The other day your Wonkette LIED when we described whatever Facebook thing happened with the French President as our “annual bit of foreign news.” Turns out there were two foreign things to happen in 2009! Kindly direct your attention to this absolutely insane Wall Street Journal article: “Like a lot of countries, Mexico has a federal government. It meets in a number of imposing colonial and modern buildings around the country. But Mexico has another body, the so-called ‘Legitimate Government,’ which claims to be running the republic, too. It meets here in the capital every 15 days in a former garage at 64 San Luis Potosí St.” Please and thank you!
A bunch of countries have shadow governments in case something happens like the US decides to bomb their real governments, but this Mexican iteration is so comical! The president of Mexico’s shadow government demands that everyone call him the “Legitimate President of Mexico.” Dude lost the presidential election in 2006, citing election fraud, and inaugurated himself in public anyway.
He went on to found a parallel executive branch of government that proposes new laws, issues statements, holds elections, officiates during Mexican Independence Day, and even circulates its own form of identification card for Mexicans (some 2.8 million Mexicans carry them, according to a Legitimate Government spokesman).
Nowadays, Mr. López Obrador tours the country giving presidential speeches where he is introduced as the real McCoy. After three years of this, he will soon have visited all of Mexico’s 2,438 municipalities. That would make him, he says, the first politician — indeed, maybe even the first man — ever to have done that.
Everyone involved Legitimate Government is of course tragically earnest about it all, while everyone in Government Government tries their best to be polite and patient… but goodness!
[Wall Street Journal]
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Elections?!? I don’t need no stinking elections!!!
They have their very own Eleanor Holmes Norton – how cute!
AMLO: El Senor Presidente Legitimo (aka, El McCoy Autentico)
Al Gore should have had the cojones to do that back in 2001.
Since Emperor Norton was also the Protector of Mexico it is clear that both these “governments” lack all legitimacy.
The tragedy of Lopez Obrador is that he was robbed of an election in the wrong country. Next time, try Iran or some other country the US hates. You’ll get a lot more sympathy.
¡Usted engaña!
I break into the big hit from “López Obrador’s Rainbow”:
“How are things in Nacajuca?
¿Eso poco arroyo todavía está saltando allí?”
Mexicans have Mr. López Obrador and young American women have Meghan McCain.
¡Ay, el estomago!
[re=456654]Next Great Pwndit[/re]: Ha ha ha!
[re=456655]user-of-owls[/re]: Ever hear the one about the coke-sacker, the sock-tucker, the cork-soaker, and the real McCoy?
All these Mexican governments have one thing in common; they all hate Lou Dobbs.
[re=456656]bureaucrap[/re]: True, Gore had no cojones, but Clinton had Paula Jones.
Mexico Has a President Who Runs Things and One Who Doesn’t
We did that for eight years — trust me guys, it turns into a mess.
Maybe we can import the “selling oranges to reduce the deficit” cunning plan.
Lou Dobbs is quitting to become the press secretary for the legitimate president of Mexico. It’s obvious!
This is good news for John McCain.
Mexico also has a great film director named Senor Spielbergo.
McCain’s got the same strategy just with Sunday talk shows. The only politician, nay, the only person, to appear on every single episode of every single show since last November.
I haven’t seen Calderón’s birth certificate, so maybe this Obrador fellow is onto something.
Obrador insists he hasn’t asked Sarah Palin to campaign for him, nor does he have plans to ask her to do so.
Does Obrador need an official motorcade? We have one that we can spare.
AMLO is my prez.
The two governments have appeared to have reached some sort of standoff . . .
[re=456708]Car Ramrod[/re]: ¿Donde esta la partida de nacimiento?
As the temperature rose, so did his voice as he railed against high prices for tamales, corporate tax loopholes and political corruption, all of which he vowed to fight off with new legislation and decrees.
Nothin’ gets folks riled up more than tellin’ ‘em they’re payin’ too damn much for tamales.
We should give the wingnuts their own pretend government here. They could elect Lou Dobbs pretend president, Ron Paul could be pretend Secretary of the Treasury. Michelle Bachman could be pretend Speaker of the House! They could pretend to amend the constitution to outlaw muslimism and force the relocation of homosexuals, that kind of thing.
Then we could pat them on the head and give them a cookie before bed.
I smell re-make!! Obrador is Rufus T. Firefly, Eleanor Norton is Mrs. Teasdale, and Calderon is Trentino; if we can get Don “Sabado Gigante” Francisco to play Chicolini and Cheech to do Pinky, I think we’ve got a cast for “Sopa del Pato.”
