Sanders' Travels to Totalitarian Regimes Haunt His Campaign

Sanders in Russia.

In addition to, in my view, an over weaning ego, Bernie Sanders shares another trait with Donald Trump: he never admits that he is wrong or that there are other legitimate perspectives. In his recent 60 Minutes interview, Sanders had an opportunity to disavow his past flirtations with and laudatory comments about brutal communist regimes in Russia, Cuba and Nicaragua, but, being Sanders, he did not do so.  Now, his opponents for the Democrat primary are focusing on this aspect of Sanders past that could prove radioactive in a general election - especially in crucial Mid-West states - and which the Trump campaign will laser focus upon.  To me it is yet another reason that a Sanders nomination could see Trump, even hated as he is by so many, being reelected and the nation sliding more and more toward fascism - something Sanders and his base claim to oppose.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this very damaging baggage that Sanders carries.  Here are article highlights:

The mayor of tiny Burlington, Vt., was back from Nicaragua and eager to share the good news.

The country’s Soviet-backed government — forged via armed rebellion — was cutting infant mortality, reducing illiteracy and redistributing land to peasant farmers. Its Sandinista leaders, branded terrorists by the U.S. government, impressed him with “their intelligence and their sincerity.”

Three years later, Bernie Sanders was fresh off the plane from Moscow, reveling in the beauty of the land and the contentedness of the people.

And a year after that, he returned from Cuba having tapped into a revolutionary spirit “far deeper and more profound than I understood it to be.”

With Sanders now surging to the top of the Democratic presidential field, those three-decade-old impressions introduced a volatile new element in the race Monday as rivals reacted to Sanders’s decision to defend his remarks, not disclaim them.

Asked about his favorable reviews of Fidel Castro’s Cuba in a “60 Minutes” interview that aired on CBS on Sunday night, Sanders said the communist leader deserved criticism for “the authoritarian nature” of his government — as well as praise where it was due, including for “a massive literacy program.”

The comments offered instant fodder for opponents who had already been sharing the old clips and highlighted the risk to a candidate with a track record of sympathy for communist and socialist governments that is unlike any other recent Democratic nominee.

Rivals seized on the brand-new video to portray the senator from Vermont as naive — a possible preview of attack lines in Tuesday night’s debate and of the barrage Sanders is likely to endure in the general election if he makes it that far.

“Fidel Castro left a dark legacy of forced labor camps, religious repression, widespread poverty, firing squads, and the murder of thousands of his own people,” former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg tweeted. “But sure, Bernie, let’s talk about his literacy program.”

Former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg compared Sanders to President Trump, tweeting that after four years of giving dictators a pass, the United States needs “a president who will be extremely clear in standing against regimes that violate human rights abroad.”

Sanders has promised to remake the party in his far-left image as a “democratic socialist,” and he argues that his vision for a political revolution is best exemplified by thriving democratic, first-world societies like Denmark.

Yet in the 1980s, during the dying days of the Cold War, Sanders indulged a fascination with far more disruptive and divisive strains of a socialist ideology he has embraced throughout his adult life.

Returning home from visits to some of the United States’ most avowed enemies, Sanders offered some criticism but also plenty of praise in Vermont community television recordings.

Now, Sanders’s comments are coming back to life as opponents say his warm feelings toward his hosts decades ago make him vulnerable to attack and reveal a soft spot for left-wing despots.

“If people are going to vote for socialist candidate Bernie Sanders, they need to understand what socialism means historically. And it’s not Scandinavia,” said Marion Smith, executive director of the congressionally authorized Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Smith recently tweeted a clip from a 1988 news conference in which Sanders lauds the Soviet Union for its chandelier-filled transit stations and its “palaces of culture.” Smith demanded an apology for what went unmentioned.

“He turned a blind eye to what was known about the ongoing systematic human rights abuses, the suppression of religious and ethnic minorities, the jailing of dissidents,” Smith said. “He was very clearly joining the ranks of the useful idiots who believed in the propaganda of the Soviet Union and carried it to the West.”

Sanders’s infatuation with revolutionary left-wing movements, particularly those in Latin America, was long-standing, and it became a key feature of his first stint in elected office.

Sanders has recalled feeling “very excited” by Castro’s 1959 revolution, which played out during his teens. “It just seemed right and appropriate that poor people were rising up against rather ugly rich people,” he said in 1986.

