All the conjecture and today’s meeting reminded me of Truthteller’s excellent piece on March 22, “Chávez Calls Obama an ‘Ignoramus’,” which we’re reprinting for your amusement:

No Quarter is a loose but raucous chorus of discordant voices. Some of us are centrists, others are hawkish Democrats, some view themselves as reformers, a few are resolutely independent and others are unabashed Leftists. Consider me one of the latter. In this essay I will not criticize Chávez, and I will not repeat all the threadbare rhetorical bludgeons such as socialist, communist, totalitarian or dictatorial many use to dismiss Chávez and his democratically elected government. If that is what you are seeking, I recommend you take your dossier and go somewhere else.

But at least consider this before you rush for the exit: the candidate who claimed “negotiations without preconditions” would yield amicable and cooperative relations with Iran, Cuba and Venezuela has literally had his Ferragamo shoe shoved squarely in his programmed mouth by Hugo Chávez. I quote Reuters:

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez said on Sunday his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama was at best an “ignoramus” for saying the socialist leader exported terrorism and obstructed progress in Latin America.

“He goes and accuses me of exporting terrorism: the least I can say is that he’s a poor ignoramus; he should read and study a little to understand reality,” said Chavez, who heads a group of left-wing Latin American leaders opposed to the U.S. influence in the region.

Negotiations with Chávez and the Leftist Latin American coalition are now foreclosed as a result of Obama’s garrulity and glibness. How else would one expect a country to react if one claims its largest export is terrorism? Here is one effect:

Chavez said Obama’s comments had made him change his mind about sending a new ambassador to Washington, after he withdrew the previous envoy in a dispute last year with the Bush administration in which he also expelled the U.S. ambassador to Venezuela.

Obama really is the Democratic incarnation of Bush: so much for change, and so much for meaningful negotiations. Not only are our relations with our neighbors Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Paraguay, El Salvador and Brazil strained; the Mexican government has raised tariffs on our exports, and we are the subject of much ridicule in the British press.

Venezuela, many of you may recall, is an ally of Iran, and Chávez will visit that and other countries in the Middle East in a few days for a summit of leaders from South American and Arab countries. Iran just rebuffed Obama’s recent attempt at negotiations with television and teleprompter, dismissing the staged spectacle as so many “slogans.” Democrats in the US may be duped by Obama’s empty rhetoric, media simulations and other mass ornaments, but true Leftists are always ones to lift the hood and investigate the true operations of the apparatus power utilizes against them. Unlike Andrew Sullivan, they are not mesmerized by brands and “faces;” they need a bit more than just images and surfaces. No wonder why Chávez calls Obama an “ignoramus.” I imagine he thinks that term also applies to all of Obama’s easily duped supporters.

What can one expect now that Obama has alienated Iran, Venezuela and all their allies in the Middle East and South and Central America? Oil prices will rise, trade agreements will become increasingly strained, tariffs on exports will probably increase, the price of imports will increase, and all the populist movements in countries wherein impoverished citizens are demanding something that resembles a suitable standard of living will be hostile instead of receptive to the United States’s particular version of democracy and global unity. With our economy spiraling into bankruptcy this can only engender more problems abroad, especially if our European allies feel we are exacerbating the distrust many countries have for what can broadly be defined as the West. Here is Russia admonishing the US in the wake of Obama’s failed attempt to engage Iran:

Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said there was no proof that Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon and urged the West to respect and reach out to the Islamic republic.

While I opposed Obama during the primaries for his lack of an ideological compass and his lack of a bold domestic agenda that would expand social services and thereby provide more Americans with equal access to power and resources, I thought his foreign policy, however vaguely defined, however utterly naïve, however hopelessly optimistic, would enable the United States to marshall the energy generated by all the New Social Movements, populist upheavals and new articulations of ethnic identity occurring throughout the world and funnel it toward a global understanding wherein difference and empathy would be celebrated and cultivated. Instead, we have more of the strained relations that were aggravated under Bush. Chávez, who is the face of some Leftist and New Social Movements, views us as antagonists to be shunned, as colonizers to be ousted, as representatives of a late capitalist hegemony that for him and his followers is the latest iteration of enslavement to the West. Obama promised to change this perception with his “negotiations without preconditions,” but instead all he did was reinvigorate it.

That Obama and his staff are reproducing the errors of Bush does not surprise me. Hopefully Hillary will help Obama out of this latest problem he has created for us. After all, it takes a Clinton to clean the mess created by a Bush. And Obama, to be sure, is nothing more than the Democratic Party’s version of George W. Bush. Indeed, he is nothing more than an ignoramus.

