Saturday, May 29, 2010
Friday, January 25, 2008
The Left is fascinated with their own crew of fascists
The progressives are furious about Jonah Goldberg's new book "Liberal Fascism. He commits the sin of reminding them of the facts. And once reminded of the facts, it becomes easier to understand the idolatry the Left has for the current crew of undemocratic iron-fisted rulers.
The fascists of the 1930's -- national socialists -- such as Mussolini were Leftists, praised and supported by the international Left. The Hitler-Stalin pact was signed by two socialists, and the pro-Soviet "progressive forces" had unlimited praise for the German national socialist regime, only changing their tune for political reasons when the German's attacked their beloved Soviet Union and the international propaganda machine of the Left did a 180 degree turn.
If Col. Hugo Chavez carried out exactly the same internal policies as he has been doing, but declared himself to be pro-U.S. or anti-Castro, the Latin Leftists would be his worst enemies and they would be the ones denouncing him as a corrupt, dictatorial militarist and the Hollywood airheads would lose all interest in him. Of course, in that case, their preferred term would be to call him a "fascist", which he obviously is.
The fascists of the 1930's -- national socialists -- such as Mussolini were Leftists, praised and supported by the international Left. The Hitler-Stalin pact was signed by two socialists, and the pro-Soviet "progressive forces" had unlimited praise for the German national socialist regime, only changing their tune for political reasons when the German's attacked their beloved Soviet Union and the international propaganda machine of the Left did a 180 degree turn.
If Col. Hugo Chavez carried out exactly the same internal policies as he has been doing, but declared himself to be pro-U.S. or anti-Castro, the Latin Leftists would be his worst enemies and they would be the ones denouncing him as a corrupt, dictatorial militarist and the Hollywood airheads would lose all interest in him. Of course, in that case, their preferred term would be to call him a "fascist", which he obviously is.
Ortega: the anti-democratic option
One important difference between the Sandinista candidate Daniel Ortega and his rivals, is that he did not want a second round run-off election that would have given Nicaragua a president with majority support -- very important in a country as divided as Nicaragua is.
The manipulation of the election law between Aleman and Ortega made it possible for the Sandinistas to take power in the 2006 election even though a majority of the people opposed them.
Of course, all the 2006 polling data shows that there still would have been a run-off -- and Ortega would have been defeated, again -- if it were not for the tragic fact that a rival candidate, the very popular former mayor of Managua and ex-Sandinistas Herty Lewites died four months before the election. His immediate cause of death was cardiac arrest -- his heart stopped -- which can occur either by natural causes or can be readily induced. Some people continue to speculate on whether he might have been murdered, especially as he had warned in the press earlier in the year that Ortega might have him killed.
One commenter to this blog, with a very militant tone, gives data regarding the 1984 election won by Ortega, which only supports the point that the anti-Ortega vote hit an all time high 22 years later in 2006. Of course, he omits the detail that the leading opposition groups boycotted the 1984 election.
Has anyone else noticed that there is a large brigade of self-proclaimed progressives who have a great fondness for corrupt and militaristic regimes, just as long as they position themselves on the "Left"?
The manipulation of the election law between Aleman and Ortega made it possible for the Sandinistas to take power in the 2006 election even though a majority of the people opposed them.
Of course, all the 2006 polling data shows that there still would have been a run-off -- and Ortega would have been defeated, again -- if it were not for the tragic fact that a rival candidate, the very popular former mayor of Managua and ex-Sandinistas Herty Lewites died four months before the election. His immediate cause of death was cardiac arrest -- his heart stopped -- which can occur either by natural causes or can be readily induced. Some people continue to speculate on whether he might have been murdered, especially as he had warned in the press earlier in the year that Ortega might have him killed.
One commenter to this blog, with a very militant tone, gives data regarding the 1984 election won by Ortega, which only supports the point that the anti-Ortega vote hit an all time high 22 years later in 2006. Of course, he omits the detail that the leading opposition groups boycotted the 1984 election.
Has anyone else noticed that there is a large brigade of self-proclaimed progressives who have a great fondness for corrupt and militaristic regimes, just as long as they position themselves on the "Left"?
Thursday, November 23, 2006
The anti-Ortega vote reaches a new high of 62% -- and he gets to be president anyway!
