By John Minnis
Legal News
If anything became clear following Election Day’s Republican rout, just two years following the Democrats’ “Yes, We Can” revolution under President Barack Obama, is that we have become such a divided people that we cannot agree on anything.
And even if we did agree we couldn’t allow it. For example, even if the new Republican majority came up with an idea that would cut taxes, put people back to work and reduce the deficit, the Democrats couldn’t go along. And vice versa.
The idea is that one party cannot let the other party succeed in anything. The only thing the other party can be allowed to get “credit” for is failure.
We cannot even agree on such universal givens as the environment, energy, health care, employment and the homeless.
But there is one exception: WAR. We can all agree on war.
It cannot be a pseudo war, like war on drugs, war on poverty, war on crime. There has to be military involvement. Troops have to be put in harms way. Our sons and daughters have to die. Now that is something we can all get behind.
We dare not object. After all, that would be anti-American and anti-troops.
Sure we have Afghanistan and Iraq and al Qaeda. But those were “Bush’s Wars.” President Obama needs his own war to unite the country behind him. In glancing around the world looking for likely targets, I suggest Cuba.
Think about it. Just like Iraq, Cuba is led by a dictator. As a socialist (maybe even COMMUNIST) nation, it can be considered an “evil empire.” Further, Cuba has allied itself with the devil himself, Hugo Chávez, the socialist president of Venezuela. Clearly, Cuba is a destabilizing influence on American values and presents a clear and present danger to U.S. interests.
True, Cuba doesn’t have weapons of mass destruction, but it once did. (Remember the Cuban Missile Crisis?) Besides, that hasn’t stopped us before.
True, the Cuban government has been accused of numerous human rights abuses, including torture, arbitrary imprisonment, unfair trials and extrajudicial executions, but that poses no problem for the United States or the Supreme Court. In fact, at Guantanamo, we’ve prefected it.
True, Cuba has a 100 percent literacy rate, universal health care, an infant death rate lower than some developed countries and is the only nation in the world that has a sustainable economy. But don’t worry, we can change all that.
Further, Cuba should rightfully belong to the United States. It should have been our 49th state following the Spanish-American War. In fact, in the Treaty of Paris, Spain ceded Cuba to the United States for free. (We had to pay for Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam.)
In a misguided moment of sentimentality, President Theodore Roosevelt granted Cuba independence. And look what’s happened since.
One dictator after another, and, horror or horrors, COMMUNISM. The Red Menace just 90 miles off the Florida coast! We should have invaded Cuba many times over.
Declaring war on Cuba would be a win-win for Democrats and Republicans alike. Already, 10 percent of Democratic voters are Hispanic. Florida, which has the highest concentration of Cubans outside of Cuba itself, just elected a Republican governor.
More than 1.2 million people of Cuban background — about 10 percent of the current population of Cuba — already live in the United States. That’s a huge voting block, not even counting sympathetic Hispanics from South American, Mexico and other Latin American countries.
Short of Cuba, the only other foreign nation available to Obama would be Alaska, but they don’t have great beaches!
As publisher William Randolph Heart said on the eve of the Spanish-American War, “You furnish the picture and I’ll furnish the war.”
