{"id":2392,"date":"2004-08-23T12:59:21","date_gmt":"2004-08-23T17:59:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/2392.html"},"modified":"2004-08-23T12:59:21","modified_gmt":"2004-08-23T17:59:21","slug":"who-came-up-with-this-idea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/who-came-up-with-this-idea\/","title":{"rendered":"Who came up with this idea?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This move seems so dumb, I can’t even figure out to whom it’s supposed to pander.<\/p>\n

Cuba, like the western coast of central Florida, faced widespread devastation recently from Hurricane Charley. In a gesture that doesn’t appear to make any sense at all, the Bush administration offered Cuba $50,000<\/a> in aid. Cuba, not surprisingly, isn’t interested in the pittance.<\/p>\n

Cuba on Monday rejected the U.S. government’s offer of $50,000 in post-hurricane aid, calling the gesture hypocritical, and the amount humiliating.<\/p>\n

“This cynical and hypocritical offer by the government of the United States to ease Hurricane Charley’s effects ignores the damage caused over more than four decades by the economic war of successive [American] administrations against our country,” Cuba’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried Monday in the Communist workers weekly Trabajadores.<\/p>\n

The offer was announced by the U.S. State Department in Washington on August 13, the same day Hurricane Charley battered western Cuba on its way to Florida.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I admit to often finding Bush’s approach to foreign policy bewildering, but if there was a point to this aid offer, I don’t see it. As Carpetbagger regular David S., who alerted me to this story, said, “Is this some kind of joke?”
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\nI’ve written ad naseum about how unpopular<\/a> Bush’s new policies on Cuba are with Cuban-American voters in south Florida. Could this be a gesture to show Bush’s “compassion” towards the Cuban people who are suffering? I doubt it; if Bush really wanted to help those people, he wouldn’t offer a measly $50,000.<\/p>\n

With this in mind, maybe the offer was supposed to have the opposite effect? In other words, perhaps Bush thought he’d score some cheap political points by insulting Castro. But who would be impressed by Bush offering a paltry aid package to a country ravaged by a hurricane?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This move seems so dumb, I can’t even figure out to whom it’s supposed to pander. Cuba, like the western coast of central Florida, faced widespread devastation recently from Hurricane Charley. In a gesture that doesn’t appear to make any sense at all, the Bush administration offered Cuba $50,000 in aid. Cuba, not surprisingly, isn’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2392\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}