This helps explain those countless boatloads of desperate refugees fleeing Florida for Cuba over the last several decades. Oh wait ...
Paleo-lib columnist Eleanor Clift was in fine fiddle on The McLaughlin Group yesterday and did not disappoint when the conversation turned to Cuba.
Clift served up what is arguably her most asinine observation since she claimed that Ambassador Chris Stevens wasn't murdered in the September 2012 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi because he died of smoke inhalation from fire set ablaze during the siege.
Fellow McLaughlin Group pundit Pat Buchanan wasted no time leveling Clift's inanity --
CLIFT: This is the soft landing for the end of the Castro regime. Nobody is quite sure what comes next, but this certainly does open up the opportunity for more small-d democratic principles to come into play.
BUCHANAN: That is true but let me say this. China, Nixon went to China and Mao continued with the madness of the Cultural Revolution and then the Chinese, what they did, they tried to open up, they brought in the investment, they bring in the capital, they bring in all the manufacturing and everything, and try to maintain a police state-dictatorship and they've maintained their dictatorship very, very well. This is what the Castro brothers are going to try to do. It's a very tough thing to do and they're of course much smaller and much closer.
CLIFT: And the rest of us are all going to be rushing to get to Cuba before it turns into Miami Beach, while it's still that unspoiled seemingly place, with the classic cars ...
BUCHANAN: You think Cuba under Castro is an unspoiled, wonderful paradise?
CLIFT (still fixated on the island's antiquated vehicles): Well, the classic cars from the 1950s and '60s. You know, people want to see Cuba as it is before it becomes more developed.
How awful indeed to contemplate that the socialist utopia of Cuba may come to resemble chic, cosmopolitan hellhole Miami Beach. The horror ...
In fairness to Clift, there are a fair number of like-minded liberals who'll want to visit Cuba before its unfortunate conversion to capitalism, for the same reason that many people enjoy the dinosaur exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History.
