President Trump’s surprise visit with North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un on last week, brought out the usual Democratic whiners. The Senate’s “whiner-in-chief” Chuck Schumer complained that “dictators seem to get elevated and people who believe in democracy do not.”
The complaint seems to be that President Trump’s meeting with Un doesn’t have the diplomatic gravitas to convince Un to give up his nuclear weapons plans. When President Trump stepped over the border as the first U.S. president to set foot in North Korea, Democrats claimed that it was all just a cheap photo op.
Then there was “Sleepy Joe” Biden’s spokesperson who accused Trump of coddling dictators at the expense of U.S. National Security.
And not to be outdone by her 2020 rival, Senator Amy Klobuchar who did not garner any more support following her performance in the first debate, quipped that diplomacy was “not as easy as just going and bringing a hot dish over the fence to the dictator next door.”
Senator Klobuchar’s “dictator next door” comment brought to mind ex-President Obama’s abortive attempts to normalize relations with Fidel and Raul Castro. During a joint press conference with Raul Castro, Obama succeeded not only in disrespecting the United States, but he also agreed with an outright smear perpetrated by Fidel’s demented brother, Raul.
A reporter asked Raul about Cuba’s miserable human rights record. Castro’s reply was to equate America’s denial of health care and education for all and equal pay for women as equivalent to jailing dissidents. Instead of exclaiming, “Say What?” Obama topped off his “apology tour” by responding to Raul’s smear, “I personally would not disagree with him.”
Then there was America’s worst ex-president, Jimmy Carter. Famous for world travel and bad-mouthing our country, Carter’s meddling during the Clinton presidency helped cause the current problems with North Korea. He befriended Kim’s father with an appeasement package that provided cover for the North Korean nuclear weapons program.
During President Reagan’s administration, Carter was in direct contact with Soviet government officials in an attempt to subvert Reagan’s anti-communist policies. When that didn’t work, and Soviet Communism came crashing down, Jimmy Carter’s Democrat pals gave the credit to Communist dictator Mikhail Gorbachev.
And no discussion of Democrat hypocrisy could be complete without mentioning the prominent left-wing senator and former mayor of Burlington, Vermont, “Crazy Bernie” Sanders. If Sanders somehow ends up on the debate stage with Donald Trump, it will be interesting to see how he defends his long record of supporting communist dictators.
Specifically, during the 1980s Bernie was vociferous in his denunciation of U.S. Central American policy. That defense was typically accompanied by an ardent defense of the left-wing dictatorship in Nicaragua. Bernie’s own sympathetic biographer wrote in 1991 that Sanders “probably has done more than any other elected politician in the country to actively support the Sandinistas and their revolution.”
Perversely, and despite the Sandinistas hatred of elections, their brutal suppression of dissent and overall rejection of basic democratic norms, younger Bernie believed that the Marxist-Leninist leaders had much to teach his beloved state of Vermont. Said Bernie, “Vermont could set an example to the rest of the nation similar to the type of example Nicaragua is setting for the rest of Latin America.”
Bernie included Communist Cuba in his fulsome praise of Latin American communists. He traveled to Cuba in 1989 on a trip organized by the Center for Cuban Studies, a New York-based pro-Castro group.
One Vermont journalist observed that Sanders “came back singing the praises of Fidel Castro.” Again, quoting Sanders, “I think there is tremendous ignorance in this country as to what is going on in Cuba. Yes, Cuba is a country with deficiencies, but has made enormous progress in improving the lives of poor people and working people.”
Bernie’s view of one-party rule in Cuba, “The people we met had an almost religious affection for [Fidel Castro].” Years earlier, Sanders said, “You know, not to say Fidel Castro and Cuba are perfect—they are certainly not—but just because Ronald Reagan dislikes these people does not mean to say the people in these nations feel the same.”
Bernie made no mention of the fact that Ronald Reagan was a product of a free election, something the average Cuban hasn’t experienced in over 60 years.
So, when it comes to coddling dictators, Democrats have no peers. Hypocrisy flourishes when memory fails, and the average democrat doesn’t even remember they were the party of slavery, Jim Crow, and the Ku Klux Klan. Psychiatrists call it transference, and its current form is the Trump derangement syndrome.