Watching the video decades later, Latin America scholar Richard Feinberg said Sanders appeared to have had “a rather simplistic” view of the developing world, as well as an overly rosy assessment of Nicaragua’s leaders. But the reason for Sanders’s attraction, he said, was clear.

“In Nicaragua, he found his equivalents to his view of the United States . . . allegedly a small group of wealthy people at the top versus the struggling, noble poor,” said Feinberg, . . .

Trump and the GOP must be salivating at the prospect of a Sanders nomination.

America’s Credibility Abroad Is Gone

Traveling to France and the United Kingdom last September, the husband and I found that Americans are still much liked.  The same cannot be said for the Trump/Pence regime which is pretty much widely loathed and for good reason.  The buffoon in the White House - who in his extreme narcissism thinks himself a genius - has made it very obvious that longstanding treaties and alliances mean nothing. And that's not even factoring the Trump initiated trade wars that are harming American consumers who pay the tariffs in the form of higher prices - even as Trump lies to his moronic base and tells them the foreign nations are paying the tariffs.  The long term damage to America's interests will last for years even after Trump is gone from the White House with America's trustworthiness being questioned.  A piece in Slate looks at the damage done to date and how all of us will pay a price.  Here are article highlights: 

Remember Sen. Tom Cotton’s letter to Iran? These days, you can bet that the leaders of Iran do.

The letter, sent in March 2015, was one of those events that seemed like a major outrage at the time but now feels like such ancient history that the letter might as well have been written on parchment. At the height of the debate over the Obama administration’s nuclear diplomacy with Iran, the Arkansas senator organized a group of 47 Republican colleagues to send a letter to the “leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran” explaining “features of our Constitution … which you should consider seriously as negotiations progress.” Noting that any deal would be merely an “executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei” rather than a formal treaty ratified by Congress and that Barack Obama would be leaving office in January 2017, the letter warned that the next president would revoke it “with the stroke of a pen.”

[T]he thing is, Cotton was completely right: On May 8, 2018, Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the deal the Obama administration had negotiated and re-imposed sanctions lifted as part of it. Tensions between the two countries have been rising ever since.

The five other countries that were party to the deal and the European Union are still committed to it, as is Iran, but just barely. This week, Iranian nuclear officials announced that they had quadrupled the country’s uranium enrichment production, putting them on a path to exceed limits set by the accord.

If the Iranian regime stays in compliance with the deal, it may be only because they know Trump won’t be in office forever, either. Most of the Democratic candidates running for president in 2020 have promised to rejoin the Iran deal, which would entail lifting the sanctions that Trump has re-imposed. 

Waiting out the Trump administration is a popular idea these days. Susan Thornton, the former acting assistant secretary of state, told a gathering in Shanghai earlier this month that China should be patient amid the ongoing trade war and not rush to resolve it, telling the audience, “If this skeptical attitude towards talking diplomacy continues in this administration, you might have to wait till another administration.” The parties to the Paris climate agreement may also be somewhat heartened that every major Democratic candidate has pledged to keep the U.S. in the agreement. (The U.S. will technically still be a party to the Paris agreement until November 2020 at the earliest, despite Trump’s withdrawal announcement in 2017.)
 This isn’t a very encouraging state of affairs, and not only because there’s a decent chance Trump will be reelected in 2020. If it becomes the norm that agreements struck by a U.S. president will be kept only so long as that president’s party is in power, why would any country ever sign a deal with the U.S. ever again? If the entire disposition of U.S. foreign policy transforms depending on whether a Democrat or a Republican occupies the White House, it will have a destabilizing impact on international relations long after Trump leaves office.
 But presidents of both parties have, at the very least, shared a disposition toward international alliances and broad policy objectives that contrasts with domestic political divides.
 In today’s U.S. political climate, all issues are becoming culture war issues, and more and more official U.S. policies abroad are coming to resemble the Mexico City Policy—switches to be flipped on or off depending on which domestic constituency the party in power wants to appeal to.
 This dynamic has only been getting more acute in recent years. The near impossibility of getting Republican support meant that Obama had to carry out most of his signature diplomatic achievements—the Iran deal, the Paris accord, the normalization of relations with Cuba—via executive action. That also meant those achievements could be undone by executive action.
 Meanwhile, Trump has pulled the U.S. out of negotiations for the planned Trans-Pacific Partnership and the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty with Russia. Even the Universal Postal Union hasn’t been safe.

