Recently in the New York Times, JFK speechwriter and adviser Ted Sorensen commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy/Nixon debates: “When Kennedy Met Nixon: The Real Story,” reads the op-ed’s title.

Turns out, however, that the “real story” as “revealed” by Sorensen is identical to the one filtered through the MSM for the past fifty years:  Kennedy, we’re given to understand, trounced Nixon—and not just in style—mainly in substance. Sorensen also laments what “now passes for political debate in our increasingly commercialized, sound-biteTwitter-fied culture, in which extremist rhetoric requires presidents to respond to outrageous claims.”

Nothing of the sort, we’re given to understand, marred those heady and substantive debates of yore. Take Kennedy’s claim that President Eisenhower had fallen asleep (or gone golfing) during his command and allowed a perilous “missile gap” to grow between the U.S. and the Soviets. In fact a huge gap had grown (roughly six thousand for us, three hundred for the Soviets.)

Might this qualify as an “outrageous claim” by Kennedy?  Not if your source is Ted Sorensen and the New York Times. In fact, prior to the debates, CIA director Allen Dulles had briefed Kennedy on the genuine missile numbers. But rather than respond to this genuinely outrageous claim, Nixon bit his tongue. Disclosing the real number (that JFK knew perfectly well) in public would alert the Soviets to how we got their number, and jeopardize U.S. national security.  Which is to say, to blindside his Republican opponent Kennedy relied on that opponent’s patriotism. Let’s face it, Republicans are at a woeful disadvantage here. (more…)

“Let me address the FOX News Network…. two words. It’s all I need:  “You lie”… Fox News is “essentially the voice of the Republican Party.”  – Rick Sanchez, September 18, 2009

Americans of Cuban heritage are, in fact, the most overwhelmingly Republican ethnic group in the U.S. Even with the third generation registering to vote, a measly 13 per cent of these incurably obtuse and unenlightened Hispanics register with America’s majority political party. This is the most diminutive Democratic registration of any ethnic group in the U.S.!  And 72% of these Troglodytes are registered with America’s minority party (Republican.) This is the highest for any ethnic group in the U.S.

Earlier immigrant groups have all yielded to mainstream American political enlightenment. Though the Reagan Revolution made inroads, over a third of Italian-Americans remain registered with America’s majority political party, along with almost half of Irish-Americans. Jewish-Americans habitually skew 65-85 percent for America’s majority party.

Yet these insufferable Cuban-Americans simply will not see the light—simply will not politically assimilate. Not all the Kings Horses or all the King’s Men can bring them around to follow the lead of the majority in their adopted country and register Democratic. (more…)

Hired help might be hard to find nowadays—but not for Fidel Castro. Jack Benny had his Rochester. Louise Jefferson had her Florence.  And Fidel Castro now has his Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s freshly-minted “Cuba Expert.”

Last month Fidel Castro granted Goldberg an extensive “interview.” This week a seemingly conscience-pricked Goldberg cops a plea for the arrant apple-polishing that resulted. Regarding his portrayal of a “benign” and grandfatherly Fidel Castro whom he also called a “great man,” Goldberg rationalizes thusly:

A close reading of the human rights literature suggests to me that the leadership of Cuba is not morally comparable to the leadership of Zimbabwe, Burma, Iran, Syria, Libya, North Korea, Eritrea, Venezuela.

Well, Mr. Goldberg, perhaps a closer reading might help. To wit:  In his book Against All Hope, Armando Valladares, who suffered 22 years in Castro’s dungeons, forced-labor camps, and torture chambers, then served as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Commission, reveals how at one point in 1961, Castro’s Gulag held 350,000 political prisoners. Freedom House estimates that half a million Cubans have passed through Castro’s Gulag. That’s out of a Cuban population at the time of 6.4 million. (more…)

Fidel Castro recently bestowed the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg with an exclusive interview. More than a mere exclusive, this is the first interview granted by the Stalinist dictator to an American reporter in four years.

The MSM is absolutely agog with the catalogue of insights, woes and regrets bequeathed by the Cuban mass-murderer to Goldberg. “I asked him if he believed the Cuban model was still something worth exporting” writes Goldberg.

“‘The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore,” Castro replied.  And as mentioned the MSM and assorted “Cuba Analysts” are all aflutter over Castro’s “epiphany,”  “honesty,” “regret,” –take your pick—“that Communism “doesn’t work.”

