I know a lot of you are mad at Marco Rubio over immigration. Do yourself a favor. Leave that aside for a moment - actually for about 14 minutes - and watch this.
Leftist Sen. Tom Harkin recently returned from Havana with the usual fawning praise liberals offer because everyone has health care, blah blah blah. Rubio, who grew up in Miami surrounded by Cuban exiles, wasn't about to stand for it. Taking to the floor, Rubio laid the smack to Harkin and every other liberal who waxes happily over the utopian wonder of the worker's paradise - as well as the connection to the oppressive violence happening in Venezuela right now.
Pop popcorn and enjoy:
Harkin spent a week in Cuba and returned touting the communists' entirely self-reported "success" at reducing infant mortality. He did not overtly push for us to adopt Cuba's system, but tried to used the infant morality nonsense to argue that all things turn out better when government takes the reins. Rubio reminds him that these "results" are offered entirely on the government's word, and that this is the same government that is so committed to full and accurate information that it doesn't allow its subjects access to the Internet.
And if you've failed until now to recognize the connection between oppression in Cuba and violence in Venezuela, you won't anymore.
This is a story that's been around for awhile. Old-time leftists like Harkin have forever been making pilgrimages to communist countries and coming back with wondrous stories from the worker's paradise, accompanied by pleas: Why, if government can do it there . . .
All this is of course designed to justify the encroachment of government in Washington into more and more aspects of our lives. Rubio makes a fairly obvious observation: If you're going to use Cuba to justify what you want to do in America, you should explore the true nature of life under the Cuban regime - as well as its copycat regime in Venezuela - in all its fullness. And once you do, the only thing you want to do in response is to start dismantling big government here before it has any chance to turn into what Rubio described so well in Cuba and Venezuela.
