Ship of Fools

T. Carlson

Chavez led the legendary Delano grape strike, which lasted for five years and inspired college students across the country to wear 'Boycott Grapes' pins.

Chavez’s signature rallying cry, 'Si, se puede!' ('Yes we can!'), became so famous among well-educated liberals that Barack Obama used it as a campaign slogan when he ran for president. Growing up in California, I can’t remember a year when we didn’t celebrate the life and achievements of Cesar Chavez in class. Chavez’s name is still everywhere in the state. There are six libraries, eleven parks, half a dozen major roads, and at least twenty-five public schools in California named after him, more than George Washington. That doesn’t include the many Cesar Chavez academic buildings, student centers, and at least one college. Cesar Chavez Day is a California state holiday.

Most enduring is Chavez’s 'Si, se puede!' [.. is] most common at pro-immigration rallies. Several times I’ve seen illegal aliens scream it while carrying Mexican flags. Every time, I say a silent prayer of thanks that Cesar Chavez is long dead. It would have been torture for him.

Cesar Chavez didn’t support illegal aliens. Chavez didn’t like immigration at all, generally, especially the low-skilled kind. Chavez understood that new arrivals from poor countries will always work for less than Americans

Interventionism

In the middle of the 1992 New Hampshire primary campaign, when candidates were working twenty-hour days and not a minute was unscheduled, Clinton took a break to fly back to Arkansas in order to preside over the lethal injection of a convicted murderer named Ricky Ray Rector. Rector was so profoundly brain damaged from a self-inflicted gunshot wound that it’s not clear he knew he was about to die. After finishing his final meal, Rector asked the guards if he could save his dessert for later. Rival campaigns denounced the execution as inhumane. Clinton ignored them, and in November he won the general election.

The lesson was clear, and Clinton as president soon applied it to foreign policy. When he took office, Clinton inherited a several-thousand-troop humanitarian mission in Somalia, first deployed by President Bush. Clinton didn’t simply continue the mission, he expanded it, deploying hundreds of U.S. Special Forces to battle Somali warlords. Clinton withdrew American forces only after nineteen U.S. troops were killed. Criticism came not from liberals in his own party, but from Republicans...

Clinton’s most militant posture was reserved for Iraq, which the U.S. military bombed numerous times throughout his presidency. By the end of Clinton’s second term, the United States was bombing Iraq an average of three times a week, at the cost of more than $1 billion a year.

After he left office, Clinton reflected that his main regret was that he hadn’t been interventionist enough.