Nearly all the Democratic presidential candidates, to the extent they discuss foreign policy at all, emphasize the importance of rebuilding international alliances. If any of them becomes president, he or she would probably work to rejoin many of the deals and institutions that Trump has pulled out of and reaffirm the U.S. commitment to those, notably NATO, that Trump has simply trashed. But it will be immeasurably more difficult for the next Democratic president to replicate even the limited diplomatic achievements of the Obama years. Why would the leader of any U.S. adversary want to repeat the experience of Iran or Cuba by spending political capital on a rapprochement with the U.S., only to see the offer humiliatingly rescinded by the next president?

The problem isn’t just treaties and agreements. The way Americans view the world, and other countries, is increasingly polarized. Polls show increasing divergences between the parties in views on Mexico, Iran, Russia, Germany, Canada, and other countries. Iran may not be particularly popular on either side of the aisle, but prominent voices on Democratic foreign policy, including Sanders’ foreign policy adviser, have been arguing that Saudi Arabia is viewed as worse. Whether you think the Iranians or the Saudis are a bigger threat to human rights and regional stability may soon become an indicator of partisan loyalty.
 Countries may never be entirely neutral topics in each other’s partisan politics—the U.S. certainly hasn’t always been. But at least the ideal state of affairs is that they’re willing to conduct business with whatever party is in power. And that only works if there’s at least a certain level of continuity in foreign policy outlook and strategic goals as well as a baseline willingness to honor agreements signed by the previous administration, even if the new one doesn’t like them very much. If current trends continue, America’s partisan divide will continue to widen, and foreign policy questions will increasingly be treated as culture war fights between the parties.
 If future presidents share Trump’s disdain for international institutions and agreements, the credibility of U.S. foreign policy stances will suffer. And if these partisan swings become predicable—in other words, if countries know in advance that certain U.S. policies and agreements only apply when one party or another is in office—it will increase incentives for foreign powers to try to influence and meddle in U.S. elections. What’s a few cyberattacks or Facebook ad buys when the entire foreign policy outlook of the most powerful country is at stake?

Americans are increasingly living in two different countries at home. Soon we may be treated as two different countries abroad as well.

How Donald Trump Violated the U.S. Embargo Against Cuba

Donald Trump likes to talk about "crooked Hillary," but given the Trump University scam, Trump's use of his foundation as a personal piggy bank, and Trump's six bankruptcies and screwing over of contractors, Trump is the one who looks crooked.  Now, on top of all of this, Newsweek is reporting that Trump violated the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba.  Admittedly, the dollar amounts are not huger - at least for someone like Trump.  But what I find so disturbing is Trump's attitude.  Like his Christofascist supporters, Trump obviously thinks that he is above the laws that apply to the rest of America.  Here are excerpts from the Newsweek piece:

A company controlled by Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, secretly conducted business in Communist Cuba during Fidel Castro’s presidency despite strict American trade bans that made such undertakings illegal, according to interviews with former Trump executives, internal company records and court filings.

Documents show that the Trump company spent a minimum of $68,000 for its 1998 foray into Cuba at a time when the corporate expenditure of even a penny in the Caribbean country was prohibited without U.S. government approval. But the company did not spend the money directly. Instead, with Trump’s knowledge, executives funneled the cash for the Cuba trip through an American consulting firm called Seven Arrows Investment and Development Corp. Once the business consultants traveled to the island and incurred the expenses for the venture, Seven Arrows instructed senior officers with Trump’s company—then called Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts—how to make it appear legal by linking it after the fact to a charitable effort.

The payment by Trump Hotels came just before the New York business mogul launched his first bid for the White House, seeking the nomination of the Reform Party. On his first day of the campaign, he traveled to Miami, where he spoke to a group of Cuban-Americans, a critical voting bloc in the swing state. Trump vowed to maintain the embargo and never spend his or his companies’ money in Cuba until Fidel Castro was removed from power.

He did not disclose that, seven months earlier, Trump Hotels already had reimbursed its consultants for the money they spent on their secret business trip to Havana.

 Without obtaining a license from the federal Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) before the consultants went to Cuba, the undertaking by Trump Hotels would have been in violation of federal law, trade experts say.

