However you look at it, Robert Mugabe is getting away with murder. The power-sharing deal he is expected to sign on Monday with his arch-rival, Morgan Tsvangirai, will protect Zimbabwe's president and his cohorts from prosecution for their bloody campaign of killings and terror against opposition supporters and their leaders.
Mugabe will remain president, even though his claim of winning 90% of the valid votes in June's election was met with universal scorn after Tsvangirai pulled out because he did not want people killed going to vote for him.
The last time Zimbabwe's voters had a chance to cast a ballot without a gun to their heads, in the first round of presidential elections in March, Tsvangirai won. And that was with millions of opposition voters in exile and a good deal of other kinds of intimidation by the ruling Zanu-PF party.
Mugabe will sit at the head of a Cabinet half filled with men responsible for robbing Tsvangirai of his electoral victory by murdering, beating and terrorising the supporters of the other half of the Cabinet. When they weren't doing that, they were looting the central bank, stealing land and driving the economy into the ground through incompetence and cynicism, leaving millions on the brink of starvation.
Now Mugabe will sit at the head of a Cabinet half filled with men responsible for robbing Tsvangirai of that victory by murdering, beating and terrorising the supporters -- and sometimes the families -- of the other half of the Cabinet. When they weren't doing that, they were looting the central bank, stealing land and driving the economy into the ground through incompetence and cynicism, leaving millions on the brink of starvation.
So an agreement that persuades the opposition to recognise Mugabe as president and keeps Zanu-PF's killers and looters out of jail might be viewed as a great victory for the old man. Yet the historic deal holds the elements to dismantle Mugabe's 28-year rule and reduce the power of the only leader Zimbabwe has known until a clean election can be held.
Behind the scenes, Movement for Democratic Change leaders are calling the agreement a watershed. Some quietly realise that Monday could mark the end of their struggle to finish Zanu-PF's abusive and sometimes violent political domination - the second liberation struggle, as one put it -- and the beginning of the equally demanding challenge to take control of government.
If they can pull it off -- and, in many ways, whether they succeed or fail lies within the MDC's control, not Zanu-PF's -- then Mugabe's pledge that Tsvangirai would never rule Zimbabwe, and his bloody strategy to try to ensure it did not happen, will ultimately have failed.
It is a complex arrangement, but the nuts and bolts of the agreement are that while Mugabe is president, Tsvangirai has day-to-day control of government as prime minister and head of a council of ministers. That is a considerable asset, even though many of his ministers will be from Zanu-PF. Tsvangirai will run the council of ministers without Mugabe present, but will sit in the Cabinet chaired by the president.
Crucially, the two MDC factions have a majority of one in both bodies, as well as control of Parliament, allowing the party to out-vote Mugabe and set policy. That will allow the MDC to dismantle the apparatus of repression which helped keep Mugabe in power long after his popularity crumbled. The government will be able to abolish legislation banning newspapers, locking up journalists and imposing severe restrictions on freedom of speech.
Posted by: Fred ||
09/15/2008 00:00 ||
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The demise of European social democracy has come suddenly and perhaps unexpectedly. As Roger Liddle from Policy Network, the New Labour think tank that organized the Hertfordshire conference, has pointed out, as recently as 2000 no fewer than eleven out of the then fifteen European Union member states had social democratic or center-left prime ministers. Today there are only four.
Electoral setbacks for social democrats in Europe cannot be dismissed as the temporary result of fickle and volatile voters who will return to the fold in due course. The truth is that social democrats are now very much on the ideological defensive. This does not mean, however, that the axis of political advantage has tilted inexorably rightward in any dramatic way. On the contrary, what should concern social democrats is the unexpected emergence of what looks like a serious threat from new forces to their left.
In Germany Die Linke, or the Left Party, as it is known in English, has become the third-largest political party in the country after the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats. It is the result of a strategic alliance between the old Communists from East Germany and breakaways from the left wing of the Social Democrats, under the charismatic leadership of Oskar Lafontaine, the former finance minister. Der Linke polled around 15 percent in the spring regional elections and has become a pivotal force in cities like Berlin and Hamburg and regions such as Hesse.
A similar left surge at the expense of social democrats has occurred in Denmark. In the 2007 general election the Left Socialists secured 13 percent of the total Danish vote. The electoral shift to a left beyond social democracy has been even more dramatic in the Netherlands. In the last general election in 2006, the Left Socialists won a sixth of the vote, not far behind the Dutch Labour Party, which lost a quarter of its core support and finished with only just over 20 percent.
Women, immigrants, and gays may have won hard fights for legal rights, but their position is also growing more insecure in Europe from those, mainly Muslim, arrivals but also embattled male manual workers, who are less tolerant about pluralism and divergent moral values and more hostile to difference. The fear and experience of crime and terrorism is also more likely to hit the least advantaged than the better off.
All these changes are hitting social democrats more profoundly than any other political grouping in Europe because they reduce the perceived effectiveness of the kind of progressive policies with which they are normally identified. It hits efforts to maintain or create any sense of social or political unity across internal divisions and it also weakens center-left appeals to internationalist solidarity around shared values. This is why social democrats have to focus their attention on religion and culture and not just on their traditional concerns with work and income equality in order to ensure their contemporary relevance.
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The electoral shift to a left beyond social democracy
Women, immigrants, and gays may have won hard fights for legal rights, but their position is also growing more insecure in Europe from those, mainly Muslim, arrivals but also embattled male manual workers, who are less tolerant about pluralism and divergent moral values and more hostile to difference. The fear and experience of crime and terrorism is also more likely to hit the least advantaged than the better off.
