| You know you've lived a good life when both Fidel Castro and Bill Clinton mutter your name in disgust. If Vlad the Impaler knew about Orlando Bosch, he'd have belched out Bosch's name, too.
Just a few months ago, Fidel Castro was regaling an audience in Havana's Plaza de la Revolucion with tales of Bosch's perfidy. In the sort of crisp, punchy speaking style that draws millions to hear him (nearly as much as the threat of execution), Castro compared Bosch to the Sept. 11 terrorists. Bosch, Castro said, was the perpetrator of a "monstrous terrorist act."
Similarly, Clinton invoked Bosch's name recently while being interviewed for Newsweek's Clinton Rehabilitation Project. Angrily describing ruckus over his fire sale on presidential pardons, Clinton sneered: "I swore I wouldn't answer questions about Marc Rich until (former president) Bush answered about Orlando Bosch."
(Note that Clinton's position is that the Rich pardon "wasn't worth the damage to my reputation" -- which was unblemished until then. Rich deserved a pardon, but if he had to do it over again, Clinton would have withheld the pardon solely to protect his own reputation.)
In the honest reporting Americans have come to expect from the mainstream media, Newsweek went on to explain that Bosch -- quote -- "blew up an airliner in 1976, killing 73, and was freed from jail in 1990 by then-President Bush under pressure from his son Jeb and Cuban exiles."
On the basis of the Newsweek account, one might think that Bosch blew up an airliner in 1976, killing 73, and was freed from jail in 1990 by then-President Bush under pressure from his son Jeb and Cuban exiles. In fact, Bosch was cleared of any connection to the airline bombing. Twice. In Venezuelan courts.
When not trying to rehabilitate Clinton, liberals wail that Venezuelan courts are human-rights violators more malignant than Ken Starr. Yet it was Venezuela's criminal justice system that produced two acquittals for Bosch -- in both civilian and military courts.
It took DNA evidence and a score of witnesses for liberals to stop shouting "allegedly" about Clinton's crimes. But an anti-Castro Cuban is deemed guilty even of the crimes of which he has been formally acquitted. Twice. In Venezuela.
Bosch's only known violent crime -- admittedly not proved with DNA evidence and a score of witnesses, but found by a jury nevertheless -- was to fire a rifle at a Polish ship docked off of Miami in 1968. No one was hurt and the ship was only slightly damaged, making it a more successful operation than John F. Kennedy's Bay of Pigs invasion. But, inexplicably, it is a crime to fire a rifle at communist freighters headed to Cuba. Continued... |