Since everything has to be ridiculously politicized, it’s natural that it’s going to be impossible to get a hearing, let alone a confirmation, for President Obama’s nominee to be Ambassador to Cuba. Jeffrey DeLaurentis is already doing the job, albeit with the lower rank of “Chargé d’affaires ad interim.” He’s been our top State Department official in Havana since the president normalized relations with Cuba last year. It makes sense to give him the more appropriate rank and title of ambassador.
Commercial flights to Cuba began in August. The policy is not going to be reversed, and certainly not by a casino magnate like Donald Trump. Mobbed-up gaming industrialists have been looking to get back to Havana since Meyer Lansky was in his fifties. Hell, the Kennedys even enlisted Sam Giancana, John Roselli and Santo Trafficante Jr. to assassinate Castro. They wanted their casino hotels back, and they wanted access to the Cuban market.
Even if you disagree with the decision to end a policy of isolating Cuba that had benefited no one for more than half a century, refusing to vote on an ambassador is just petulance.
Republicans, such as Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.), have vowed to block anyone Obama nominates as ambassador.
It’s an effort to rebuke Obama’s decision to reopen ties with Cuba, a move they believe rewards the communist island nation, which still commits human-rights abuses against its citizens.
“A U.S. ambassador is not going to influence the Cuban government, which is a dictatorial, closed regime,” Rubio, a Cuban-American, said in a July interview.
I have to wonder why we have ambassadors in any countries that have dictatorships or monarchial ruling families or that fail in some way to live up to our ideal of openness. Do these countries listen to our ambassadors? Do our ambassadors have any influence over the House of Saud or Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo in Equatorial Guinea?
Equatorial Guinea’s relations with the United States entered a cooling phase in 1993, when Ambassador John E. Bennett was accused of practicing witchcraft at the graves of 10 British airmen who were killed when their plane crashed there during World War II. Bennett left after receiving a death threat at the U.S. Embassy in Malabo in 1994. In his farewell address, he publicly named the government’s most notorious torturers, including Equatorial Guinea’s then-current Minister of National Security, Manuel Nguema Mba. No new envoy was appointed, and the embassy was closed in 1996, leaving its affairs to be handled by the embassy in neighboring Cameroon.
Our ambassador returned to Malabo in 2006 and we completed a new embassy complex there in 2013. Was that a “reward,” too? Perhaps it was a reward to U.S. oil firms or some kind of quid pro quo for providing assistance in Bush’s “Global War on Terror.” It’s amazing what lobbyists can do to humanize even the most brutal of regimes.
When it’s convenient or in some strategic or economic interest, we ally ourselves with despots with far more terrifying human rights records than the one compiled by the Castro brothers. And, except in the most extreme cases, we maintain diplomatic relations even with our enemies.
Here’s what the White House says:
Deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes disagreed in an interview with Yahoo News, which first reported the nomination.
“To us, the concept that it’s a reward for a country to have an ambassador makes no sense,” Rhodes said. “On the contrary, having an ambassador gives you a higher profile, a higher-ranked advocate for what America cares about.”
That’s inarguable, but this isn’t even a debate about whether or not to have an ambassador. It’s a debate about whether to call our top diplomat in Havana an ambassador and provide him with the rank, title, prestige and (perhaps) pay that he deserves.
Once again, however, common sense will be held hostage to political pandering and posturing.
The opponents of this nomination are, with a small handful of exceptions, all Republicans. They know this isn’t a reward to Cuba. They just don’t want to cooperate with our president or in any way ratify his decision to open up our relationship to Cuba. And they want to keep their cred with the dead-ender anti-Castro lobby. So, just as with Merrick Garland, the nomination of Jeffrey DeLaurentis will be ignored.
They’re all just petulant obstructive assholes. Get ready for more of the same x 1million when Clinton wins the election.
One really has to wonder if the Republican Party will ever again take a role in the normal functions of our government. I am guessing they figure they will just bide their time until they can hold all three branches, and then they can pour gasoline over the whole thing and light it on fire.
I am just fucking sick and tired of the whole thing.
Don’t worry. As soon as the Repub Congress gets a Repub prez, they will take a very big role. And they sure as hell won’t let the Olde Tyme filibuster get in the way.
