Monday, July 18, 2011

The Travel Channel's Useful Idiot

The Travel Channel's Useful Idiot
Posted By Humberto Fontova
On July 18, 2011 @ 12:25 am In Daily Mailer, FrontPage

On July 12th the Travel Channel ran an episode of Anthony Bourdain's "No
Reservations" where he travels to Cuba highlighting the food, people,
sights and sounds, etc. At the end he gushes: "Yes, go to Cuba!" This
probably strikes most Travel Channel viewers as perfectly innocent and
as professionally appropriate.

Here's some background information mostly unknown to Travel Channel viewers:

Neck to neck with Hugo Chavez subsidies, Castro's Stalinist regime lives
off of tourism. And Cuba's intelligence and military sector owns 80
percent of the tourist industry, as documented to Congress by retired
Defense Intelligence Agency Cuba analyst, Lt. Col. Chris Simmons.
Therefore, yet another Travel Channel infomercial (Zimmern visited in
2009) for Cuba was a godsend to the Stalinist nomenklatura—especially
right now with their Venezuelan sugar daddy in perilous health.

Those charming, smiling hosts who escorted Bourdain around Castro's
fiefdom were all regime apparatchiks. Immediately upon applying for his
Cuban visa, well before Bourdain even set foot in Cuba, Castro's
intelligence had Bourdain completely investigated and his future escorts
completely briefed. The procedure started the day he applied for a Cuban
visa, as also explained by Lt. Col. Christopher Simmons. That your
official "guides" while visiting a Communist nation are regime
apparatchiks was common knowledge even to proto-imbeciles all during the
Cold War. Bourdain was born in 1956.

Mr Simmons is a Lieutenant Colonel who specialized in Cuban
counterintelligence and spy-catching and recently retired from the
Defense Intelligence Agency. In 25 years as a U.S. military
counterintelligence officer, Lt. Col. Simmons ended the operations of 80
enemy agents, many of whom are today behind bars. He played a key role
in cracking what is considered America's most "damaging spy scandal
since the end of the Cold War." This spy scandal featured Ana Montes,
awarded the "Certificate of Distinction," and promoted by the Clinton
administration to head the Defense Intelligence Agency's Cuba division.
Due partly to Lt. Col. Simmons' investigative work, on September 20th
2001 (under Bush), Ms. Montes was arrested by the FBI as a Castro spy
and accused of the same crime as Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. After
conviction, only a plea bargain allowed the Clinton administration's top
"Cuba expert" to escape the fate of the Rosenbergs.

"Yes, go to Cuba!" exhorted Bourdain at the end of the show. And that's
the vital matter for Cuba's Stalinist regime — especially right now with
Hugo Chavez undergoing cancer treatment. Bourdain's visa-issuers got a
fabulous return. As I write, the Travel Channel's Bourdain page links to
the Castro-regime-owned Hotel Nacional, for quick and easy reservations.

We're told Bourdain is quite "feisty" and "spunky." Certainly against
Tea Partiers, or "marginal, very angry white people" who remind him of
"George Wallace voters and the murderer of Martin Luther King."

He also snarks against the James Beard Foundation: "An insular, elitist
organization more interested in an ego-stroke than the well-being of the
people it purports to honor. I've been loudly peeing on this
organization at every opportunity for years."

But if only he'd demonstrated 1/100 of his vaunted "spunk" and
"feistiness" against a regime that jailed political prisoners at a
higher rate than Stalin during the Great Terror, murdered more Cubans
than Hitler murdered Germans during the Night of Long Knives, and craved
to nuke his homeland.

It's an old story, actually. Where have we seen this lion to lamb
metamorphosis before? Try Dan Rather, Andrea Mitchell, Barbara Walters,
etc. etc. They say weird things happen in the Bermuda Triangle. I say
much weirder things happen in the Florida Straits. Let a mainstream
media reporter confront a Republican official, and he's a roaring,
jabbing Torquemada. North of the Florida Straits and in front of
Republicans, no question is too rude, irrelevant or offensive; no
demeanor too haughty, combative or insolent.

But just let these identical paragons of "feistiness" cross the Florida
Straits and find themselves in front of "President" Castro or any of his
apparatchiks. Then they fawn and grovel.

Predictably, Bourdain snarks at travel and food-writers who "crassly
commercialize" their reviews, for instance, in the "World's 50 Best
List." "The guys who put together that list all call each other and
horse trade. It's good for business, it's good for chefs, but I mean, no
one takes it seriously. It's not even a popularity contest, it is a list
brokered by a lot of people with common interests. They're in the business."

Not that any conceivable "horse-trading" transpired between the Travel
Channel and the Stalinist apparatchiks who issued the Travel Channel's
visas.

In a 1985 interview KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov explained his former
employer's recruitment process:

Cynical, ego-centric people who can look into your eyes with
angelic expression and tell you a lie — these are the most recruitable
people for us; people who lack moral principals – who are either too
greedy or who suffer from exaggerated self-importance. These are the
people the KGB wants and finds easiest to recruit.

Please, I don't claim that Bourdain acts (wittingly) as a foreign agent.
But for some reason Bezmenov's description caught my eye—especially
regarding the disproportionate number of Communist apologists found
among celebrity ranks.

http://frontpagemag.com/2011/07/18/the-travel-channels-useful-idiot/

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