In this, his fifth time as presidential candidate of Nicaragua's Sandinista party, the anti-Daniel Ortega vote has hit a record high, with 62% of the electorate voting against him. If there is a trend here, it is anti-Sandinista. (By the way, Ortega has been declared the winner.)
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/11/23/america/LA_POL_Nicaragua_Elections.php
Electoral Council confirms Ortega as Nicaragua's next president
(AP) Nov. 22, 2006http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/11/23/america/LA_POL_Nicaragua_Elections.php
Electoral Council confirms Ortega as Nicaragua's next president
Nicaraguan electoral officials on Wednesday released the final results in the Nov. 5 presidential elections, confirming the victory of Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega.
With all of the votes counted, the Supreme Electoral Council declared Ortega the winner with 38 percent.
Eduardo Montealegre, a Harvard-educated economist running with the National Liberal Alliance, was second with 28.3 percent.
Jose Rizo of the Liberal Constitutionalist Party finished third with 27.1 percent and Edmundo Jarquin of the anti-Ortega Sandinista Renovation Movement finished with 6.3 percent.
Former Sandinista army commander Eden Pastora, who later led a breakaway Contra movement trying to oust the Sandinistas in the 1980s, received 0.3 percent of the vote.
It is the first time in modern history that a candidate in Nicaragua has won with less than half of the vote; a recent law change allows a first-round win to a candidate who gets at least 35 percent and finishes at least 5 percentage points ahead of the runner-up.
Ortega, who headed the leftist Sandinista government of the 1980s until losing an election in 1990, takes power Jan. 10.
Ortega's Sandinista National Liberation Front kept the 38 seats it had in the National Assembly. Jose Rizo's Liberal Constitutionalists has 25 and the National Liberal Alliance won 22. Jarquin's party won five.
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Sandinista terror ties to Iran and N. Korea
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OTQ3ZWIxN2MwZDhiZjM5MTViNTkyM2Q4MWM0ODc0YTg=
NATIONAL REVIEW
November 3, 2006
Ortega, Again?
History repeats itself. Why do the ugliest chapters always recur?
By Mark Klugmann
Long before 9/11, before we launched the War on Terror, before we recognized the incipient nuclear threat of North Korea and Iran, President Reagan warned us of the coming storm. He saw that Nicaragua had become part of “a confederation of terrorist states,” including North Korea and Iran, that was waging “a campaign of international terrorism against the United States.”
How unfortunate for us that his words should ring true once more. In early November, while the nation waits restlessly to learn the makeup of the next session of Congress, there is another election that begs our attention just two days prior. For Nicaragua might be going to the wolves.
The Sandinistas, whom we fought for a decade while Reagan was president, are on the verge of returning to power in Nicaragua. Daniel Ortega, their once and (perhaps) future president, appears to be on his way to a highly questionable, and lamentable, victory in the November 5 election.
The latest Zogby International poll shows Ortega in the lead with 35 percent of the vote, significantly ahead of all other contenders. Though a majority of voters are anti-Sandinista, their support is divided among several candidates.
If Ortega’s small plurality holds, that would be enough for him to win outright in the first round, the Sandinistas having pushed through a constitutional reform that allows a candidate with just 35 percent of the vote to win without a run off, if he has a five-point lead. Ortega, an authoritarian thug who in the words of then-Attorney General Ed Meese turned Nicaragua into “a terrorist country club,” giving refuge to the FMLN, the IRA, the ETA, the Red Brigades, Baader-Meinhof, the Tupamaros and others, is standing right on the threshold of recovering his throne.
While Republicans are tearing their hair for fear of losing control of the House and Senate for the next two years, they are in danger of a much more enduring loss.
For some in Washington, the Nicaraguan election must look like small potatoes compared to the current crises in the Middle East and North Korea. But, in fact, it is part of the same battle and taking place on our doorstep. Ortega’s terrorist allies in Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, and North Korea will be watching closely on election night. We should be, too, for the fate of Nicaragua is inextricably linked to that of rogue nations with a manifest strategic interest in controlling a key piece of continental real estate nor far from the United States.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has emerged as the Sandinista’s new best friend. It is he who sponsors their well-funded electoral machine that may propel them back into office. Chavez has been using Venezuela’s oil money most insidiously, supporting Leftist candidates for election all over Latin America, and incorporating them into worldwide anti-American front.