Should their boy be an imbecilic naif like Trump, he won’t even know what he’s enacting!
This is the elephant in the room–the thing no one is mentioning. The American cows are blithely walking toward the slaughterhouse.
This is the elephant in the room–the thing no one is mentioning. The American cows are blithely walking toward the slaughterhouse.
Exactly. What came to mind to me was the oft used phrase around here, “waddling into the threshing blades”. It is amazing that we are this close to willfully electing a demagogue. And at least 40% of the people think it’s a really great thing.
When it comes down to it this is the reason I’m inclined to vote for HRC this election. The Republicans are committed to a radical agenda and its only a matter of time until they control the Presidency again.
Maybe some other countries should recall their ambassadors to the US because of our human rights abuses.
I wonder if at any point in election 2016 there is going to be some “conversation” about the braindead Repub Congress and the absolute governmental dysfunction it brings in its wake. With a Dem prez, its sole goal is paralysis, not governance. With a Repub prez its goal will be demolition of every piece of legislation passed since the New Deal and a rightwing extremist Supreme Court. Is that what the country actually pines for?
The sad fact is that our system of government simply has too many moving parts, is too obscure in its structure, for the American boob to understand. They do not know that voting for the prez does not mean his/her policies can/will be implemented. That in reality the Congress is the engine of the government and was clearly intended to be such by the Founders. That they have voted “for” divided government. If we were a serious nation with a serious media, coverage of federal elections would principally inform citizens about the actions and efforts of the Congress over the past 2 year–the prez election would be incidental.
And what do we really have? Voters who don’t know who represents them in Congress. An electorate that doesn’t know there are two house of Congress. That doesn’t know which party controls either house, or for how long. That can’t name a single Congressional leader. That can’t name a single piece of legislation passed in 20 years (except–maybe–“Obamacare”). That (supposedly) hates gridlock but has no ability to explain it. That cannot form a diagnosis of what the current problem is.
So pile this latest (absurdly silly) piece of Repub idiocy and childishness on the mountain of braindead shit they have pulled since 2010. 99% of voters won’t ever know about it. I suppose some percent might somehow “care” if they knew. HRC (I suppose) could begin each day with a selected “Repub Congress Obstruction of the Day”. And then ask the media each day why they refuse to mention her attempts to bring attention to the situation. And pigs may fly.
Repubo delenda est.
The chance that President HRC would begin each day in such high confrontational mode toward Congress strikes me as far less likely than that the media would run with it if she did. Sometimes you even might be forgiven for thinking that the Democratic Party itself doesn’t even know of the pivotal role Congress plays. Has the Senate axed the President’s veto yet?
I’m not talking about Prez Clinton, I’m talking about Candidate Clinton…
With the Braindead Repub Congress, Prez Clinton is total paralysis and Prez Trump is American annihilation. Those are the choices.
Repubo Delenda Est.
Candidate HRC is even less likely to do that than President Clinton. The notion would horrify her sense of political equilibrium.
This is an exaggeration:
Can’t wipe out Democratic collusion in dismantling New Deal legislation and the principles of that legislation. Can’t ignore that Democratic Party standard bearers don’t take the case — preserving New Deal legislation — to the public and voters. Obama’s “Grand Bargain” is an assault on a huge chunk of what little remains of the New Deal. If we’re honest, it was the obstructionism of the GOP that spared us from that “Grand Bargain.” So far.
But the GOP really wants that “Grand Bargain;” so, the zombie will rise again under an HRC administration, and given the high number of Republicans endorsing her and the near 100% of Congressional Democrats, odds are very good for its passage. Not that a Democratic obstructionist bloc to defeat such legislation under a Trump admin is very likely.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration, but maybe an underestimate because of what you say about the collusion of Democrats.
Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.”
― Coretta Scott King
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Again the highfalutin moralizing tone in combination with the ostentatious, attention-demanding occupation of superfluous space on the thread.
Yes, but how did another thread on a post about Republican obstruction became a Hillary-bashing thread?
Ask yourself why this keeps happening?
Are we now not allowed to respond to comments that raise an issue not directly related to your main post? If so, please articulate that rule and enforce it, including the off-topic bashing that you approve of.
