COMMENTARY Florida Sen. Marco Rubio — and other Republicans — disgracefully insult real dictatorship victims by equating Donald Trump's conviction with the real injustices of regimes like Cuba's.
I support sounding the alarm when leaders and parties, left or right, steer in dictatorial directions. It’s an important thing to do in any democracy. I’ve often done it myself in this space.
But I’d like to think I’ve had the adult common sense to demonstrate a little perspective, too. I’ve warned, for example, that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ mania for nullifying “woke” ordinances, curbing free speech or demonizing LGBTQ persons evokes the playbooks of despots like Venezuela’s late comandante, Hugo Chávez. Still, I‘ve emphasized, as I wrote last year:
“I’m certainly not asserting that DeSantis and the Florida GOP are the dictatorial human rights abusers that Chávez’s revolution was and still is.”
Aside from wanting to be accurate and fair, I make that point for one other very important reason: If I gratuitously lump the likes of DeSantis in with the likes of Chávez, Fidel Castro, Augusto Pinochet or François Duvalier, I gratuitously insult those tyrants’ victims. The people who actually experience the torture, imprisonment, kangaroo trials and other medieval injustices dictators mete out.
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I’d be trivializing their suffering just to score a juvenile zinger.
I’d be demonstrating, in short, the lack of adult common sense we’ve seen in the past week from Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and so many other Trump-toadying Republicans.
And I’ve got more than 700 reasons for saying that.
From the moment former President Donald Trump was convicted in a New York court last Thursday — for falsifying business records to pay hush money to a porn star he’d slept with — Rubio has unequivocally equated Trump’s case with the political show trials Castro’s communist revolution staged in Cuba.
It’s one thing to claim Trump’s case was unfair or never should have been brought. We can and should debate those questions in any controversial prosecution.
But it’s another thing — a disgraceful thing — to declare that a philandering husband whose corrupt cover-up got busted merits the martyrdom of Castro’s convicts. That President Biden and “the left,” as Rubio puts it, have turned the U.S. into Cuba simply because the MAGA demigod got collared the way any of us could in this country if we pulled the kind of scofflaw crap Trump’s legendary for.
It's disgraceful to declare that a philandering husband whose corrupt cover-up got busted merits the martyrdom of Castro’s convicts.
This week a Miami Herald editorial for using video of one of those farcical Cuban tribunals — and it said he “should apologize … to every political prisoner thrown in a Cuban prison for … trivializing” their plights.
I’d include the more than 700 Cubans who still sit behind bars for taking part in unprecedented anti-government protests three years ago. Like Yosvanis García, a welder from Holguín sentenced to 15 years for being “disaffected from the revolution.”
Hunger strikes
García and Cuba’s more than a thousand other political prisoners were never afforded the due process Trump received in his case.
Like an impartial jury of his peers — whose members were agreed upon by his lawyers. Those attorneys proved incompetent, but they were nonetheless allowed to present the sort of defense García could only fantasize about at his 2022 “trial.” Trump can also appeal last week’s verdict; García’s sole appeals are the hunger strikes he’s staged in his cell.
So yes, the juvenile zinger Rubio’s been scoring for political gain since last week is an insult to genuine show-trial prey like García, all over this hemisphere and all over the world.
And I’d say the same about any Democrat who claims Hunter Biden’s trial underway this week in Delaware is a political witch hunt.
Hunter Biden — President Biden’s son — is charged with possessing a gun while using cocaine. He’s also been indicted for allegedly not paying $1.5 million in taxes. But a lot of liberals say his case is unfair, that he never would have been prosecuted if he weren’t the President’s offspring.
Bull. Hunter Biden’s own scofflaw inclinations have simply caught up with him, too. His is no “show trial” any more than Trump’s was.
As the federal prosecutor at Hunter Biden’s trial said in his opening statement: “No man is above the law.”
It’s always gratifying to hear that truism confirmed. Just as it’s always distressing to hear Marco Rubio confirm another truism:
That he’s not above disgraceful comparisons.