International revolutionary cooperation is not a new idea. During a state visit by Ortega to Pyongyang in the 1980’s, Kim Il-Sung of North Korea suggested to his guest that their nations work together to render America “powerless.” Now Ortega might be in position to reap what was sowed those many years ago, partnering with Kim Il-Sung’s heir, Kim Jong-Il, the newest member of the nuclear club.
North Korea is already at work building closer relations with the radical Left in Latin America. In September of 2005, the vice president of North Korea’s Supreme People's Assembly (and sometimes arms dealer) visited both Cuba and Venezuela. In Caracas, he called for Venezuela and North Korea to respond jointly to “American pressure and threats.” Shortly thereafter, a North Korean economic delegation arrived in Venezuela. North Korea, faced with a severe energy shortage, happens to be a leading exporter of missiles. Chavez, flush with oil, is on an arms-buying spree.
The terror connection does not end there, for the Sandinistas are also longtime friends of Iran, another of Chavez’s anti-American cohort. In 1980, even as Jimmy Carter was sending hundreds of millions in aid to the Sandinistas, the Nicaraguans were feting the Iranian foreign minister–this while Americans were still being held hostage in Iran.
In September, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared that he and Chavez are like “brothers.” Chavez staunchly defended the Iranian nuclear program at the U.N. General Assembly and vowed in a meeting in Havana that “[u]nder any scenario we are with you … [Venezuela] will stand together with Iran at all times and under any conditions.” That these terrorist alliances may soon have a branch office in the heart of Central America — essentially within walking distance of our undefended border – is a ghastly and terrifying proposition.
In recent days, despite the white-hot battle for control of the Congress, U.S. Congressmen Dana Rohrabacher, Ed Royce, Pete Hoekstra, Tom Tancredo and others have sent clear public warnings to Nicaraguan voters about the stakes in their election, reminding them that one of the terrorists serving a life sentence for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center was found carrying five Sandinista-issued Nicaraguan passports.
Certainly, a Nicaragua that returns to tropical socialism will be a domestic disaster, as it was during the 1980’s. But a Nicaragua that opens its arms to murderous radicalism poses a threat for America and the world. Daniel Ortega is poised, once again, to place his nation’s people and territory in service to the globe’s most deadly tyrannies.
If warnings fall on deaf ears, and Ortega returns to power, it would be more than a simple repeat of history. The technology and mechanics of terrorism have advanced these twenty years, even as biological and nuclear weapons have proliferated. Moreover, a nuclear North Korea and a nuclear Iran could be in position, with an ally so close to our porous frontier, to wreak the havoc we once thought only the Soviet Union could ever bring home.
November 5, not November 7, is the day to watch. And someone said “Macaca?”
— Mark Klugmann is a political consultant and presidential adviser in Latin America. A former speechwriter to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, he also served as assistant director of the White House Outreach Working Group on Central America.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OTQ3ZWIxN2MwZDhiZjM5MTViNTkyM2Q4MWM0ODc0YTg=
NATIONAL REVIEW
November 3, 2006
Ortega, Again?
History repeats itself. Why do the ugliest chapters always recur?
By Mark Klugmann
Long before 9/11, before we launched the War on Terror, before we recognized the incipient nuclear threat of North Korea and Iran, President Reagan warned us of the coming storm. He saw that Nicaragua had become part of “a confederation of terrorist states,” including North Korea and Iran, that was waging “a campaign of international terrorism against the United States.”
How unfortunate for us that his words should ring true once more. In early November, while the nation waits restlessly to learn the makeup of the next session of Congress, there is another election that begs our attention just two days prior. For Nicaragua might be going to the wolves.
The Sandinistas, whom we fought for a decade while Reagan was president, are on the verge of returning to power in Nicaragua. Daniel Ortega, their once and (perhaps) future president, appears to be on his way to a highly questionable, and lamentable, victory in the November 5 election.
The latest Zogby International poll shows Ortega in the lead with 35 percent of the vote, significantly ahead of all other contenders. Though a majority of voters are anti-Sandinista, their support is divided among several candidates.
