Photo via: The Daily Caller: Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) says Americans need to be taught at sixth grade level
One reliable yes vote for all of the Pelosi-driven wild spending these past several years has been MO-5’s Emanuel Cleaver, one of the more liberal members of Congress. Cleaver, who is up for reelection in MO-5 this November, against Jacob Turk, can always be counted on to vote yes on whatever big government spending program comes down the pike, and since Obama’s been in power, that has amounted to a lot of yeas.
The liberal Voting Record:
The failed Stimulus Bill: Yea
Economy crushing Cap and Trade: Yea
ObamaCare: Yea– (but he prefers Single Payer). A Rasmussen Poll taken in March showed that 54% of the American people opposed the bill.) Today, 55% Favor Repeal of Health Care Law
And he voted no on prohibiting federally funded abortion services. A CNN poll in November 2009 showed that 61% of Americans oppose federal funding of abortions.
When Congress voted to defund ACORN in September ’09 after the devastating Giles and O’Keefe ACORN sting videos exposed them as the corrupt organization that they are, 345 congressmen voted yea, only 75 nay. Cleaver was one of them.
His entire voting record can be viewed, here.
Not to put too fine a point on it, if you believe in limited government, and fiscal responsibility, Cleaver ain’t your man.
The Trip To Cuba:
In March of 2009, The National Black Caucus went on a goodwill trip to Cuba.
Michelle Malkin wrote at the time:
Not since New York Times reporter Walter Duranty traipsed around Stalin’s Russia, filing cheery travelogues whitewashing Communist-engineered famine, has America witnessed such disgraceful propaganda tourism.
Led around by the nose by the Castro brothers, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver declared “if there is repression in Cuba we didn’t see it.” Somehow, the gulags and slums got left off the itinerary. Go figure. The CBC members saw, instead, a land of milk and honey. Fresh air and freedom. Shiny, happy people cared for by a kindly, benevolent leader. As Comrade Fidel himself put it in his official statement on the visit: “Persons who move on the streets in an active and almost always happy manner do not match with the stereotyped images that most of the times are portrayed about Cuba abroad.”
Rep. Cleaver swallowed the Kastro Kool-Aid in one big gulp: “We’ve been led to believe that the Cuban people are not free, and they are repressed by a vicious dictator, and I saw nothing to match what we’ve been told.” Cleaver unabashedly basked in the cult of Castro’s personality: “He’s one of the most amazing human beings I’ve ever met.”
***
Two years ago, the U.S. international religious freedom panel reported, a Pentecostal preacher and his family were evicted from their home and their church demolished. A month after that, police raided the Santa Teresita Catholic Church in Santiago de Cuba, beat several persons gathered for Mass who participated in a political protest earlier that day, and detained 18 worshipers.
Every Sunday in Havana, a brave group of jailed dissidents’ wives walk to a government-approved Mass at an old Catholic cathedral to pray for their husbands’ freedom. They are known as the Ladies in White. The group has been harassed and bullied by Castro’s henchmen at Easter time for demanding regime change. Their church is named for Saint Rita, the patroness of lost causes. The hopeless sycophants of the Congressional Black Caucus, willfully blind to Castro’s systemic brutality, could certainly use the saint’s intercession.
Here’s a video of Cleaver discussing his trip with clear admiration for the Castros.
The Politico reported that in a statement following their meeting, Castro had said “the delegation had expressed to him that a segment of American society “continues to be racist, and is at least partly to blame for the travel restrictions”. Cleaver denied that happened, which indicates that either the “amazing” Castro was lying and using the CNC for propaganda purposes, or Cleaver was the one lying. And it just could be his word ain’t worth old worn out tires…
It probably never occurred to Emanuel Cleaver to question the state of civil rights in Cuba:
Lest we forget: these black U.S. legislators were raving about a regime that jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s and executed more people (out of a population of 6.4 million) in its first three years in power than Hitler’s executed (out of a population of 70 million) in its first six.
Racism is one of the cornerstones of the Castro regime. As Fidel’s close friend and ally, the murderous Ernesto “Che” Guevara, once said, “The Negro is indolent and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent… We’re going to do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the Cuban revolution. By which I mean: nothing!”
Che was much too modest. “Nothing” is not at all an accurate description of Castroite treatment of Cuba’s blacks. In fact, these lily-white European soldiers sons (Fidel and Raul) forcibly overthrew a Cuban government where Cuban blacks served as President of the Senate, Minister of Agriculture, Chief of Army, and Head of State (Fulgencio Batista, a grandson of slaves who was born in a palm-roofed shack). Not that you’ll learn any of this from the liberals’ exclusive educational source on pre-Castro Cuba: the Godfather II movie.
Today the prison population in Stalinist/Apartheid Cuba is 90% black while only 9% of the ruling Stalinist party is black. As these black legislators cavorted in Cuba, a black Cuban anti-communist named Antunez, who suffered 17 years in Castro’s dungeons (essentially for quoting Martin Luther King and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights in a public square), was on a hunger strike against Castroism. I will quote his sister from a samizdat smuggled out of Cuba last year while he was still in prison:
“The Cuban government tries to fool the world with siren songs depicting racial equality in our country. But it is all a farce, as I and my family can attest, having suffered from the systematic racism directed at us by Castro’s regime. My brother suffers the scourge of racial hatred every day. The beatings are always accompanied by racial epithets. They set dogs on him. They deny him medical attention. They kept him from attending his mother’s funeral.”
Republican Rep, Chris Smith strongly denounced the CBC trip on their return, video here.
Cleaver 2nd from left, photo credit Daylife
To call Emanuel Cleaver, and the rest of the the CBC members who toured Cuba in March of 2009 “hopeless sycophants”, or “bootlickers” as Malkin put it, is being too kind.
But it gets worse. Much worse. Flash forward to March 20, 2010 – a date that is seared into the memories of conservative tea partiers, everywhere, because that is the day Emanuel Cleaver, and the CBC decided to smear us with the spurious charge of racism.
See also: Emanuel Cleaver, Fiscal Hawk
Stay tuned for part two, Spittlegate.
UPDATE:
The Case Against Cleaver, Part 2: Spittlegate
The Case Against Cleaver, Part 3: Democratic Socialists Of America
Linked by Ace of Spades HQ: For Congress: Jacob Turk MO-5
Nice Deb 