Some actual study of recent Cuban history might enlighten these learned parties. To wit:

“This doesn’t work, I’m resigning!” (Fidel Castro, July 1959 during political crisis with his puppet “President” Manuel Urrutia)

“This doesn’t work! Terrible mistakes were made (especially in adopting Che Guevara’s moral incentives)–we need material capitalistic incentives. So I’m resigning!” (Fidel Castro, July 1970, after the much-ballyhooed “10 million ton” sugar harvest proved way short and utterly disastrous.)

“The capitalists organize production better than we do. There’s much we can learn from them.” (Fidel Castro, 1986 during “Rectification Process” i.e. another “re-evaluation” after another economic crisis.) (more…)

The oldest gay-rights organization in Latin America is taking Fidel Castro to the International Court of justice in The Hague for “crimes against humanity.”

“What?!”  snort the “enlightened.” You rubes got the news exactly bass-ackwards!  In fact, last week Fidel Castro apologized graciously for his regime’s past mistreatment of gays. His graciousness has been accepted graciously by all enlightened parties.  The AP, Reuters and CNN picked up the story and it went media-viral. Any Google search finds it in spades.

The “news” agencies to which Fidel Castro bestowed Havana “press” bureaus indeed ran with his “apology” regarding his historic jailing, torture and murder of gays.  But true to their Cuba-“reporting” the MSM has completely “overlooked” the World Court complaint by Brazil’s Grupo Gay da Bahía, which is to say, what prompted the apology in the first place.

Again, true to form, the MSM pack—yipping, yapping, tails wagging, tongues hanging — followed the snickering Castro’s every cue as he led them off the trail of this damaging accusation in the World Court. Again, dutiful to their mission as outlined by Castro upon granting their Havana bureaus, they rushed to bark up every wrong tree and report bald misinformation. (more…)

Time Magazine just ran an article on U.S.-Cuba relations which employs the word embargo (as in big, bad bully U.S. against innocent little free-health-care provider Castro) eight times. The term travel ban figures in the article’s very title.

Question 1. What embargo? Webster’s defines “embargo” as “a government order imposing a trade barrier.” As a verb it’s defined as “to prevent commerce.”

And yet:  according to figures from the U.S. Department of Commerce (that you’d hope Time could dig up) the U.S. transacted $710 million worth of business with Castro’s Cuba in 2008, and has transacted more than $2 billion worth of business with Castro’s Cuba in the last decade. Currently the U.S. serves as Castro’s Cuba’s biggest food supplier and fifth biggest import partner. Furthermore, the U.S. has been Castro’s Cuba’s biggest donor of humanitarian aid including medicine and medical supplies for decades. All this together with the almost $2 billion a year in remittances sent from the U.S. ranks our nation right between Red China and Hugo’s Venezuela as a Castro business partner.

Question 2. What Travel Ban? The term seems pretty self-explanatory, right? (more…)

This just in from the New York Times.

The Obama administration is planning to expand opportunities for Americans to travel to Cuba. The policy… is meant to loosen restrictions on academic, religious and cultural groups that were adopted under President George Bush and return to the “people to people” policies followed under President Bill Clinton… Those policies, officials said, fostered robust exchanges between the United States and Cuba, allowing groups … to share expertise as well as life experiences.

In fact, these groups shared much more than “life experiences.” The Times is much; too bashful in detailing just how “robust” these exchanges with Cuba had gotten during the Clinton administration.

Mr. and Mrs. Kendall Myers, Cuban spies in the State Dept.

No mention by the Times, for instance, that the deepest and most damaging penetration of the U.S. Defense Department by an enemy agent resulted precisely from all that “sharing” by the Clinton administration with Stalinist Cuba, a regime Obama’s very State Department lists as a State Sponsor of Terrorism. Schizophrenia by any other name

“Castro poses no significant threat to the U.S. or any of his hemispheric neighbors. No evidence exists that Cuba is trying to foment any instability in the Western Hemisphere,” asserted the Clinton Defense Department’s “National Intelligence Estimate on Cuba.”

From Havana Castro immediately hailed the report as “an objective report by serious people.” (more…)

While the MSM reports on Fidel Castro’s 84th birthday today –

Fidel Castro marks his 84th birthday on Friday after a spate of public appearances and apocalyptic warnings of nuclear war and environmental disaster that have catapulted him back onto center stage in Cuba and garnered him headlines outside the Communist-run Caribbean island.

The Cuban public, by and large, has welcomed their Commandante back after four years of seclusion with the warmth and sympathy one might bestow on an ailing, but wise grandfather home after a prolonged hospital stay, but in no position any longer to play head of the household.

– Big Journalism will report on some of the tens of thousands of his countrymen who cannot celebrate birthdays. Seems only fitting.

