This skipped my attention in the flurry of #FAIL and douchebaggery that characterized Barack Obama paying homage to one of his idols, Raul Castro, in Cuba. While we were focused on Obama posing in front of a mural of mass murderer Che Guevara and doing “the wave” with Castro at a baseball game as political prisoners rotted in Cuban jails, this bit of idiocy made its way into Obama’s fawning statement in Havana:

The ideals that are the starting point for every revolution — America’s revolution, Cuba’s revolution, the liberation movements around the world — those ideals find their truest expression, I believe, in democracy.

There is so much wrong here that one doesn’t even know where to begin. The United States is not a democracy. It wasn’t conceived as a democracy. It has not developed as a democracy. Democracy, in its purest form, is mob rule. A sampling:

“Hence it is that democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general have been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths… A republic, by which I mean a government in which a scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect and promises the cure for which we are seeking.” James Madison, Federalist Papers No. 10 (1787). “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” Thomas Jefferson. “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” John Adams.

What is more is the Cuban Revolution and the communist “liberation movements” that Obama applauds never in their wildest dreams envisioned empowering the people to govern. Their ideals had nothing to do with democracy and everything to do with using the state as a way to achieve the perfection of man… under the correct leadership. From the inception of Castro’s revolution is was designed to produce a dictatorship with Castro at the top. The same is true with every single “liberation movement” that has stalked the landscape over the past seventy years. Go down the sad list, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, Colombia, Peru, Argentina. Bolivia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and you don’t find a solitary “liberation movement” that was motivated by the desire to increase individual freedom.

When George Washington was encouraged to lead a coup and supplant the ineffectual government, the Newburgh Conspiracy, he not only declined but so shamed the instigators that the US Army never again contemplated taking political power. When encouraged to become a king, he returned to Mount Vernon and private life after two terms as president. Where the founders of the American republic voluntarily relinquished power, the Castros have created nothing but a thugocracy.

What has become extremely obvious over the past eight years is that Barack Obama simply does not have even a high school level of understanding about America, its history, and its people. In fact, Obama’s administration has much, much more in common with the way the Castros have run Cuba into the ground than it does with America’s own history. The national treasury is used as a piggy bank to fund the wild-assed business plans of Obama’s political cronies. The military is used to further the reordering of society. The coercive power of the government is used to silence and intimidate opponents. So perhaps it is understandable that Obama thinks the American Revolution and the Cuban revolution that put the Castros in charge have the same core principles.