Bollettino

Good news from Uruguay this morning.


“Tabaré Vázquez, a Socialist doctor running as the candidate of an opposition coalition that includes former guerrillas, narrowly triumphed Sunday in the presidential election, bringing the left to power for the first time in this South American country.

The victory by the coalition, known as the Progressive-Encounter-Broad-FrontNew-Majority, whose largest faction consists of Tupamaro guerrillas turned politicians, strengthens a trend throughout the continent. As in the last presidential votes in Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador and Argentina, the candidate most opposed to American-supported free-market policies has defeated backers of those policies.”

Given that the model in Iraq is the same model the U.S. has pursued in Central and South America, LI’s hope, floating somewhere in the distant future, is that Iraq will go through the furnace of the American occupation with its major industry and structure intact – a state owned petroleum company at the center of it – and resolutely and democratically break with the logic of neo-liberalism. It is a continuing astonishment to LI that Vietnam (or, on the right, WWII) have been the template comparisons for a black bag op that has all the indices of the usual slimy Latin American intervention, right down to Negroponte, the mollusk pulling the strings from the American embassy. In fact, we are pretty confident that the most successful American reconstruction project in Iraq will be the CIA’s cheerful attempt to get the torturers rolling again with its hands on aid to the Mukhabarat.

As for our election here in the States – LI has been waking up cautiously optimistic for the last couple of days. While the polls don’t look too good for Kerry, the voter turnout numbers look like they could be very good for him. The Republican strategy of suppressing the voter turnout is, we optimistically think, doomed to fail. Our slim hope rests, partly, on the odd difference between the reported results from early voting in Nevada and Florida, where there seems to be a Dem surge, and the polls, which record a Republican edge. Our desire that this coup be over (deliver us, o Lord) has briefly surmounted the usual intellectual distance we try to gaze into around the LI office. Yes, we folded up the intellectual distance and chucked it in the drawer for the nonce. We actually think Max Boot is about right – the options facing both Kerry and Bush, given the right-defined landscape of American politics, financial reality, and the American penchant for ending its foreign policy failures by retreating from the various bloody theaters into which we should never have stuck our beaks in a hail of bombs and bromides, are too narrow to allow for too much diversity – but a too studied disdain for the symbolic plane misses the way options are formed. There is literature in life as well as decision trees.

We’ve been pleased to see that the Sex industry is coming out for Kerry. While wiling away our surfing hours looking for comforting quotes from our Lord Jesus Christ, somehow, oh somehow, we came upon a situationist site run by a Pagan Moss, Sensual lib, full of pics of cheerful and intently bodacious naked gals interspersed with cutting remarks about jefe Bush. This is probably not a link you want to open around the kids, or at work (pay attention, now, to our prophylactic remarks, since there are penises involved here -- for those of you shocked at the existence of such things). Brian Leiter linked to a phone sex site for Republicans, Lie Girls, where all your Cheney-ite fantasies can come, briefly, true.