This much we know for sure: Even in an arena more than familiar with the decorum-challenged, South Florida Rep. Allen West was over the top and below the belt with what he said about fellow South Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz. “Vile.” “Despicable.” Say what?
The only understandable context for such verbal venom would have been criticism of Wasserman Schultz’s unconscionable stand on Cuba. The one she still gets a pass on because her District 20 is, after all, in South Florida. Say no more. She’s otherwise on the right side of Israel and the liberal side of most everything else.
Except for the exile side on Cuba. She’s a staunch defender of the Cuban embargo and not receptive to Americans having the freedom to travel to that nearby island. She takes money from the U.S. Cuba Democracy PAC and helped found the Cuba Democracy Caucus, a pro-embargo coterie of legislators. She’s a comrade-in-arms with vendetta-agenda influentials such as Sen. Marco Rubio, the Brothers Diaz-Balaart and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the strident, Havana-born chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Wasserman Schultz makes no apologies for being out of step with the majority of her constituents, her party, her president, a majority of Cuban Americans, most Floridians, this Hemisphere and the rest of the world. She knows what still makes self-serving political sense, regardless of the implications for Florida, the United States and countless, powerless people still awaiting the end of a Cold War relic.
To play a part in the perpetuation of such a counterproductive, pandering policy is, in fact, despicable.