Et tu, WSJ?

The Wall Street Journal, a paper whose opinion pages are generally friendly to the exile community has proven that the news reporters there might be longing for a move to the New York Times with a biased article that repeats many of the myths currently being peddled about the mass defections of Cubans to the Democrats.

First the obligatory attack on the intolerant Cubans, in quotes of course (always get someone who will say what your thinking):

“If you deviate slightly from what is the traditional hard-line approach to the Castro regime, they will publicly call you a communist on local radio and TV stations, humiliate you and your family, and accuse you of terrible things,” the 24-year-old says.

Then you must include the allegation of pandering (by both parties of course):

For decades, U.S. presidential candidates from both parties have made pilgrimages to Miami to pledge their toughness toward Fidel Castro, hoping to score Cuban-American votes. In 2000, when a few hundred ballots in Florida determined the presidency, both Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore came out against the Clinton administration’s decision to take a motherless 6-year-old boy, Elian González, away from his Miami relatives and return him to his father in Cuba.

What the author, Michael M. Phillips, doesn’t say is that Gore’s attempt to distance himself from his boss didn’t work and that the Cuban-American community once again went overwhelmingly to the Republican candidate.

Then Phillips has to pump up his messenger’s bona fides:

Mr. Sopo’s anti-Castro pedigree is impeccable. His grandfather was a Cuban Navy officer who died in a Cuban prison after the revolution. His father, Edgar, who had studied at Georgetown University, was jailed by the Castro regime in 1959, but he fled to Miami after a friend secured his release. In Florida, he joined fellow exiles plotting Mr. Castro’s overthrow and went ashore in Cuba with an infiltration team ahead of the failed American-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. He escaped capture by taking refuge in the Venezuelan Embassy in Havana. Félix Rodríguez, the Central Intelligence Agency operative who was present in Bolivia at the 1967 execution of Mr. Castro’s Argentine comrade Ernesto “Che” Guevara, was on Edgar Sopo’s team during the Bay of Pigs invasion and spoke at his 1999 funeral.

The problem is that one’s position’s on an issue are not inherited. But Phillips sees that knock on his argument coming and assures us that the younger Sopo actually supported president Bush:

The younger Mr. Sopo was proud to shake Mr. Bush’s hand at a campaign rally in 2000, but the war in Iraq soured him on Mr. Bush, and in 2004 he worked on Democrat John Kerry’s presidential bid. He first heard about Mr. Obama in 2003 and volunteered to do low-level campaign work earlier this year.

The eureka moment, however, came in a movie theater when Mr. Sopo’s BlackBerry buzzed with an Internet alert notifying him that Mr. Obama planned to propose easing travel and remittance restrictions to Cuba.

The next day he decided to organize Cuban-Americans and other Hispanics to support Mr. Obama’s presidential bid.

Apparently Mr. Sopo has ADD. He’s easily distracted by shiny objects. So Bush’s stance on the war in Iraq made him do a 180 on Cuba policy? How exactly does that work?

Of course Phillips (through Sopo) has to refer to the famous FIU poll of Cuban Americans:

When they did speak, Mr. Sopo brought up a recent Florida International University poll showing that more than 60% of Cuban-Americans in Miami support freer travel and remittances. He said he disagreed with those who call Mr. Obama naive for thinking that more contact between the U.S. and Cuba will loosen the regime’s grip.

To add the patina of objectivity Phillips includes the statement of someone who doesn’t agree with Sopo or Obama:

Ms. De Armas responded that she doesn’t believe the polls. “I wasn’t polled, and nobody in my family was polled,” she says.

With all due respect to Ms. De Armas, that’s not a very scientific response to an allegedly scientific study of opinions. But that’s exactly the kind of response Phillips needs to keep up the sham. He, of course, leaves out the fact that in the same poll a majority of registered Cuban American voters favored direct U.S. military action to overthrow the Cuban government (47.2% strongly favor plus that 7.9% mostly favor) and more than 2/3 of of such voters favored military action by the exile community to overthrow the Cuban government (57.7% strongly favor plus 11.3% that mostly favor).

As further evidence that the old of order of things has crumbled Phillips leaves us with this:

The conflict was evident at Mr. Obama’s Little Havana rally. Outside the auditorium, Mr. Sopo, wearing a white guayabera, with his 19-year-old sister, Giannina, and their young allies waved signs that read, “Cuban Americans Support Obama.”

On the other side of the street were a few dozen older protesters waving signs that read, “Helping Castro Is a Crime” and “Cuba Sí, Obama No.”

Inside the auditorium, the candidate vowed to fight for freedom in Cuba — in his own way. “Until there’s justice in Cuba, there’s no justice anywhere,” Mr. Obama said. The Sopos gave him a standing ovation.

Afterward, Giannina gestured across the street at the angry anti-Obama demonstrators. “They’re too old to change,” she said.

Naturally because there weren’t 1,000 demonstrators outside that means Miami loves Obama. This is like those jerks who think that there aren’t any conservatives because we don’t do rallies. We have better things to with our time, assholes. And Phillips makes sure to characterize those few demonstrators that were there as older, as if that were a sin. What’s the one thing all old people love to do? Vote.

The same FIU poll these jerks love to cherry pick also shows this:

At the end of the day, in South Florida, there are almost as many independents as there are Democrats and the Democrats have “achieved” an increase of 2 basis points in the last 16 years (well within the margin of error of the poll).

You see while Cuban-American voters don’t generally do demonstrations, we do elections.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R): 62.61% of the vote in her last election.

Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R): 63.34% of the vote in his last election.

Mario Diaz-Balart (R): 58.06% of the vote in his last election.

Keep in mind that these are the county-wide results so one can only assume the percentages are even higher among just Cuban-Americans.

To add some more perspective on how high these numbers are, Charlie Crist (the Republican governor of Florida) lost Dade county with only 45.29% of the vote.

In conclusion, as late as November of last year Cuban-American voters were firmly in the Republican camp regardless of what Michael Phillips, Joe Garcia, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Giancarlo Sopo or anybody else who is “stuck” in the mud thinks.