Bush's Undergrad Intelligence Service

George Bush is now branching out, and is no longer distorting the truth simply to justify unprovoked, unilateral wars. Buoyed by his past success, he's now expanding his method to encompass diplomatic relations with Cuba.

Per an article by foreign correspondent Gary Marx in the Chicago Tribune--which, I must point out, has not historically been a bastion of liberal sentiment--in 1992 Fidel Castro addressed the Cuban National Assembly. He acknowledged that while prostitution did indeed exist in Cuba, the practice "is not allowed in our country." According to a BBC translation, he continued:

"There are no women forced to sell themselves to a man, to a foreigner, to a tourist. Those who do so do it on their own, voluntarily and without any need for it. We can say that they are highly educated hookers and quite healthy, because we are a country with the lowest number of AIDS cases."

Sometime afterward, an undergraduate at Dartmouth College wrote an essay in which Castro's comment was rather negligently paraphrased as "Cuba has the cleanest and most educated prostitutes in the world."

This essay--just another misinformed writing effort from an over-eager undergrad, something that all of us college grads were guilty of at some point--should have had only a benign impact and been justifiably confined to the dustbin of academic history.

But earlier this month Bush directly quoted the Dartmouth paraphrase as being Castro's actual words. Bush did so in a campaign speech in Tampa, where, clearly pandering to the anti-Castro Cuban expatriate community, he claimed that Castro promoted prostitution and sex tourism to bring foreign capital into Cuba.

So this is where George Bush is getting his intelligence? Twelve-year old essays written by Ivy League undergrads? Using such an obviously unreliable source is bad enough, but it's inexplicable that Bush would present this as a direct quote of Castro's without double-checking the original citation for validity. But I suppose doing so wouldn't have served his preconceptions, and goodness knows that George Bush is not one to letting little things like the truth interfere with his deeply held convictions, especially when there are campaign contributions at stake.