and sustainable communism.” And just to clear up any lingering confusion about Obama’s normalization of relations, Castro bluntly stated, “No one should believe that improving relations with the United States means Cuba renouncing its ideas.”
The Obama White House made mindboggling concessions to the Cubans. What exactly did we get out of it?
Not surprisingly, the mullahs in Tehran are looking at Cuba and concluding Obama will cave on sanctions. A spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry said over the weekend that Cuba’s victory proves that “policies of isolation and sanctions imposed by the major powers . . . are ineffective.”
Those nuclear negotiations just got a lot harder. The Iranians had little incentive to negotiate in good faith before. After seeing Cuba’s resistance get rewarded, they have zero incentive to do anything now.
Meanwhile, the administration’s non-response to North Korea’s cyberattack on Sony continues to disappoint. Before heading off for his Hawaiian vacation, Obama downplayed the attack on Sony as just “cyber-vandalism.”
Today’s Washington Post reports that administration officials asked for China’s help in responding to North Korea’s attack. That’s insane! There is evidence that China likely helped the North Korean hackers. Not surprisingly, Beijing declined to lift a finger.
Yesterday Internet service in North Korea went down for nine hours. Some speculate this might have been U.S. retaliation for the Sony attack, I mean vandalism. If that was Obama’s idea of a “proportional response,” it was a waste of time. Temporarily annoying the hackers by taking down their Internet service for few hours is meaningless.
According to the Associated Press, North Korea is “one of the least-wired and poorest countries in the world.” The AP adds that taking down North Korea’s Internet would be a purely “symbolic” gesture and “probably more inconvenient to foreigners.”
There is much more the administration could do to tighten sanctions and further isolate the Stalinist regime. But I won’t hold my breath.
The Left’s Hate Speech
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, Attorney General Eric Holder and Al Sharpton have been scrambling for cover since Saturday’s assassination of two New York City police officers. They are trying to deny any responsibility for the shooting deaths of Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, in spite of months of rhetorical attacks against law enforcement. But the left can’t have it both ways.
The Oklahoma City bombing took place during a time when conservatives were warning that government was becoming too big and too powerful. President Bill Clinton immediately seized on that horrible event and attempted to twist normal conservative beliefs about limited government into “hate speech,” blaming the bombing on Rush Limbaugh and “hate radio.”
I also recall well how the pro-family movement was collectively blamed for the death of Matthew Shepard. Conservatives spent months trying to beat back those canards.
By the left’s own standards, Obama, Holder, de Blasio and Sharpton must bear some culpability for the deaths of Officers Ramos and Liu. Obama encouraged Al Sharpton at the White House to keep the protests “on course.” And we know that there is a significant element among the political left that is prone to violence. The Occupy Wall Street movement amassed quite a rap sheet.
The deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner have been exploited to push a left-wing narrative and inflame racial discord. But there was zero evidence of racism in any of those cases. And in the cases of Brown and Garner, the evidence didn’t even support charges of excessive force by the police. Grand juries refused to indict the police officers, but that didn’t stop the left from indicting all cops collectively and American society generally.
Sadly, it’s not surprising that after months of stoking tensions, a weak response to riots in Ferguson, no defense of the rule of law and no condemnation of radicals chanting, “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now,” that someone would act to fulfill that chant.
Saturday night, the head of New York City’s police union said that there was “Blood on many hands.” He’s right. The left deserves its share of collective blame.
Attempting to restore calm to his city yesterday, Mayor de Blasio asked that the protest be suspended until Officers Ramos and Liu are buried. That seems eminently reasonable. But, of course, Al Sharpton is refusing to cooperate.
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