Babaloo's Waterloos: Has There Been a Coup at Babalú?

Has there been a coup at Babalú blog? The long dormant or neutralized George Moneo has suddenly begun to blog furiously while the other editorialists are holding back (or being held back). George also has taken over The Babalu [Faux] Radio Hour and banished Henry from the show and even kept Val waiting on the phone for 15 minutes because he could. Is the monumental failure of BUCL's campaigns — which has brought so much discredit to Babalú that even its regular commenters have abandoned it in disgust — the reason that Henry has been shunted aside as Number 2?

Whatever his new role may be — the Raúl who subs for the ever ailing Val, whose hypochondria is one of the charms of Babalu? — George has taken over with a vengeance, relegating Cuba to the back of the bus while placing his Crusade Against Islamo-Fascism at the front alongside his Campaign to Canonize Ronald Reagan, the two passions of his warped life. When a commenter objected, and rightly so, that Reagan had done nothing for Cuba, Moneo roared back that Cuba did not matter in the great scheme of defeating Communism. This is what we have always suspected was Moneo's position. Cuba is a prop to him. Nothing he feels or loves.

Ronald Reagan, whom Moneo considers the greatest American president of his lifetime, did help to liberate the Western World from Communism, but appeared to forget that Cuba was also a part of the West. In fact, Reagan even sent General Vernon Waters to Cuba to talk detente with Castro and actually hoped to make Cuba his "China." As far as Cuba was concerned, Reagan was a complete accommodationist. He may not have been afraid of Gorbachev, but he was afraid of Castro. How ridiculous and inexplicable! All that Reagan did for us was to put frijoles negros on the White House menu and for this he is still idolized as a demigod by many of Más Canosa's crowd.

As he stated on The Babalu [Faux] Radio Hour yesterday, Moneo believes that "Jimmy Carter is the worst president of my lifetime and that's saying a lot considering we have Lyndon and Bubba [Clinton] to consider." George is 50 years old. His lifetime encompasses both Eisenhower, whose government handed Cuba over to Castro, and Kennedy, who betrayed the freedom fighters at the Bay of Pigs and codified that betrayal in the Kennedy-Khruschev Pact, wherein the U.S. agreed to act as the guarantor of Communism in Cuba (one treaty, at least, which the U.S. has kept even after ther implosion of the Soviet Union).

But, remember, George thinks and speaks as an American, not as a Cuban. George may well be the only Cuban his age who doesn't speak Spanish. This alone confirms how completely detached he is from his Cuban roots because this could not have been anything but a conscious choice on his part.

It is no secret to anyone that most Cubans consider JFK the worst U.S. president, not Jimmy Carter. As it happens, JFK's monumental ineptitude, which the Cuban crises gave him the chance to demonstrate in all its dimensions, makes Kennedy even a worse president than Warren G. Harding, who was corrupt (like Kennedy), dimwitted (like Kennedy), a satyr who turned the White House into a brothel (like Kennedy) but not ineffectual, nor an abettor of Communism, nor a threat to world peace.

Yes, John F. Kennedy was the worst American president as Cuban exiles were the first to see.

As for Jimmy Carter, he may have been a "horrible president," but he has been an even worse ex-president. As president, however, he admitted 125,000 Cuban refugeees into the U.S. within a matter of months without questioning their right to seek asylum here. What would Clinton have done with (or to) those 125,000? After he was booted from the presidency (for, among other reasons, giving the marielitos asylum), Carter became the marionette of Castro and every other America-hating despot, that is true. But his calamitous presidency will be judged by his tenure as president, not the prelude or the sequel to his presidency. All of Carter's good works with Habitat for Humanity will mean absolutely nothing in judging his presidential years, just as his shilling for despots after his presidency will not impact (how could it?) the fact that he was the second American president to be held hostage by a foreign government. The first, of course, was JFK, whom Nikita held more tightly by the balls than even the Ayatollah did Carter.

As for Lyndon B. Johnson, I recently posted a tribute to him on the occasion of Lady Bird's death in which I acknowledged the debt of gratitude that all Cubans owe him for opening the doors of liberty to us. I stated that LBJ was our Statue of Liberty, a man who understood the nature of Communism and who did not think that Cubans or the Vietnamese were unworthy of freedom. Moneo, who is free, like the rest of us, because of LBJ, reciprocated with a hate-filled post accusing Johnson of the usual "crimes" which appeasers and adherents of the Viet-Cong still level at him. For George, it doesn't matter that LBJ was the first U.S. president to make the Constitution protect all Americans regardless of color and the first to embrace the poor and marginalized and give them the tools (such as education grants) to improve their lot and realize the promise of America.

As for Bill Clinton, we are surprised that George also classes him among the worst American presidents of his lifetime since nothing that Clinton did can be said to be outside George's moral universe. In fact, at one time, George even supported the "Wet Foot/Dry Foot Policy," as did Val Prieto, as a means to exclude "undesirables" and even defended, as did Val Prieto, the Coast Guard's predations on the refugees.