Harold Meyerson is really pushing the hypocrisy charge past all reason. He claims that Mexico City's PRD (hard left) mayor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is being shuffled out of contention for the presidency in 2006 by ginned up corruption charges. It's a wonder that Mr. Meyerson thinks his own credibility is worth muddying up due to his support of such a dubious figure.
If the Mayor's finance minister blows $3,000,000 on Las Vegas casino's the Bellagio is in league with Mexico's president and an international list of conspirators to take the mayor out of contention for the presidency. This is the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy writ large, with lots of hot rhetoric and no evidence whatsoever despite repeated promises.
If Mayor Obrador decides he doesn't like a judicial decision, he seems to have a regrettable tendency to just ignore it, whether it's to build a road that has an injunction in place against it or detaining Spanish workers putting up street kiosks under a legal contract Mayor Obrador doesn't like. The full Wikipedia entry has an entire section devoted to these and other controversies. Apparently, the federal prosecutor delayed prosecution until he, himself was at risk of indictment for obstruction of justice and asked for Obrador's immunity to be lifted.
So here we have some sleazy little land seizure deal, a prosecutor unaccustomed to actually prosecuting government figures on illegal expropriation of land, and Harold Meyerson makes it an international case of hypocrisy that President Bush hasn't protested the indictment of a personally popular mayor who is fond of spinning wide conspiracy theories and surrounding himself (at the very least) with corrupt figures who have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
That's just sad.
Posted by TMLutas at April 16, 2005 01:17 PM