October 18, 2007
And speaking of fawning reporters toadying to tyrants
Segueing from the previous post, Jay Nordlinger notes a disgusting bit of Castro ass-kissing, masquerading as quality reportage.
Anita Snow of the AP has filed another of her reports from Havana. And in this one, we learn that Castro appeared on the radio with Hugo Chávez, “sounding lucid and in good humor.”
Isn’t it nice when Castro sounds lucid and in good humor? That was nice about Stalin, too. Remember the words of Joseph Davies, our idiot ambassador: Stalin was “a man upon whose knee a child would like to sit.” No doubt.
Anyway, Ms. Snow tells us that, in a meeting shortly before the radio appearance, Chávez “sang revolutionary hymns to Castro.” He also called him “father of all revolutionaries.” In addition, he called him, “Our father, who is in the water, earth, and air.”
Most strikingly, Ms. Snow tells us that Chávez gave Castro a painting “he said he made while imprisoned in the early 1990s after leading a failed coup. The dark-colored painting showed the bars of his cell and a night scene beyond, with a full red moon and a guard tower in the distance.”
That is really cool. I wonder whether Anita Snow could ever consider meeting and writing about Castro’s many, many political prisoners. Perhaps one or two of them even have artistic talent.
But then that would require the press to acknowledge that Castro's prisons are filled with men and women who have dared to speak truth to power -- real power, malignant power -- and paid the price.
And when forced to see what happens to those who dare to defy a real dictator, American reporters and their fellow travelers would be hard-pressed to maintain the fiction that dissent of any kind has been stifled by the Right during the eight years of the Bush Administration.
Talk about an inconvenient truth.
Posted by Mike Lief at October 18, 2007 09:13 PM
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