Upon arriving in Havana Jan of 1959 after an utterly bogus guerrilla war, (The New York Times had breathlessly reported of “thousands dead in single battles!” The official tally compiled by the U.S embassy after two years of “ferocious civil war!” was 184 dead on both sides, half New Orleans’ annual murder tally)–at any rate, upon entering the Cuban capitol, the gallant Che Guevara (beaming and strutting over his appointment as Castro’s chief hangman!) immediately recognized the moat around Havana’s La Cabana fortress as a handy execution pit. At Babi-Yar Hitler’s SS had to dig one. Here Che Guevara and Fidel Castro had one ready-made and so they put their firing squads to work in triple-shifts. (more…)

The dictator who came the closest in history to igniting a nuclear war made several public appearances recently to predict imminent nuclear war. The cataclysm he craved in Oct. 1962 will erupt, he warned on Cuban TV, when the Israelis and their Yankee vassals provoke Iran in the straits of Hormuz.

That’s not a typo above. Castro, who co-sponsored the famous 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with Racism, says the Israeli tail wags the Yankee dog. Those Yankees are certainly powerful, Castro explained, but also a bit naïve and docile.  The main instigators, the ones carefully setting the trap to ignite nuclear war are those crafty Israelis. “The control that Israel has over the United States is enormous,” he revealed last week.

Fidel Castro, that sentimental old fool, has excellent reason to bask in the fond memory of imminent nuclear war. “Of course I knew the missiles were nuclear- armed,” responded Fidel Castro to Robert McNamara during a meeting in 1992. “That’s precisely why I urged Khrushchev to launch them.  And of course Cuba would have been utterly destroyed in the exchange.”

If the missiles had remained, we would have fired them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.

– Che Guevara, November 1962.

“My dream is to drop three atomic bombs on New York City

– Raul –not Fidel—Castro, Nov. 1960.

But “Hay Caramba!” the Stalinist trio fumed and raged for years afterwards. “Nikita Khrushchev, that sniveling maricon, snatched that magic button-pushing moment from our eager fingers!”

“We should deliver a nuclear first strike,” read the telegram from Castro to Khrushchev on Oct. 28 1962. (more…)

General Franco is still dead and after a year of legal wrangling popular radio-host Michael Savage is still banned (in Britain.) The new Conservative British government of Prime Minister David Cameron is sticking by former Labor Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s decision from May of last year. “Coming to the U.K. is a privilege,” explained the Home Secretary at the time, “and I refuse to extend that privilege to individuals who abuse our standards and values and who foster extremist views as I want them to know that they are not welcome here. Mr. Savage engages in unacceptable behavior by seeking to provoke others to serious criminal acts and fostering hatred.”

The new British government informed Mr. Savage his exclusion stands because of “the absence of clear, convincing and public evidence that he has repudiated his previous statements.”

Instead of the false contrition, groveling and confessions that Stalin, Mao and Che Guevara demanded from the subjects they accused of “thought crimes,” (before murdering them) Michael Savage sought to repudiate his listing alongside terrorists and Nazis by resorting to the tenets of Western jurisprudence and presenting evidence to the contrary.

“His bad” some might quip regarding the strategy. In today’s Britain what’s left of the Magna Carta only work s in favor of actual Islamic terrorists. (more…)

Castro’s regime has agreed to release 52 political prisoners in the coming months and according to the New York Times, “this would reduce the number of prisoners of conscience on the island by about a third.”

“We think that’s a positive sign,” said Sec. of State Clinton. “It’s something that is overdue but nevertheless very welcome.”

“Gosh, Castro only jails about 150 political prisoners?” might remark a typical Times reader (maybe even Hillary). “So why all the fuss about Cuba’s human-rights problems? Heck, we keep almost double that many prisoners in Guantanamo!”

In fact, the Times (“Fidel Castro is not only NOT a Communist, he is decidedly anti-Communist. In Cuba there are no communists in positions of control.” New York Times, June 1959) probably picked up the political prisoner release story from the Associated Press, another outfit with “a past” on Castroism. (more…)

Vicky Pelaez

The 11 arrests so far are the tip of iceberg. Many more to follow, many in South Florida.

The “South American country” where Vicky Pelaez picked up her payments from Russia’s SVR was Venezuela.

Russia’s SVR, Castro’s DGI (Directorio General de Inteligencia) and Chavez’ SEBIN, (Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia) (are all linked. They all share agents and information.  Castro-Cubans run Chavez’ intelligence agency practically lock, stock and barrel.

Vicky Pelaez was a frequent traveler to Cuba where she met with Castro’s DGI Pictures exist of those meetings.

Prominent figures in South Florida under investigation and net is closing on them. One suspect was very close to a U.S. Presidential candidate during the 2008 campaign.