Latin America policy uber diva Julia Sweig chaired a news-making gathering at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington yesterday morning. It was excellent, and the CFR has audio of the entire event here.

In response to a question I posed to Sweig’s panel, Obama administration Summit of the Americas point man Jeffrey Davidow fell back on droopy anachronisms while Foreign Policy magazine blogger and best-selling writer and geostrategic interpreter David Rothkopf hit the ball out of the park with his statement:

“US-Cuba policy is the Edsel of American foreign policy.”

The full line-up on Sweig’s panel included Jeffrey Davidow, White House Adviser for the Summit of the Americas and former US Ambassador to Mexico; Luis Alberto Moreno, President of the Inter-American Development Bank; and David J. Rothkopf, President and CEO, Garten Rothkopf and visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The Summit of the Americas, which President Obama is attending, will convene in Trinidad & Tobago from April 17-19.

After Davidow successfully avoided mentioning the word “Cuba” in his primary remarks on the Obama administration’s game plan for the Summit of the Americas, the former US Ambassador to Mexico finally offered in his penultimate exhale an acknowledgement that “Cuba might come up” in the meeting.

And then he finished stating that other “flamboyant personalities may ‘flambay’” — a clear nod to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

When I had a chance to pose a question, I pressed Davidow pretty hard on what he tried to avoid.

The exchange between Ambassador Davidow, David Rothkopf, and myself follows below.

What is interesting and disconcerting is that Barack Obama’s point guy on this upcoming Summit gave the unreconstructed, neoconservative-friendly, ideologically vapid, ‘unchastened by five decades of embargo failure’ answer to my question on Cuba.

Has Obama read the brief that his people are preparing for him on Cuba?

Davidow embraced one of the worst single editorials I have read in years in the Washington Post titled “Coddling Cuba.”

And Rothkopf did his part to say that on US-Cuba policy, the American position has no clothes — and has become completely illegitimate in the eyes of the world and undermines America’s own, parochial national interests.

Here is the exchange in full between Sweig, Davidow, Rothkopf, and myself:

Council on Foreign Relations – Washington, DC
April 9, 2009

Perspectives on the Fifth Summit of the Americas: Cooperation on Development, Energy, and the Environment

Speakers:
Jeffrey Davidow, White House Adviser for the Summit of the Americas
Luis Alberto Moreno, President, Inter-American Development Bank
David J. Rothkopf, President and CEO, Garten Rothkopf

Presider:
Julia E. Sweig, Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow for Latin America Studies and Director for Latin America Studies, Council on Foreign Relations

Partial Transcript of Q&A Exchange

STEVE CLEMONS, Director, American Strategy Program, New America Foundation and Publisher, The Washington Note

I would like to just start with what David Rothkopf said about the Cuban embargo, “the beginning of the end” and ask Ambassador Davidow if you would agree with David’s perspective on that, or perhaps his assertion.

It’s very odd right now when one looks at Senator Richard Lugar and his statements on Cuba that seem to be running politically left of the President. Brent Scowcroft has said recently that Cuba makes no sense at all as a foreign policy problem. Russia’s lack of patronage of Cuba has shown that we can’t starve Cuba.

So, part of the question is if Barack Obama is the change agent he said, is Cuba more than Cuba? Is it a place where the steps you take there are so symbolic that they can have echo effects geostrategically on other parts of the world?

Or are we leaving this in the same arena where Senator Martinez and others would like to have it which is we are going to create opportunities for a class of ethnic Americans but not look at the broader geostrategic equation?

JULIA SWEIG, Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow for Latin America Studies and Director for Latin America Studies, Council on Foreign Relations

Ambassador Davidow? It’s the “four letter word” – not Peru – that you are asked to address now.

AMBASSADOR JEFFREY DAVIDOW, White House Adviser for the Summit of the Americas

I will try to answer that question. . .

JULIA SWEIG, Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow for Latin America Studies and Director for Latin America Studies, Council on Foreign Relations

And other panelists can chime in . . .

AMBASSADOR JEFFREY DAVIDOW

Yes, why don’t they!

Look it’s obviously a highly contentious issue. From my perspective, a few points to make.

From my perspective, I think it would be unfortunate to lose the opportunity for this hemisphere, at the beginning of the Obama administration, to set down some guidelines and make some progress jointly by getting distracted by the Cuban issue.