If Ortega’s small plurality holds, that would be enough for him to win outright in the first round, the Sandinistas having pushed through a constitutional reform that allows a candidate with just 35 percent of the vote to win without a run off, if he has a five-point lead. Ortega, an authoritarian thug who in the words of then-Attorney General Ed Meese turned Nicaragua into “a terrorist country club,” giving refuge to the FMLN, the IRA, the ETA, the Red Brigades, Baader-Meinhof, the Tupamaros and others, is standing right on the threshold of recovering his throne.
While Republicans are tearing their hair for fear of losing control of the House and Senate for the next two years, they are in danger of a much more enduring loss.
For some in Washington, the Nicaraguan election must look like small potatoes compared to the current crises in the Middle East and North Korea. But, in fact, it is part of the same battle and taking place on our doorstep. Ortega’s terrorist allies in Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, and North Korea will be watching closely on election night. We should be, too, for the fate of Nicaragua is inextricably linked to that of rogue nations with a manifest strategic interest in controlling a key piece of continental real estate nor far from the United States.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has emerged as the Sandinista’s new best friend. It is he who sponsors their well-funded electoral machine that may propel them back into office. Chavez has been using Venezuela’s oil money most insidiously, supporting Leftist candidates for election all over Latin America, and incorporating them into worldwide anti-American front.
International revolutionary cooperation is not a new idea. During a state visit by Ortega to Pyongyang in the 1980’s, Kim Il-Sung of North Korea suggested to his guest that their nations work together to render America “powerless.” Now Ortega might be in position to reap what was sowed those many years ago, partnering with Kim Il-Sung’s heir, Kim Jong-Il, the newest member of the nuclear club.
North Korea is already at work building closer relations with the radical Left in Latin America. In September of 2005, the vice president of North Korea’s Supreme People's Assembly (and sometimes arms dealer) visited both Cuba and Venezuela. In Caracas, he called for Venezuela and North Korea to respond jointly to “American pressure and threats.” Shortly thereafter, a North Korean economic delegation arrived in Venezuela. North Korea, faced with a severe energy shortage, happens to be a leading exporter of missiles. Chavez, flush with oil, is on an arms-buying spree.
The terror connection does not end there, for the Sandinistas are also longtime friends of Iran, another of Chavez’s anti-American cohort. In 1980, even as Jimmy Carter was sending hundreds of millions in aid to the Sandinistas, the Nicaraguans were feting the Iranian foreign minister–this while Americans were still being held hostage in Iran.
In September, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared that he and Chavez are like “brothers.” Chavez staunchly defended the Iranian nuclear program at the U.N. General Assembly and vowed in a meeting in Havana that “[u]nder any scenario we are with you … [Venezuela] will stand together with Iran at all times and under any conditions.” That these terrorist alliances may soon have a branch office in the heart of Central America — essentially within walking distance of our undefended border – is a ghastly and terrifying proposition.
In recent days, despite the white-hot battle for control of the Congress, U.S. Congressmen Dana Rohrabacher, Ed Royce, Pete Hoekstra, Tom Tancredo and others have sent clear public warnings to Nicaraguan voters about the stakes in their election, reminding them that one of the terrorists serving a life sentence for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center was found carrying five Sandinista-issued Nicaraguan passports.
Certainly, a Nicaragua that returns to tropical socialism will be a domestic disaster, as it was during the 1980’s. But a Nicaragua that opens its arms to murderous radicalism poses a threat for America and the world. Daniel Ortega is poised, once again, to place his nation’s people and territory in service to the globe’s most deadly tyrannies.
If warnings fall on deaf ears, and Ortega returns to power, it would be more than a simple repeat of history. The technology and mechanics of terrorism have advanced these twenty years, even as biological and nuclear weapons have proliferated. Moreover, a nuclear North Korea and a nuclear Iran could be in position, with an ally so close to our porous frontier, to wreak the havoc we once thought only the Soviet Union could ever bring home.
November 5, not November 7, is the day to watch. And someone said “Macaca?”
— Mark Klugmann is a political consultant and presidential adviser in Latin America. A former speechwriter to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, he also served as assistant director of the White House Outreach Working Group on Central America.
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OTQ3ZWIxN2MwZDhiZjM5MTViNTkyM2Q4MWM0ODc0YTg=
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