Obama's latest 'endorsement'

Tue, 05/27/2008 - 5:53pm

Jorge Rey/Getty Images

As the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Barack Obama may continue to suffer from, of all things, a likability problem. Two weeks after John McCain pounced on favorable remarks made by a Hamas spokesperson that seemed to identify Obama as the group's preferred candidate, the junior senator from Illinois received another endorsement of sorts, this time from Fidel Castro.

A Reuters story yesterday cited an op-ed written by the retired Cuban leader:

In one of his periodic newspaper columns published in Communist Party newspaper Granma, Castro said he had 'no personal rancor' toward Obama, but 'if I defended him I would do a huge favor for his adversaries.'

Castro went on to call Obama "a strong candidate" as well as "the most progressive candidate" from "the social and human points of view."

Although Castro was highly critical of Obama's plans to continue the 50-year-old embargo, it's a safe bet that the McCain camp was not altogether disappointed with Fidel's comments.

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Are bad people always wrong?

by grandpaw7 on Wed, 05/28/2008 - 9:26am

grandpaw: So Castro and Hamas favor Obama. Like the old saying goes, if Hitler said that two plus two is four, would that make it wrong? We can hardly blame Castro and Hamas for wanting to reduce the chances of another U.S. invasion. It would be odd indeed if they preferred that the U.S. have a president who wanted to get rid of them rather than talk to them.

About talking to them. We may find that doing that comes to nothing, in which case we will have put into practice the universally accepted (except for Bush) doctrine of exhausting diplomatic possibilities before talking a violent approach, and in which case we will have much improved our standing in the eyes of our friends and made coalition-building easier to come by. But there is the possibility that such talks will produce beneficial results, a possibility that the Bush/McCain approach would make impossible. If that is the case, if Hamas and Cuba would be willing to give up something, then naturally they would prefer a president who is amenable to talking.

When we look at how wrong Bush/McCain were about how the Iraq war would turn out, we should be unwilling to put much stock in their prognostications about the usefulness of talks. Faced with certain defeat if the U.S. invaded, Saddam might well have been willing to admit to the fact that he had no WMDs if Bush had given him the prestige of taking directly to him. He might have seen life after that better than living in an underground hole.

Or talking to him might have produced nothing. Nothing, that is, except to show that we meant it when we said that we would exhaust diplomacy and nothing, that is, except to enhance rather than injure our standing among our friends, nothing, that is, except to enhance our ability to form a meaningful coalition rather than one made out of tinsel.