Cuba is not an issue for discussion at the Summit if one reads the Summit declaration and the documents on all the past year of negotiation. However, having said that, and given what we are reading in the press, it is probable that it will come up in some way.

The one point that I would respond to in Steve’s question specifically is, “Is Cuba something larger than itself?” and the answer is ‘yes, it is’.

And I think that whatever the reasons have been in the 1960s for initiation of elements of our Cuban policy, the fact is in today’s Hemisphere, Cuba is the odd man out.

Keep in mind that this meeting in Trinidad is a meeting of 34 democratic states.

If we had been talking about a meeting of the hemisphere as little as twenty years ago, it would have been cast in a different light.

There has been a remarkable historical transformation in this hemisphere, and a laudable one, toward democratically elected governments.

We may have difficulty with some of the governments that have been democratically elected, of course, but this Summit is a reunion of countries and presidents, every one of which has been elected by their populations.

There is not one government represented at this Summit whose population would willingly accept the kind of restrictions on their civil, political and human rights that are commonplace in Cuba – and that remain commonplace.

So, I think as we talk about Cuba and talk about how we as a government deal with it and so forth, let’s keep in mind that it is something larger than itself, it is in a way a memory of that which existed in the past and a caution of what may exist in the future unless we are totally committed to the question of democracy, human rights and representation of people.

And lest you think, and I’m sure some of you do, that I am some sort of ideologue on this, take a look at the lead editorial in today’s Washington Post. Maybe you think they are a bunch of ideologues as well, but I think they say it much better than I do.

So, we have been struggling with Cuba as a nation for close to half a century and there is a real focus on what we should be doing, but to answer the question, it is an important place beyond a small island 90 miles off our shore

DAVID J. ROTHKOPF, President and CEO, Garten Rothkopf

If I may make a couple of brief comments on this- and I am unconstrained by affiliation with the United States government right now – so perhaps they will be in a slightly different direction.

The editorial in today’s Washington Post was absurd.

The position of the Florida contingent on this is Paleolithic.

The policy is indefensible on any grounds,

The reality is that Cuba may be special, but you have to ask yourself why it’s therefore easier to travel to or do business with the Stalinist, nuclear weapon-toting North Koreans, or whether it’s more comfortable for us to be totally economically integrated with the Saudi royal family and their depredations, or if we are concerned about human rights, why are we so integrated with and why are we the sole supporter of a government in Afghanistan that has just made rape in marriage legal and denies women the right to go outside without the approval of their husbands?

So this notion that some how democracy alone is the only criteria that we should use in defining the nature of relationship doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny whatsoever, and the reality is that only one country that has successfully been isolated by this fifty year embargo, and that is the United States of America.

Our [US-Cuba] policy dates back to the Edsel.

It is the Edsel of American foreign policy.

[END]

David Rothkopf is absolutely right.

Barack Obama has given few indications thus far that he is willing to move a five decade failed relationship forward in a meaningful sense — with the single exception that he may ironically codify “relaxation” for a class of ethnic Americans in a way that crudely discriminates against all other Americans.

We did not open Vietnam by relaxing travel and remittances for Vietnamese-Americans.

And Obama’s team — for all of the ballyhoo about democracy promotion — is promoting a policy of the United States government that restricts the American right of free travel anywhere.

I thought that we lived in a real democracy — and that it was supposed to be Communist governments — not democracies — that restricted the travel rights of their citizens.

President Obama is a busy man, but he better take a look at the brief that his team is preparing for him — otherwise he’ll learn too late that he’s driving “an Edsel” to the Summit of the Americas.

– Steve Clemons

Editor’s Note: Steve Clemons hosts a venerable blog, The Washington Note, is Senior Fellow & Director, American Strategy Program, New America Foundation and Director of the Japan Policy Research Institute.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid needs 60 votes to close the debate on the $410 billion dollar omnibus spending bill and bring it to a Senate vote. As of this morning, he is one vote short. A few moderate Republicans that Reid was counting on have yet to climb on board. The GOP has some amendments of their own they would like to add to this bill and are trying to leverage their votes to push their proposals through.

Reid may just have to give in to some Republican demands, thanks to a dissenting vote from his own caucus. Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, a member of the Democratic leadership is voting no and is downright pissed off.

His anger has nothing to do with the massive spending by a government already in unfathomable debt or even the 9,000 plus earmarks attached to this drunken Capitol Hill spending spree.