Sensationalist?..Perhaps. But I quote Cuban-American Arturo Cobo, a Bay of Pigs veteran and former Castro political prisoner who had a key role in identifying Castro spies and alerting the FBI to their attempted infiltration into the U.S. during the Mariel Boatlift. Details of his vital work here. (more…)

So the Cold War’s Over?

Tell it to Fidel Castro and his agents.  Among the ten spies just nabbed by the FBI and accused of working for the Russian Federation we find a Vicky Pelaez, weekly columnist for New York’s  largest circulation Spanish-language paper, La Prensa/El Diario.  You will never guess who they endorsed for President.

Besides this New York paper, please note who proudly publishes Vicky Pelaez’ articles and displays her byline.

Now please note who proudly publishes the articles confected by the Huffington Post’s Margarita Alarcon and proudly displays her byline. The Huffington Post’s “conflict of interest” was revealed on this site just the other day (if I may so say myself.)

Cubadebate, for anyone poised to spout off about “McCarthyism at Big Journalism!” is blatantly and unapologetically the Castro regime’s house organ.  Note that Fidel, Raul and Hugo’s pronouncements, decrees and fiats appear just to the right of The Huffington Post writer’s articles (and those of the recently arrested and accused Russian spy’s.)

Among Vicky Pelaez most recent articles was a paean to Hugo Chavez for his “lifting Venezuelans’ from abject poverty and restoring their pride” and to Oliver Stone for documenting and publicizing the glorious process. (more…)

The Huffington Post’s Cuba-based writer, Margarita Alarcon, informs us that treating Cuba, “this small island,” as “a threat to U.S. integrity so much that the Department of State puts it on its list of terrorist nations is considered tantamount to political dementia.”  In fact, Margarita Alarcon’s views closely parallel those of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency’s former Latin American head, Ana Belen Montes.

In a 1998 report entitled “National Intelligence Estimate on Cuba” and largely authored by Ms. Montes, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that:

Castro poses no significant threat to the U.S. or any of its hemispheric neighbors. No evidence exists that that Cuba is trying to foment any instability in the Western Hemisphere.

The Clinton administration based its Cuba policy on this eminently authoritative report. After all, its primary author had access to all U.S. intelligence on Cuba and led briefings on Capitol Hill, at the State Department and the Pentagon regarding Cuban policy. “On Cuba,” one government official said. “Montes was who you went to.”

Four years after issuing that report, its primary author was in U.S. federal prison having been convicted of espionage, (the same charges against the Rosenbergs) and having narrowly dodged their death sentence only with a plea bargain. Turned out that Montes, (a frequent visitor to Cuba on “academic exchanges”) had been working for Castro since the 80’s. (more…)

So what’s the most dangerous nation on earth for journalists? Which nation jails and tortures them at the highest rate?

The question was answered on June 16 by the Committee to Protect Journalists‘ Executive Director, Joel Simon. The setting was a hearing on “Press Freedom in the Americas,” held by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere.  And quite interestingly, none of that very hemispheric press has yet seen fit to report this item.

So let’s ask the multiple Peabody and Emmy award winning American journalist Dan Rather if he knows who jails and tortures the most journalists on earth.

Fidel Castro is Cuba’s Elvis!

Nope.  Seems that Dan’s no help. Okay, now let’s ask the same question to Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism- winner, Andrea Mitchell: (more…)

Three times last week CNBC aired an hour-long special titled “Escape from Havana.“ “

Between 1960 and 1962, more than 14,000 Cuban children were secretly flown to the United States to escape Fidel Castro, “reads the catchy CNBC teaser.  “Today, many of the Pedro Pans have thrived in America… Each has walked a long road and fought to overcome profound obstacles on their way to the American dream.  In our documentary, you’ll meet a big-city mayor, an accomplished author, a singer, an activist, a professor, and a business leader. They were all part of a secret and improbable plan to escape a dictator’s rule and fly to freedom.”

CNBC seemed to promise   love, war, danger, intrigue, heartbreak, and a heart-warming Horatio Alger finale.  And indeed, accurately told, the story of thousands of Cuban parents desperate to save their children by spiriting them to the traditional land of the free as Soviet proxies Fidel Castro and Che Guevara tightened their grip around Cuba’s throat would provide all of the dramatic elements above –and in spades.

We still await such a depiction.  Instead NBC gave us cleverly-disguised Castroite propaganda. (more…)

Imagine a Breitbart contributor thanking Timothy Mc Veigh in the acknowledgements to his books. Imagine a Tea Party speaker doing same. Imagine a Heritage Foundation Senior fellow proudly acknowledging how Timothy Mc Veigh “championed” his research and writings.

