Obama tosses the Castros in the dustbin of history, while Republicans rage

If they gave prizes for walking corpses—and maybe they should—the Castro brothers’ brutal farce in Havana would certainly win at least an honorable mention—“ugly but ambulant for more than two decades!” has a nice ring to it. But the Republican mainstream seems determined to prop up the beast.

Reason’s Matt Welch gives a nice rundown on the tortured logic used by leading neo-con¹ mouthpieces to maintain a failed policy of “isolation” that gives the Castro regime a reason to exist, and to torture. For the most part, the Republican Gang of Fifty rely on mere vituperation, with heavy—very heavy—repetition of the “A word”—“A” as in appeasement. Props, of a sort, to Sen. Marco Rubio for actually trying to refute an argument in favor of restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba. As Rubio puts it, “The entire policy shift is based on the illusion—in fact, on the lie—that more commerce and access to money and goods will translate to political freedom for the Cuban people. Cuba already enjoys access to commerce, money and goods from other nations, and yet the Cuban people are still not free.”

But the U.S. is not just another country. We are still the largest economy in the world, pretty much, with 300 million odd people, many of whom like to take tropical vacations, and, as you may remember, we’re only 90 miles away. The Castro regime is a corpse that wants to lie down, that wants to see a revived, prosperous, and even free Cuba. The Marxist Cuban dream, a dream of absolute power and absolute revenge against the United States, is over. But the neo-cons are afraid to let it die. Like the far more odious regime in North Korea, they need enemies to exist.

Afterwords
Additional props—real ones, this time—to Sen. Rand Paul for explicitly contradicting Rubio and the rest of the “war forever” tribe. The arguments in favor of diplomatic recognition of Cuba, and ending the embargo, which only Congress can do, are so crushing—invigorating the economies of both Cuba and the U.S., freeing the Cubans from self-willed Marxist poverty, not to mention improved relations with all of Latin America, and in fact, with most of our traditional allies, who have always felt we acted like idiots over Castro—that the real basis for Republican opposition stands naked for all to see. They oppose diplomatic recognition of Cuba because it makes Obama look good. The Castros are irritants, but Barack Obama is the devil incarnate.