What infuriates Menendez is that when his legislative aides read through the legislation online, they discovered language that eases restrictions on travel to Cuba and importing Cuban goods. Menendez would be the first to admit that he holds a minority view when it comes to dealing with the Castro government. As the son of Cuban immigrants, he has always taken a hard line on Cuban policy. He undoubtedly knew that with the Obama administration in charge, a change in policy was coming, but the way this was handled really has him steamed.

Shailagh Murphy reports in the Washington Post that Menendez even held off support on some administration appointees in protest.

“The process by which these changes have been forced upon this body is so deeply offensive to me, and so deeply undemocratic, that it puts the omnibus appropriations package in jeopardy, in spite of all the other tremendously important funding that this bill would provide,” the enraged son of Cuban immigrants said last week on the Senate floor. Menendez even slapped a hold on a pair of Obama nominees to draw attention to the issue.

Treasury officials, working with Reid’s office, continued yesterday to search for an administrative resolution with Menendez that would ensure a narrow interpretation of the legislative language in order to prevent gaping loopholes from developing. Menendez has pointed out that, had the bill sought significant changes in U.S. policy toward Iran or Venezuela, lawmakers would revolt. “What’s the difference with Cuba?” said Menendez spokesman Afshin Mohamadi.

No doubt, that Reid at some point will wrangle that last vote and everyone on the hill will have their pork and eat it too. He will even find a way to pacify Menendez. Yet, this little incident is just another reminder of why our government is broken to begin with. The Cuban issue is important enough to deserve its own debate on the floor. In typical congressional fashion, it was tacked on to a bill that had nothing to do with the issue. Whoever, added it to the omnibus spending bill was probably figuring that Menendez and his staff would not actually read the whole thing until it was too late.

It’s amazing what happens when your legislators have time (or at least their staffs have time) to read what they are voting on. The Menendez staff probably was going through this bill because lawmakers are starting to feel the heat after the e-mails and phone calls from angry constituents following the stimulus vote. They never expected Cuban policy to be part of the legislation they were reviewing.

Whether or not, the Cuban policy needs change is not the issue. The issue is that it shouldn’t have been in this bill in the first place. So good for Bob Menendez. Make Harry go find his vote somewhere else. It will certainly cost him.

This vid was passed on to me. I enjoyed it and thought that some NQ readers might enjoy it too.

BTW Have you ever seen Sean Penn in an interview? If so, have you ever come across anyone who gives a more boring, humorless interview? i find it hard to think of anyone even coming close.

That said, I hear his portrayal of Harvey Milk in the movie “Milk” is terrific, so I guess he can’t be all bad. But I get so tired of these Hollywood pseudo-liberals and their political associates pontificating and running down America.

Sung to the tune of “The Way We Were”.

************************************

If the MSM had any difficulty, or even cared about, finding unrepentant domestic terrorist and Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers, or his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, during a week this past September, it was perhaps because they didn’t know where to look — or, most likely, weren’t looking.

The radical couple had made a little offshore visit to that four-letter island off Florida’s coast in the company of this lady, Chicago composer, flutist, and performance artist — and longtime Kenwood resident, a.k.a. Obama neighbor, and supporter — Janice Misurell-Mitchell, Co-Artistic Director of CUBE Contemporary Chamber Ensemble in Chicago since 1989, and wife of University of Chicago English and Art History professor W.J.T. Mitchell, also an Obama supporter.

How do we know? Well, thanks to sharp-eyed RBO reader jr, we have the Winter 2008 CUBE Ensemble newsletter that says so.

So, how did the Ayers-Dohrn “political activists” manage to travel to Cuba? Looks like they may have qualified as “full-time professionals“:

Full-time professionals whose travel transactions are directly related to professional research in their professional areas, provided that their research:

(1) is of a noncommercial academic nature, (2) comprises a full work schedule in Cuba, and (3) has a substantial likelihood of public dissemination.

Full-time professionals whose travel transactions are directly related to attendance at professional meetings or conferences in Cuba organized by an international professional organization, institution, or association that regularly sponsors such meetings or conferences in other countries. The organization, institution, or association sponsoring the meeting or conference may not be headquartered in the United States unless it is specifically licensed to sponsor the meeting. The purpose of the meeting or conference cannot be the promotion of tourism in Cuba or other commercial activities involving Cuba, or to foster production of any biotechnological products.