Might the MSM notice? Might they react?  Might their reaction consist of more than a few polite coughs behind the hand?

Well, here’s New York Times contributor and Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Julia Sweig in the acknowledgements to her book, Inside the Cuban Revolution:

In Cuba many people spent long hours with me, helped open doors I could not have pushed through myself, and offered friendship and warmth to myself during research trips to the island…Elsa Montero and  Jose Gomez Abad championed this project.

“Fine, Humberto,” you say.  “But just who are these folks who championed Sweig’s book? And how on earth can you equate them with Timothy Mc Veigh?” (more…)

In 1979 David Halberstam’s book, The Powers That Be, claimed that the major media had “stopped following the news and was now making the news. “An account of the rise of the modern media as an instrument of political power,” reads the jacket. Cuban regime defectors report that this became one of Fidel Castro’s favorite books. Not that he learned anything from its pages; simply that he received smug confirmation for something he’d plumbed decades before Halberstam.

Things have changed. And though MSM agencies with Havana bureau’s still perform for Castro like trained seals, bloggers (and the new media in general) are increasingly vexing the Castro regime. Reuters, AP, and CBS might clutch the regime’s hand-out sheets and eagerly transcribe them. Upon hearing Castro’s whistle, ABC, NBC and the AP might come running, their tongues out and their tails wagging.

The Cuban-American bloggers at Babalu Blog, on the other hand, watch the clown-show with bitter mirth while rubbing their hands. Ed Mc Mahon never lobbed it over so temptingly for Johnny.  Babalu blog founder and guiding light Val Prieto along with managing editors Alberto de la Cruz and George Moneo were recently interviewed by Dr Helen Smith of Pajamas TV. And as much fun as they have with this venture, you’ll see that their mission amounts to more than eye-poking.  Much of the best reporting on (and from) Castro’s fiefdom is by Spanish language bureaus. Among Babalu bloggers’ tasks is to scour these stories, and translate the juiciest morsels into Red state English for U.S. consumption. (more…)

Tea Party “racism” has roused the Washington Post to editorial indignation, as racism — whether real or imagined — always does.  “The angry faces at Tea Party rallies are eerily familiar,” ran a recent piece by Post columnist Colbert King, an eye-witness to one such conclave:

Those were the faces I saw at a David Duke rally in Metairie, La., in 1991: sullen with resentment, wallowing in victimhood, then exploding with yells of excitement as the ex-Klansman and Republican gubernatorial candidate spewed vitriolic white-power rhetoric.

It so happened that your loyal servant here spoke at a Tea Party in Mandeville, La. on April 9 (essentially a bedroom community of my hometown, Metairie).  You’d think some of the angry faces that so traumatized King, some of the very ones, in fact, might have been in evidence.  Instead, the opening prayer was given by a black pastor who was greeted with a warm and lengthy ovation:

“The Rev. Stephen Broden  drew at least six standing ovations from a mixed but predominantly white audience gathered by the Greater New Orleans Tea Party,” wrote the New Orleans Times-Picayune about an earlier conclave. (more…)

Castro’s Stalinist regime just released pictures of 16-year-old Elian Gonzalez, resplendent in the uniform of a Communist Party youth. The timing of the photo release may coincide with the tenth anniversary of Elian’s shanghaiing from the U.S.

The magnitude and methodology of  the snow-job Fidel Castro, with the aid of his ever-faithful  MSM and Democrat allies, pulled on the American public (69, per cent of whom  fell for it and  embraced Castro’s position on the kidnapping) is partly explained here.

Thanks to MSM-Castroite collusion most  people forget  (or missed) the crucial legal and ethical details of this circus/tragedy– which were mostly established during the first week after Elian’s rescue at sea, after his heroic mother’s drowning. The “son-belongs-with-his-father” crowd, for instance, “missed” (with the help of the MSM) that Elian’s father was initially delighted that his motherless son was in the U.S. and in the loving arms of his uncles and cousins.

The evidence—frantically buried by the mainstream media—was overwhelming.  Mauricio Vincent, a reporter for Madrid newspaper El Pais, wrote that during that first week he’d visited Elian’s home town of Cardenas and talked with Elian’s father, Juan Miguel, along with other family members and friends. All confirmed that Juan Miguel had always longed for his son Elian to flee to the United States. Shortly after Elian’s rescue, his father had even applied for a U.S. visa!

In phone call after phone call from Elian’s Cuban family to Elian’s Miami family, the Cuban Gonzalez family always made themselves very clear:  “Please take care of Elian. His father’s on the way….even if he has to row over in a washtub.” (more…)