Officials with the Trump campaign and the Trump Organization did not respond to emails seeking comment on the Cuba trip, further documentation about the endeavor or an interview with Trump. Richard Fields, who was then the principal in charge of Seven Arrows, did not return calls seeking comment.

In that statement, Conway has acknowledged that Trump broke the law. Paying the money for the business trip and meetings in Cuba – regardless of whether it resulted in an additional investment or casino deal – would directly violate the law. 

[O]ne OFAC official, who agreed to discuss approval procedures if granted anonymity, says the probability that the office would grant a license for work on behalf of an American casino is “essentially zero.”

The goal of the Cuba trip, the former Trump executive says, was to give Trump’s company a foothold should Washington loosen or lift the trade restrictions. While in Cuba, the Trump representatives met with government officials, bankers and other business leaders to explore possible opportunities for the casino company. The former executive says Trump had participated in discussions about the Cuba trip and knew it had taken place. 

The fact that Seven Arrows spent the money and then received reimbursement from Trump Hotels does not mitigate any potential corporate liability for violating the Cuban embargo. . . . If OFAC discovered this and found there was evidence of willful misconduct, they could have made a referral to the Department of Justice.” 

Like the Communist regime, the company was struggling, having piled up losses for years. In 1998 alone, Trump Hotels lost $39.7 million, according to the company’s financial filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Its stock price had collapsed, falling almost 80 percent from a high that year of $12 a share to a low of just $2.75.

Though it has long been illegal for corporations to spend money in Cuba without proper authorization, there is no chance that Trump, the company or any of its executives will be prosecuted for wrongdoing. The statute of limitations ran out long ago, and legal analysts say OFAC’s enforcement division is understaffed, so the chances for an investigation were slim even at the time.

And perhaps that was the calculation behind the company’s decision to flout the law: the low risk of getting caught versus the high reward of lining up Cuban allies if the U.S. loosened or dropped the embargo. The only catch: What would happen if Trump’s Cuban-American supporters ever found out?

Quote of the Day - Pope Francis Meets Patriarch Kirill

I will admit that I am a total cynic when it comes to organized religion, especial denominations that proclaim to be following God's word even as their main fruits are hate and division.  The photo above, you see Pope Francis, the leader of an institution that disseminates anti-gay and anti-woman propaganda daily and still will not step up and protect children and youths from sexual abuse by priests, and the  Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, an institution that  likewise promotes anti-gay hate and whose history shows it nearly always siding with dictators and despots, a tradition alive and well today as the Russian Orthodox Church is firmly in bed with Vladimir Putin.  Blogger friend, Tony Adams, a one time priest stationed at the Vatican sums up a meeting of Francis and the Patriarch in Cuba exceedingly well:

Two costumed old men - the pope of the Roman Catholic Church and the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church - met in Cuba today to pretend to further the reunification of their churches, knowing full well that neither will give up his tiara. They got right down to business, signing a declaration that same-sex marriage is horrible. Stupid and silly old goats.

I continue to ponder how decent, moral individuals can support either church given their foul histories and the hate and division that they continue to foster.

Rafel Cruz - The GOP's Mythical Hero

If one wants to find where Ted Cruz gets is craziness from and how he has become so challenged when it comes to telling the truth, look no farther than his nut case father, Rafel Cruz, who has artfully re-written his personal history and happily allowed his son's lunatic and religious extremist followers to transform Rafel Cruz into an almost mythical figure.  While the Cruz campaign doesn't actively promote the myth, it does nothing to set the record straight, including making it clear that Cruz senior fought - if one can use the word - on the side of Castro and not against him.  The story line of Rafel Cruz is, in short, a lie.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the myth making effort.  Here are highlights:

Rafael Cruz has biography that seems made of Red-State American dreams: fleeing Cuba, coming to the United States, becoming a born-again Christian, falling hard for Reagan, and now trying to help his son, Ted, inspire an Evangelical resurgence in American politics.

It’s a compelling narrative, and it makes for a great Tea Party rally speech. Cruz was his son’s most beloved surrogate during the 2012 Texas Senate race, and the admiration he found from Tea Party crowds only grew.

But as Rafael Cruz’s star has risen, so have a multitude of myths about his life that Team Cruz doesn’t exactly discourage

[W]hile Rafael himself and the Cruz campaign haven’t (to our knowledge) publicly said anything inaccurate about his personal history, they have left uncorrected some tales that members of the media and prominent conservative activists have woven about Cruz the Elder -- including tales that are totally divorced from reality (and in some cases easily found on the Internet).