Venceremos Brigade-Weatherman

This must have been a highly nostalgic walk down the international revolutionary “memory lane” for Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

The following, which comes from an August 1976 redacted FBI report, provides a clear background. When, in July 1969, Vietnamese representatives met with “leading Weatherpeople” (including Dohrn) in Havana, Cuba,

… the influence of Vietnamese representatives on the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) leadership became sharply pronounced. At the same time, the example of the Cuban revolution became the guide for the emerging American student revolutionary. With an increasing number of trips to Havana where the youthful revolutionary could learn at first hand how to create revolution, the influence of Cuba on the developing WUO was enormous.

The WUO obtained their revolutionary methodology from the Cubans and Vietnamese and, importantly, put into practice what they had learned from them. [...]

So, when Huynh Van Ba, representative of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Vietnam (PRG), instructed WUO to “look for the person who fights hardest against cops…Don’t look for the one who says the best thing. Look for the one who fights,” the campus base was forgotten and the WUO began to recruit the greasers and assorted oddments who had displayed their hatred of authority in direct combat with police.”

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It seems it takes a Canadian reporter, Alan Abel, to go to Florida to talk to the community. He joined them in a banquet hall, in a Cuban Restaurant. He tells his story in an article, Cuban-Americans sticking by McCain. He sets the scene with descriptions of the meeting place and the number of people in the hall. Abel took a hand count of the number of McCain supporters vs. the number of Obama supporters, 50 for McCain and 2 for Obama.

Abel puts a name and a face on the patrons in the hall:

It is a reunion of a group that calls itself the Municipal Council of the City of Santiago de Cuba in Exile. Santiago is where Fidel and Raúl Castro and 160 other upstarts wearing stolen military uniforms began their revolution on el 26 de Julio, 1953. Almost all the insurgents were killed or captured as they attempted to overrun an army base at six o’clock in the morning. The Castro brothers escaped to the high sierra, only to be surrounded, arrested, tried, convicted, condemned to death, reprieved, imprisoned, pardoned, and freed by the same Cuban government they soon would overthrow.

He captures the conversations of the Cuban exiles in their own words. They talk about Raul (Castro). Here is what they said:

“Did you hear what Raúl said last night in Santiago?” an architect and contractor named José Gonzáles barks at me. The Cuban leader had chosen the scene of the rebels’ original assault for a major policy address and the annual festival of Socialism or Death.

“He said, ‘Compañeros, I have bad news for you – we all must sacrifice even more,’ ” Mr. Gonzáles reports. “Well, that is exactly the same thing that Obama says!

“The left only wants to bring you down,” Mr. Gonzáles announces. “Obama doesn’t want to make everybody rich. When he talks about ‘equality,’ he means that everybody should be equally poor, not equally up.”

Interesting that the Cuban Americans draw such a stark comparison between Obama and Castro. Obama says he will meet with Raul Castro, unconditionally, in a May 23, 2008 speech.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This group of exiles wasn’t finished with Obama yet. This is one man’s view on Obama’s hope:

“We don’t need that kind of change,” another man named Felipe Fontanills agrees. “Fidel Castro achieved that already!”

Abel captured more opinions on Obama from these exiles. Again they are very telling words.

Señor Fontanills, another successful Miami architect, is just getting started.

“Read Fidel Castro’s speeches!” he commands me. “He is a much better speaker than Obama. In Germany, Obama was talking about the ‘unity of the world.’ This idea that we’re all equal, it’s bull—t – you cannot accomplish that.

Senor Fontanills had this to say about Obama’s words in Germany, offering a bit of advice even.

“Only a religious leader should use those words, because we are all equal in the sight of God. But in every human society, there is a nucleus of leaders who move the society forward. The promise of equality is a false promise. It is manipulation of human opinion!”

Mr. Abel asked the people gathered in this hall why they liked McCain and not Obama. It seems our Cuban American friends have a strong opinion on the candidates.

“Why do you like John McCain?” I ask the Cubans.

“When you have two pieces of

s–t,” one of them replies, “you pick up the one that stinks the least.”

In essence they are picking the lesser of two evils. It made me a take pause, I wonder if Hillary was their true choice. But possibly not as one Cuban American woman had this to say:

“When you come over here, it’s like the other Cubans force you to be Republican,” she says. “It’s still because of Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs.”

That was el 17 de Abril, 1961 – the botched liberation of the island by four boatloads of anti-Castro fighters. The young president John F. Kennedy had denied the invaders American air support on the grounds of “plausible deniability.”

In the end the talk turned to Obama’s lack of qualifications. They listed them as “too inexperienced, weak and young”. On McCain, they grudgingly accept him as the only other choice.

They leave with a question. A question that many have been asking for sometime now.

“For such a large country, can these really be the only two men for president?” Mr. Gonzáles wonders.