Sea tranquilo mi corazon:
Mexico City _ To an untrained eye, the scenes captured on video certainly looked like Mexico's bad old days when votes were stolen instead of won. There was a man inside a polling station stuffing one vote after another into a ballot box. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the embattled leftist candidate for president, showed the video to a crowd of reporters on Monday morning and called it proof that poll workers had taken part in a conspiracy of fraud that robbed him of victory and handed it to his conservative rival, Felipe Calderon.Sore loser trying to get voting results annulled
That night, the Federal Electoral Institute, or IFE, and Mr Lopez Obrador's own representative at the polling station said Mr Lopez Obrador was misrepresenting the video.
The tape, they said, showed a poll worker putting misplaced ballots where they belonged, a common procedure that was perfectly legal.
By then, however, doubt had already been planted. Mr Lopez Obrador has bet his political future that it will not take much to make that doubt grow into a national call for a recount in a country where rigging elections was once a kind of national pastime.
His opponents in Mr Calderon's camp are betting that people will see things the way they do: that the only one playing dirty these days is Mr Lopez Obrador.
Thompson-McKinleyJr/NYTimes(BangkokPost) 15.Jul.06
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This is like a pancake breakfast - free! At the local firehouse. With all the neighbors drinking coffee and decaf and tea and talking about the new sewer line. Kids running around yelling and laughing. Good weather ahead. But mostly the pancakes, I'm hungry, figuratively speaking.
People will be confused by the NYTimes' non-grovelling stance toward Bush-Cheney, it seems to confirm the rightwing absurdities about how liberal they are, but that's because the Bush Administration was used, not using. The idea now is blame all the bad things on them and put the next phase into operation. Bush becomes the scapegoat for the mounting crises and disasters. Everything's tied to him and he gets driven out of town.
Meanwhile we can't have anything unpredictable happening on our southern borders, especially with Morales and Chavez and those other "leftists" agitating their commie propaganda nonsense all over the place. Caramba!
"Ginger" Thompson and "James C" McKinley Jr are professional journalists in the employ of the NYTimes.
The word "leftist" should be libellous and actionable in the US given its derogatory import, but it's merely a smug descriptor. It means someone who wants you to live in a concrete apartment house with loud messy neighbors, someone who wants to take your car away and make you ride the bus. Someone who wants the non-English speaking landscape crew that does your lawn to make as much money a day as your son the medical professional.
As mentioned previously, there are no "leftists" in American politics or mainstream media. None. Being a "leftist" is like being an unarmed terrorist. It is unacceptable, unpatriotic, bad.
You see how the language has been manipulated. "Rightists" are patriots, "leftists" are subversive. Obrador's a "leftist" candidate. Thompson and McKinley do a little lip service to the "bad old days", the "only one playing dirty these days" they say, is Obrador.
They don't mention that those bad old days go right up to the elections of 2002. And that Obrador was an active, and bravely prominent, campaigner against those "bad old days". While Calderon and his masters did whatever they could to maintain the grip of corruption and plutocracy on the people of Mexico.
What this makes plain is the fear the pigs at the top of the American economy have for that populist uprising down there in Latin America.
But there's a note of desperation in the story - in the tone and language of it - that's pretty encouraging, all in all, something light behind it.
Like pancakes late on Sunday morning.