It’s unclear where the Rafael Cruz mythologies came from and how much they benefit his standing in the Evangelical community. But it’s clear that the myths are pernicious, and that they’re impactful.

One of the first and most galling falsehoods about Rafael Cruz’s past is the notion that he fought communism. He didn’t, but that hasn’t stopped some of his most vocal backers from repeating, in contravention of all fact, that he suffered under communism and took on Fidel Castro.

Cuba may have been a hellhole when Rafael Cruz was growing up there.  But there’s one thing it wasn’t: communist.

As Andy Kroll detailed in his National Journal profile of Rafael Cruz, the future senator’s father fought against the island nation’s dictator, General Fulgencio Batista. 

In reality, the Batista regime gave Rafael Cruz a student visa in 1957, which he used to travel to the U.S. Two years later, in 1959, Castro became prime minister of Cuba and the island nation became a communist country.

And when it comes to literal fighting in armed conflict, Rafael Cruz fought on only one side: Fidel’s. But this false implication that he was on the other side of history still finds its way into the first pages of his very own book. This isn’t the only instance of Cruz World overlooking misperceptions about Cruz the Elder’s Cuban background.

But that’s not the only persistent rumor. Multiple major publications have reported Rafael Cruz: that he pastors a church in the suburbs of Dallas. Except that he hasn’t. Ever.   

Rick Tyler, a spokesman for Cruz’s campaign, told the Daily Beast that these reports are all wrong, and that Rafael Cruz has never pastored any churches.  He is an ordained minister, Tyler said, but has never led a congregation.

Any relation to “Purifying Fire Ministries,” by the way, is another Cruz mythology. Tyler said Cruz initially branded his work preaching to pastors’ groups with that moniker, but ditched it when he realized that Suzanne Hinn -- wife of famous and sketchy televangelist Benny Hinn -- had a ministry with almost the identical name.

It’s an odd situation. And if his son’s rise continues at the rate it’s going, it could generate no dearth of confusion for people looking for the truth about the dad of the maybe-president.

Another Campaign Untruth: Ted Cruz’s Father’s Story of Fighting for Castro

Ted Cruz and Rafael Cruz- two consummate liars and nutcases

It increasing seems that being a shameless liar is a prerequisite to being a Republican presidential nominee contestant.  Either the candidates themselves are telling the lies or close family members are providing the false story lines.  Candidly, as the Christofascists have risen in power within the GOP, the level of lying and demagoguery has directly increased.  Now, Ted Cruz finds himself under fire for his father's fraudulent lies that have been woven into Cruz's own fairy tale narrative.  The older Cruz - who in my opinion belongs in an insane asylum - has made claims of "fighting for freedom" in Cuba as a young man.  The trouble is that many of the details he used to embellish his story simply are not true.  The New York Times looks at the truth about the elder Cruz's made up narrative.  Here are excerpts:

Since he was a boy, Senator Ted Cruz has said, all he wanted to do was “fight for liberty” — a yearning that he says was first kindled when he heard his father’s tales of fighting as a rebel leader in Cuba in the 1950s, throwing firebombs, running guns and surviving torture.

Those stories, retold by Mr. Cruz and by his father, Rafael, have hooked Republican audiences and given emotional power to the message that the Texas senator is pushing as a contender for the party’s presidential nomination. 

But the family narrative that has provided such inspirational fire to Mr. Cruz’s speeches, debate performances and a recently published memoir is, his father’s Cuban contemporaries say, an embroidered one.

The elder Mr. Cruz, 76, recalls a vivid moment at a watershed 1956 battle in Santiago de Cuba, when he was with a hero of the revolution, Frank País, just hours before he was killed in combat.  In fact, Mr. País was killed seven months later and in a different place and manner.

In interviews, Rafael Cruz’s former comrades and friends disputed his description of his role in the Cuban resistance. He was a teenager who wrote on walls and marched in the streets, they said — not a rebel leader running guns or blowing up buildings.

Leonor Arestuche, 79, a student leader in the ’50s whom the Castro government later hired to verify the supposed exploits of revolutionary veterans, said a term existed for people like Mr. Cruz — “ojalateros,” or wishful thinkers.   “People wishing and praying that Batista would fall,” she said, “but not doing much to act on it.”

