http://townhall.com/
Ernest Hemingway with Fidel Castro in Cuba
Take Time Magazine (please!) no, seriously. Let’s use Time as an exemplar of the mainstream media. They’ve run seven stories on the “slaughter” (their term) of Cecil the Lion by Dr. Walter Palmer.
This same Time magazine hails Che Guevara as among its “Heroes and Icons of the Century” alongside Mahatma Gandhi, Anne Frank, Andrei Sakharov, Rosa Parks and Mother Theresa. “People who exemplify courage, selflessness, exuberance, superhuman ability and amazing grace,” is how Time defines its Heroes and Icons.
Che Guevara co-founded a murderous Stalinist regime, personally tortured and murdered political prisoners, lived in Cuba’s most luxurious mansion, help convert a prosperous nation into a third-word hellhole and snuck away from his only brush with genuine combat whimpering, “Don’t shoot! I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!” He’s a ringer for every standard set by Time, no? Moving on now….
Now let’s take Piers Morgan as an exemplar of sophisticated liberal punditry: "We would all take a bow and fire a few arrows into his (Dr Palmer’s) limbs to render him incapable of movement,” is how Piers Morgan’s begins his erotic fantasy regarding lion-hunter Dr James Palmer. “Then we’d calmly walk over, skin him alive, cut his head from his neck, and took a bunch of photos of us all grinning inanely at his quivering flesh."
This same Piers Morgan hailed Charlie Sheen as “the Che Guevara of television!" And lest anyone wonder what Morgan meant, he quickly added: “one of life's great characters.”
But let’s get away from this type of thing for a minute. Instead of the historically futilely exercise of trying to make liberals appreciate human life over animal life let’s stick –for the sake of this discussion--with the life liberals love to cheapen: human.
We search in utter, vain, for instance, for something like: “Don’t like lion hunting?—don’t hunt one.” From the same folks who give us: “Don’t like abortion—don’t have one.”
For this discussion let’s also overlook the merits of legal lion hunting, which your humble servant has discussed previously, and comprehensively.
Instead let’s compare apples to apples. Let’s endeavor to find consistency in liberals’ reactions to two humans who both killed lions for sport. Let’s compare liberal attitudes towards lion-hunter hunter Dr James Palmer to lion-hunter Ernest Hemingway, friend and admirer of both Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
When we do this, it appears that killing lions (and rhinos and leopards, etc.) for sport in fact does not besmirch your status as cool and hip. But to maintain your coolness and hipness, it appears extremely important that you --Dr Palmer, I offer this prescription free of charge: admire, befriend and promote communist mass-murderers. And by all means be public about your admiration for the communist mass-murderer.
It also helps enormously in the coolness department if you served as a full-fledged agent for Stalin’s KGB, as declassified Soviet documents confirmed about Ernest Hemingway, who in the early 1940’s was known as the KGB’s “Agent Argo.”
In fact, concurrent with the collective liberal apoplexy over Dr James Palmer’s lion “slaughter,” an immaculately liberal outfit based in Boston named the Finca Vigia Foundation (after the name of Hemingway’s mansion in Cuba) is earnestly raising money to restore and refurbish Ernest Hemingway’s mansion. This mansion features—as its main attraction--a huge trophy room festooned with lion rugs, lion heads and even lion skulls as bookends.
The Finca Vigia Foundation includes ultra-hip and ultra-liberal Jimmy Buffett (Margaritaville) and Rep. Jim Mc Govern (D- Ma., ACU rating 0%) on their board.
Needless to add, this restoration is in full collaboration with the Stalinist regime co-founded by Hemingway’s chums Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. The coffers of the Castro family and their military cronies, you see, are swelling nicely lately, partly owning to the wild popularity of Hemingway’s house for the millions upon millions upon millions (almost 3 million just last year) of tourists to Cuba.
650,000 of these visitors, btw, issued from the U.S. last year. Oh, I know, I know, in the mainstream media you keep reading about a U.S. “embargo” of Cuba. But in fact, Obama’s executive orders have already loopholed it half to death. In fact, for the past five years many more people have been visiting Stalinist, terror-sponsoring Cuba from the U.S. than visited in 1950’s when free Cuba was billed as a “tourist playground” for Americans.
"Castro's revolution," Hemingway wrote in 1960, “is very pure and beautiful. I'm encouraged by it. The Cuban people now have a decent chance for the first time." Hemingway lived in Cuba during the very period when Che Guevara was slaughtering (though Time never uses this word when frequently referring to Castro or Che’s rule ) hundreds of Cubans by firing squad. Guevara often coached his firing squads in person then rushed up to shatter the skull of the convulsed man (or boy) by lovingly firing the coup de grace himself.
Ernest Hemingway was a gleeful and boozy spectator to some of these massacres. Accounts of "Papa's” Hemingway’s presence at these massacres comes courtesy of Hemingway's own friend, the late George Plimpton (not exactly an “embittered right-wing Cuban exile”) who worked as editor of the Paris Review, (not exactly a "Mc Carthyite scandal sheet.")
In 1958 George Plimpton interviewed Hemingway in Cuba for one of the Paris Review’s most famous pieces. They became friends and the following year Hemingway again invited Plimpton down to his Finca Vigia just outside Havana. An editor at The Paris Review during the 1990’s named James Linnville, while relating how this high-brow publication passed on serializing the manuscript that became Che Guevara’s famous Motorcycle Diaries, reveals “Papa” Hemingway’s unwitting role in the rejection.
"James, I'm sorry." Linville recalls his boss George Plimpton replying. A sad look came over him, and he said, "Years ago, after we'd done the interview, Papa invited me down again to Cuba. It was right after the revolution. “There's something you should see,” Hemingway told Plimpton while preparing a shaker of drinks for the outing.
“They got in the car with a few others and drove some way out of town.” Continues Linville (who is recalling Plimpton’s account.) “They got out, set up chairs and took out the drinks, as if they were going to watch the sunset. Soon, a truck arrived. This, explained George, was what they'd been waiting for. It came, as Hemingway knew (italics mine), the same time each day. It stopped and some men with guns got out of it. In the back were a couple of dozen others who were tied up. Prisoners.
“The men with guns hustled the others out of the back of the truck, and lined them up. Then they shot them. They put the bodies back into the truck.”
The enchanted Hemingway, we might assume, then repaired to his trophy room atFinca Vigia for more refreshments.
So Dr Palmer, here’ my prescription:
*Start hailing Obama’s “diplomatic breakthrough!” with Castro.*Visit Cuba!
*If at all possible take some pics with Fidel or Raul–smiling, shaking hands.
*VOILA!!! All charges dropped. You’ll suddenly become a COOL lion-hunter!
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