Why use the GOP refusal to confirm an ambassador to Cuba as nothing but generic GOP obstructionism? When in this case it’s an obvious continuation of an almost sixty year old GOP kneejerk policy towards Cuba that rewards the GOP at the south FL ballot box. Not as highly rewarded as it once was but still an advantage for them. That’s just ordinary political gamesmanship. Not generally pretty nor honorable, but it’s a power that the Senate has and I’m sure that at least once in the past I’ve approved Democrats doing the same thing.
The issues not directly related to my posts are always about turning the conversation from the topic at hand to one that is either “both sides do it” or “look, over here, a chihuahua!”
And that’s when it’s not just outright trolling the thread with Clinton of Dem bashing.
one major obstacle, imo, to the voter in street’s capacity to analyze current politics, is the absence of discourse about “the polis” as it were, the public space in which we act politically; at least here on this blog we commenters should do better. for this reason i object to discussing candidate preference, candidate policy preference/ support/ whatever as Candidate X hate – here calling posters Hillary haters. reducing some informed analysis of our politics (with which one may disagree) to an interpersonal emotion is reductive inaccurate and shuts off discussion and contributes to the “usa voter ignorance” that ppl so love to complain about.
my 2 cents
Exactly, Booman. Your post had nothing to do with Hillary Clinton directly but commenters keep wanting to interject her into it in such a negative fashion. If comments like this reflect how a number of liberals and/or Democrats will be voting against HRC, then we are in danger of electing a demagogue.
Now that the GOP can feel the Presidency within its grasp, all who don’t want to see that happen have to GOTV for Hillary Clinton. If given control of all three branches the GOP, not Hillary Clinton, WILL destroy our American democracy as we know it.
Trump’s first political ad came on my TV tonight at the end of the CBS Evening news. All about creating jobs and making America great again. Wonder who paid for it?
The sheer amount of projection in this comment is fucking breathtaking.
I hope you’ve caught your breath. Clutch your pearls instead.
Wow, 2 for 2 on the projection comments.
Keep on keepin’ on, champ.
The cited comment places the entire onus on the GOP when in fact bi-partisanship has been fully operational since 1993. Thus, it’s an exaggeration.
OK. An exaggeration of the role Republicans have played when Democrats have been complicit. Is this what you mean?
The Grand Bargain is conceivable given her history, and the Dems have traditionally not shown the collective discipline of the Repubs (although they seem to be getting better as far as I can see). And there’s no doubt many Dems had come to be embarrassed by the great successes of the New Deal when visiting the boardrooms of our overlords, and also very desirous of the lovely corporate bribery their corrupt Repub colleagues receive by the carload.
But such a Bill Clinton scenario, given the 2016 platform and post-Sanderian zeitgeist, would (I think) destroy her. And any Dem that went along. But this may merely be wishful thinking.
How many former Democratic politicians and officials also sit in those boardrooms collecting fat sinecures or cash in as lobbyists? Close if not at parity these days.
The 2016 Democratic standard bearer began her career in one of those boardrooms. Appears to have been a good move for her and that corporation.
But how well organized the is the “post-Sanderian zeitgeist?” How much institutional power does it have? It seems to me the answers are: “negligible” and “almost none.” Come the next opportunity for some Grand Bargain you may hear muted barking from players like Sanders himself or Elizabeth Warren — but how much of a push-back can they mount, assuming they even desire to mount one?
Our best (only) hope is that Clinton wins the election in November but once that’s accomplished the much greater challenge is to prevent her and the people she’ll put into the policy-making positions of her administration from completing the job of discrediting the Democratic Party. Which would, as you say, destroy her — and it. And then, us.
You hit the nail squarely on its round head.
I think China (or any other sovereign nation) would be very surprised to learn that our ambassador has been “influencing” them.
Republican stupidity knows no bounds.
Rubio’s statement was quite Trumpian in content, just done with an inside-the-beltway tone.
what is the purpose of any ambassador except to try to influence the other country?
I guess I see an ambassador’s role a little differently, but let’s take your position that an ambassador’s job is to influence the host nation.
Rubio just said that out of all the despotic countries on this planet it would be a waste of our time to have an ambassador in Cuba.
Rubio is not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed. I think he actually believes some of the things he says.