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how does it go, you can have 2 out of 3...........
Left-wing feminists have a hard time dealing with strong, successful conservative women in politics such as Margaret Thatcher. Sarah Palin seems to have truly unhinged more than a few, eliciting a stream of vicious, often misogynist invective.
On Salon.com last week, Cintra Wilson branded her a "Christian Stepford Wife" and a "Republican blow-up doll." Wendy Doniger, religion professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, added on the Washington Post blog, "Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."
You'd think that, whether or not they agree with her politics, feminists would at least applaud Mrs. Palin as a living example of one of their core principles: a woman's right to have a career and a family. Yet some feminists unabashedly suggest that her decision to seek the vice presidency makes her a bad and selfish mother. Others argue that she is bad for working mothers because she's just too good at having it all.
In the Boston Globe on Friday, columnist Ellen Goodman frets that Mrs. Palin is a "supermom" whose supporters "think a woman can have it all as long as she can do it all . . . by herself." In fact, Sarah Palin is doing it with the help of her husband Todd, who is currently on leave from his job as an oil worker. But Ms. Goodman's problem is that "she doesn't need anything from anyone outside the family. She isn't lobbying for, say, maternity leave, equal pay, or universal pre-K."
This also galls Katherine Marsh, writing in the latest issue of The New Republic. Mrs. Palin admits to having "an incredible support system -- a husband with flexible jobs rather than a competing career . . . and a host of nearby grandparents, aunts, and uncles." Yet, Ms. Marsh charges, she does not endorse government policies to help less-advantaged working mothers -- for instance, by promoting day-care centers.
Mrs. Palin's marriage actually makes her a terrific role model. One of the best choices a woman can make if she wants a career and a family is to pick a partner who will be able to take on equal or primary responsibility for child-rearing. Our culture still harbors a lingering perception that such men are less than manly -- and who better to smash that stereotype than "First Dude" Todd Palin?
Nevertheless, when Sarah Palin offered a tribute to her husband in her Republican National Convention speech, New York Times columnist Judith Warner read this as a message that she is "subordinate to a great man." Perhaps the message was a brilliant reversal of the old saw that behind every man is a great woman: Here, the great woman is out in front and the great man provides the support. Isn't that real feminism?
Not to Ms. Marsh, who insists that feminism must demand support for women from the government. In this worldview, advocating more federal subsidies for institutional day care is pro-woman; advocating tax breaks or regulatory reform that would help home-based care providers -- preferred by most working parents -- is not. Trying to legislate away the gender gap in earnings (which no self-respecting economist today blames primarily on discrimination) is feminist. Expanding opportunities for part-time and flexible jobs is "the Republican Party line."
I disagree with Sarah Palin on a number of issues, including abortion rights. But when the feminist establishment treats not only pro-life feminism but small-government, individualist feminism as heresy, it writes off multitudes of women.
Of course, being a feminist role model is not part of the vice president's job description, and there are legitimate questions about Mrs. Palin's qualifications. And yet, like millions of American women -- and men -- I find her can-do feminism infinitely more liberated than the what-can-the-government-do-for-me brand espoused by the sisterhood.
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These are the same pseudo feminists who've decried or remain silent as the Armed Forces of the United States has promoted real 'liberation' of their sisters in the heart of one of the most misogynistic regions of the world. They sold their souls to the anti-American left a long time ago.
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The Feminists have effectively made a complete joke of themselves for years, this is just the cherry on the sundae. They are in a complete state of panic that a feminist can be a conservative, and decent looking one at that.
Kat @ "Castle Aarruugghh" Which candidate would you have a beer with at the family reunion?
. . . You didn't even know you had a cousin Sarah until Uncle John introduces her. Okay, yeah, he did mention something one time about a second cousin, three times removed who lived in an igloo with a bunch of kids, sewed moccasins out of moose hide from a moose she tracked ten miles through a blizzard while simultaneously running the entire state of Alaska, but you never thought you were actually going to meet her.
Wow! She is smokin' hot. Except she's got that husband who won the Iron Dog something or other four times. You're not sure exactly what that entails, but anything with the word "iron" in it makes you try to keep acting like you're not looking at her while you chug your Miller Gold. . . .
Uncle John's beaming like a new daddy handing out cigars. He just knew everybody was going to like Cousin Sarah. Professor Cool, community organizer guy comes over and starts in, "Now, hold on. Just hold on a second. I'm the community organizer and she's not doing it right. I mean, sure, she's shot a moose and run a state, but I know how to organize a community and this is not how you organize a community. First, we need a meeting..."
Nobody's listening. Uncle Joe tries to get in on the show, too. He saunters over to where Cousin Sarah is standing, holding a baby on her hip, a bowl of baked beans in one hand and the instructions for erecting the big tent out on the lawn in the other. "Hey, little lady. That looks too hard. Let me help you." Then he takes the bowl of baked beans, sits it on the table and acts like he just successfully negotiated a treaty between Russia and Georgia. . . .
Posted by: Mike ||
09/15/2008 12:44 ||
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Interesting that MacCain was at the NASCAR race yesterday, did a brief statement on the radio during the pre-race show and then again just before firing engines; The crowd sounded like they loved him. Willing to bet you couldn't get The One anywhere near a dirty ol' race track: "Why they have guns and everything there, probably even pocket sized Bibles."
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Wow! She is smokin' hot. Except she's got that husband who won the Iron Dog something or other four times. You're not sure exactly what that entails, but anything with the word "iron" in it makes you try to keep acting like you're not looking at her while you chug your Miller Gold. . . .