There is no question that Rafael Cruz, who is now a pastor and his son’s most effective and popular campaign surrogate, was beaten in 1957 at the hands of agents for Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban dictator.

The reason Mr. Cruz was arrested, however, is less clear, and he has offered different explanations. In an interview alongside his son in March, Mr. Cruz said he had sought to recruit to the revolutionary cause someone who turned out to be an informant working for Batista’s regime. The 1959 account, though, did not mention any informant . . . . 

Mario Martínez, who Mr. Cruz confirmed was part of his small revolutionary cell, said he did not recall Mr. Cruz’s being apprehended for trying to recruit someone and said he believed that the cause of his old comrade’s detainment was possession of a revolver — one that Mr. Cruz had never used. 

[N]one of the Cuban historians, former comrades of Mr. Cruz in his hometown or veterans of the Santiago battle reached by The Times could corroborate his story. 

[V]eterans of the operation questioned Rafael Cruz’s account of his involvement.  Luís Clergé, who prides himself on knowing the names of the commandos he served with in the Nov. 30 operation, had no memory of Mr. Cruz.   Mr. Cruz’s name also drew blanks from Luís Solá Vila, a leader of the Federación Estudiantil Universitaria, a campus-based activist group in Santiago, and Luís Gálvez Taupier, a university leader who worked closely with the movement’s youth brigades, among others.

In his book “A Time for Truth,” published in June, Ted Cruz writes that the rebels who attacked the Santiago Police Headquarters met devastating resistance, and “All of the students were killed, as was their leader, Frank País.”

But of the scores of rebels who participated in the attack, only a few were killed, according to eyewitness accounts and historical documents.

It looks like Ben Carson is not the only GOP candidate challenged by truth and veracity.  Both Carson and Cruz are pushing narratives that play well with the idiots and Christofascists of the GOP regardless of whether or not they bear any semblance to reality.  Among most normal and honest people, this amounts to lying.  Deliberately lying.

Obama Meets Castro: GOP Goes Berserk

In most things today's Republican Party wants to believe that it is still the 1950's and/or is doing its best to roll back the clock by eroding civil rights, backing religious based oppression, and embracing ignorance.  This mindset extends, of course, to foreign policy where the GOP wants to maintain the Cold War and continue to isolate Cuba.  In contrast, Barack Obama understands the time and the world moves on and that policies must acknowledge a changed reality.  A case in point?  Obama met with Cuban President Raul Castro while attending the Summit of the Americas.  The GOP response?  Spittle flecked rants and the endorsement of policies rejected by two thirds of Americans.  The Washington Post looks at the GOP hysteria, especially among the GOP presidential candidate clown car.  Here are article highlights:

President Obama’s face-to-face meeting with Cuban President Raul Castro on Saturday angered Republican candidates vying to succeed him — and might help elevate an issue that so far hasn’t resonated widely among GOP primary voters.

Obama and Castro’s meeting lasted about an hour and focused mostly on the “practical” issues surrounding the reopening of respective embassies in both countries — including the ability of U.S. diplomats to move more freely around Cuba, according to administration officials who briefed reporters after the exchange.

A majority of Americans — and Cubans — support reestablishing diplomatic relations between the two countries and ending the decades-long economic embargo of the island nation. But Republicans controlling Congress have no plans to do so, citing Obama’s engagement with Cuba as an another example of his misguided foreign policy.

Presumed GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush, a longtime Miami resident, voiced his displeasure Saturday via Twitter: “Obama meets with Castro but refused to meet w/ [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu]. Why legitimize a cruel dictator of a repressive regime?”

The historic meeting in Panama came just two days before Obama’s most vocal Cuba critic, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), is set to launch his presidential campaign in Miami. The freshman senator and son of Cuban parents is seeking to cast his candidacy as an historic milestone for South Florida’s influential Cuban-American community.

But nearly two-thirds of Americans support establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba, according to a December Washington Post-ABC News poll. The survey also showed higher support for ending the trade embargo and lifting travel restrictions.

A poll of Cuban citizens released last week, commissioned by Univision, Fusion TV and The Washington Post, found that 97 percent believe that a better relationship with the United States would benefit Cuba. There was near-unanimous agreement that the economic embargo should end.

