George W. Bush -- Idiot or Commie Agent? You decide...

Tomorrow (29 August) we’re having another mega-march, so I shopped today. I bought some very fresh organic coffee (50 pesos the kilo -- $2/lb.) from a Tuxpam, Puebla farm family, who are losing their collective shirts, in town for the “do” tomorrow. Looking through the beads and trinkets stalls fronting the National Palace was a well-heeled gringo tourist couple. They commented on “those Russian things” around the Indigenous artesana. I’m assuming they meant the gold hammer and sickles on the bright red banners. Scary! These better-traveled, well-heeled compatriots are likely (Bush) voters. Those “noble red men” need every peso quaint customs and colorful handicrafts bring in. Oh well… if the touristas translated “Frente marxista-leninista”, they might sue. Who? It’s the fashion among conservatives to mount dubious legal challenges to their opponents. Bill Clinton (a right-winger everywhere except the U.S.) lied about a fat girlfriend – grounds for impeachment. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (a devout Roman Catholic, not a Marxist) had the temerity to not only beat back an attempted U.S. sponsored coup d’etat, but also to spent Venezuelan oil revenues on frivolous sops for the voters like… schools and hospitals. Grounds for a recall. One of those “think tank” guys (who work hard daily to come up with plausible-sounding rationales for screwing the rest of us), said Chavez cheated by “pandering” to the voters (as opposed to, say, Ronald Reagan offering us middle-class folks tax cuts). Here in Mexico, the conservatives are trying to unseat our Jefe de Gobernación, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Cynical left-wing types say it’s because neither of the two big parties (Fox’s PAN and the PRI) have any possible candidates for the 2006 Presidential election with even half the support AMLO does. There’s no Monica Lewinsky – in Mexico sex scandals are only interesting when they involve bishops. AMLO (a recent widower and model of middle-class propriety) is unfit for public office because he didn’t open his mail. Several years ago, the city expropriated an access road to the emergency room of a pricey private hospital in a wealthy neighborhood. Four or five different families claim the other guys all have forged deeds, and the wrong people were compensated. Once AMLO became a threat to the Foxistas, the fun began – one claimant (coincidentally, a PAN activist) mailed a court order to the Jefe de Gobernacíon. Not responding is a good enough reason for Congress to unseat the Jefe – making him ineligible to ever hold Federal office. Despite Marta Fox’s little financial irregularities (diverting money from the National Lottery to a “charity” she runs, which spend more on overhead that it collects), El Prez is a stickler for the law. He ordered PAN congressmen to vote against AMLO. AMLO’s party (PRD) is the smallest of the three major parties. Fox is hoping the PRI is more afraid of AMLO than they are of the conservatives. Fat chance. PRI and PAN both want to kill off AMLO (at least politically), but they see each other as the biggest danger to their survival. Every time Fox courts the PRI, his own party or the PRI splits into more factions – and AMLO becomes more credible. After Fox’s speech, the PRD, a good part of PRI and even some of PAN said el Presidente was thwarting democracy, so it’s time to go to the streets. The mega-march will be pure theater, but very smart theater. Folks are starting to wonder how bright Fox is – it took the guy a year to realize George Bush II knows (or cares) nothing about Mexico or Latin-America in general. Did the moron in the White House really call those terrorists released by Panama “freedom fighters”? Well, just because Interpol and a half-dozen countries say so, maybe “terrorist” is a tad harsh. All they did was blow up a civilian airliner and murder a few dozen other folks. Only two were American citizens (blown up in Washington, DC – their own fault for riding in the same car as a Chilean exile). Any attempted murders only involved extraneous foreigners anyway – Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Geeze, how many Nobel Prize Winning Novelists does the world need anyway? The Pope? He’s old… and Polish, so that’s not such a big deal. And besides, those would have only been “collateral damage”. The big enchilada was Fidel Castro. Hey, planning to bump off the bearded one should have got these guys a free dinner in Miami, not life in a Panamanian prison. Right? But the mistake could be corrected … never mind that Panama only allows Presidential pardons for political crimes. These guys needed a Presidential pardon – now! Those pesky Panamanians swear in a lefty Pres next week. Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia, Paraguay, Panamá. Another Latin American country freely elects a left-wing leader. Hmm… I smell a plot. Fidel wants a leftist Latin America; the Bush family got rich the old fashioned way – kissing the butts of dictators and various baddies (Prescott Senior laundered money for Adolph Hitler, George I and Prescott Jr. have business ties to the Chinese Communist Party – and Saddam Hussein and the King of Saudi Arabia - as does George II, who also was in business with an obscure Saudi construction magnate named Osama bin Ladin). So Fidel, on behalf of dictators and baddies everywhere, cleared out the mental wards and prisons of Cuba, sending the cracked, the crazed and the criminal by the boatload to Florida back during the Carter Administration. The crazies helped elect Jeb Bush as Governor; Jeb did everything possible to disenfranchise anti-conservatives, and to swing his state’s presidential votes to big brother George W. in 2000. The un-elected President of the United States, in return, has done everything in his power to give capitalism and corporatism a really, really bad name. Pro-U.S., or pro-corporate Latin American leader look like fools. Fidel’s interest is a leftist Latin America: the conservatives are voted out and the people opt for the left. The Bush family’s interest is the Bush family. A win-win for both Fidel and George II. Makes sense to me… but then I live in Latin America, where politics is simple and straightforward.