“Instead of lifting the embargo, I would argue that we should strengthen it to put pressure on the Cuban regime,” Bush said at an event held by the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC. He added that Cuba shouldn’t be able to attend the triennial Summit of the Americas unless it signs the Inter-American Democratic charter, a document signed by members of the Organization of American States reaffirming that democracy is the main form of government in the Western Hemisphere.

The one outlier among major GOP candidates is Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who gave qualified support to Obama’s new policy last December.  “The 50-year embargo just hasn’t worked,” he said in a radio interview at the time. “If the goal is regime change, it sure doesn’t seem to be working.”

The always foul Ted Cruz accused Obama of leaving the Cuban people imprisoned.  If any one is imprisoned its the GOP which is imprisoned in the past. 

Barack Obama - Operation Political Revenge

With the Christofascists/Tea Party loons still shrieking over Obamacare (which is successfully lowering the number of uninsured Americans), wailing over Obama's executive order on immigration and now traumatized by Obama's action on normalizing relations with Cuba, for a lame duck president, Barack Obama has certainly stirred the political pot and caused upheaval among his political enemies.  Frankly, it is fun to watch as the party of "No" ponders how to respond beyond merely stamping its collective feet and emitting plumes of spittle.  A piece in Politico looks at how Obama has turned the tables on his foes.  Here are excerpts:

It’s taken Obama – who spuriously predicted the 2012 election would break the “fever” of partisan gridlock – two miserable years to approach the level of presidential liberation he believes he earned that night. Yet there was always something slightly off about the idea that Obama would do better without a campaign in his future. The truth, according to current and former aides, is that the absence of a presidential election – the natural Obama habitat – actually contributed to the ennui and frustration that has hallmarked most of his second term.

Obama’s turnaround in recent weeks – he’s seized the offensive with a series of controversial executive actions and challenges to leaders in his own party on the budget — can be attributed to a fundamental change in his political mindset, according to current and former aides. He’s gone from thinking of himself as a sitting (lame) duck, they tell me, to a president diving headlong into what amounts to a final campaign – this one to preserve his legacy, add policy points to the scoreboard, and – last but definitely not least – to inflict the same kind of punishment on his newly empowered Republican enemies, who delighted in tormenting him when he was on top.

Obama, a political counterpuncher who often needs a slap in the face to wake up, got a gut-shot in November. The Democrats’ staggering loss in the midterms – like his disastrous performance in the first presidential debate against Mitt Romney in 2012 – seems to have jolted him to the realization that he’ll have to act boldly to preserve what he’d assumed was a settled legacy. (The Supreme Court’s decision to scrutinize the funding mechanism of the Affordable Care Act, in particular, has sent a shudder through the West Wing and provided an unexpected challenge from another hostile branch of government.)

[H]e can legitimately describe himself as an underdog. He feels at liberty to address any topic he chooses on his own terms — race, for instance — and, most importantly, he’s increasingly untethered from what he views as a petty, geriatric Democratic establishment he originally crusaded against as a presidential candidate in 2007.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says Obama’s newly aggressive stance – exemplified by his unilateral moves on immigration and Cuba – poses an early challenge to new Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and to House Speaker John Boehner, who are trying to re-shape the GOP into a party that can actually run a government. “Mitch and Boehner have to deal with the fact that Obama is becoming bolder and more radical,” Gingrich told me a few days before Obama announced his move to normalize relations with Cuba.

Obama says he’s just taking action to deal with fundamental problems that a gridlocked, hopelessly partisan Congress won’t address. His executive action on immigration and his Cuba move this week represent only the highest-profile unilateral steps he’s taken this year. Under the direction of White House Counselor John Podesta, a former Clinton chief of staff who has spurred the president to use executive power, Obama has issued dozens of orders and lower-profile memoranda redefining U.S. policies on emissions and wilderness area protections, created a new class of retirement accounts for low-income workers, capped student loan payments and toughened some firearms background checks.

But the truth of the matter is that Obama’s very good 2014 could turn into a check-mated 2015. The House isn’t likely to pass anything significant – or veto-proof – on immigration, but Republicans can, and likely will, block his Cuba policy by upholding the embargo and refusing to fund line items like the cost of building and staffing an embassy in Havana. “Congress is going to be a very different place than it was during the last few weeks if this year — there are still a lot of things that are on the president’s list that has go through Congress,” says former Obama Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. “The question for the White House is not ‘What?’ it’s ‘How?’ … There’s two lists: The list of things you have to convince others to do and the list of things you can do without other people. They are going through the last list first.”