[re=456753]Tommmcatt[/re]: We pretty much already do this, but as a nation can’t quite bring ourselves to whip the shit out of their smelly asses when they invoke the 10th Amendment in their attempts to nullify bedtime. What do people think “Beat on the Brat” was really about, anyway?
¿Donde esta la casa de peepee?
I had the pleasure to get stuck in the middle of a couple Lopez Obrador demonstrations while visiting Mexico City. They were just completely massive. Do not mess with Lopez Obrador, Wonkette. Likely the only reason why Calderón hasn’t shut him down is because of the threat of civil war.
[re=456735]S.Luggo[/re]: El gusto es mio.
[re=456847]sezme[/re]: Oops, I meant to close that italics tag after the word not. ¡Idiota!
[re=456847]sezme[/re]: the only reason why Calderón hasn’t shut him down is because of the threat of civil war.
Well, that and the fact that the only thing AMLO’s managed to accomplish so far is to become a favorite in the Guinness Book of Records competition for “World’s Longest Continually Running Foot Stomp and Shoutfest.”
Actually, Lopez Obrador probably did win the 2006 elections, but it was very close, and in the history of Mexican governments stolen elections, it was much less drastic a theft (if it was) then when the Presidency was stolen from the left-liberal Cuauhtemoc Cardenas — which pretty much all observers now agree was done, in order that Salinas & crew could use the remaining PRI dictatorship years to do things like push through NAFTA.
Lopez Obrador’s “gobierno legitimo” hasn’t created any miracles, but instead of simply retiring or making lots of personal money which he could have, the ex-governor of Tabasco (also known as AMLO) has spent the last years touring the country’s completely ignored and screwed over poor and indigenous communities, helping lead marches, protests, etc.
The current actual government just disbanded the nation’s largest municipal electrical utility by arguing that it was inefficient, a conclusion which that same government ensured by not paying the electrical bills it, the government, owed to the electrical utility.
This is a cheap plot to privatize a functional utility, and a predecessor to oil industry privatization — and looks ready to prompt a serious of national strikes by the electrical workers and maybe more, given the Mexican government’s initiative to make up the budget woes by increasing taxes on consumer purchases on a population whose income has largely collapsed.
On occasion snark requires that you know at least a tiny something about the subject of your snark. At least, good snark.
[re=456917]EnBuenOra[/re]: Thank you for something rather more intelligent than another “Silly Pouty Messicans” quip.
You can always depend on the Wall Street Journal for snark when it comes to Mexico… though it might help if they hired reporters with some knowledge of Mexican history and political culture. There seems to be an assumption on the part of U.S. media that because you live in a country with two parties (capitalist and rightist), that’s the only alternative. In a multi-party state like Mexico (where 2/3rds of the voters select socialist or social-democratic parties), the Calderón administration is an anomoly.
The “shadow government” concept was, ironically enough, pioneered by the right. Manuel Clothier having campaigned as PAN’s presidential candidate in the stolen 1988 elections with the full intention of losing, ran on the platform of becoming a rightist pressure group, via a “hadow government”. As a think tank and party training institute, it was highly successful in the long run, even without Clothier, who died in an auto accident soon after the elections. The shadow “Secretary of Agriculture,” Vicente Fox, used his position to launch his own personal political agenda, and the “shadow cabinet” was the core of a huge party-building and expansion program that allowed it to become the true beneficiary of the electorial reforms forced on the Salinas adminstration following their theft of the presidency in 1988.
Those elections were ALSO stolen from the left (which makes PAN’s rise all that more ironic) — also during a far-right wing U.S. presidency, and now known to have been assisted by U.S. intelligence agencies. In the 2006 elections, Republican Party operatives and “consultants” were acting illegally on behalf of PAN, and there is suspicion that the U.S. government may have played a role in the eventual outcome.
AMLO probably actually won the 2006 elections, and his “shadow government” — while also working as a think tank and party-building tool — has been highly successful. As EnBuenaOra points out, the “shadow government” has been successful in moving legislation back towards the left after several years of “neo-liberalismo” under the later PRI administrations, and right-wing legislation under PAN.
Furthermore, and something WSJ is unlikely to understand, is this is a movement from below. AMLO himself remains hugely popular among the urban working class and in indigenous and rural communities. The attacks on him in the press (both Mexican and U.S.) focused during his administration in Mexico City on “wasteful” programs, but ignored his huge support in those poorer and middle class neighborhoods, which appreciated moving police resources from the wealthier areas to less serviced areas… basic garbage collection and street lighting politics.
Finally, you have to recognize that the guy’s background is as a labor organizer and social services administrator. And was heavily influenced both by Mexican Protestant social thinking and Liberation Theology… again, things beyond the understanding of the WSJ. The point is the “Gobierno legitimo” is a much more serious, more sustainable and long-term movement than those “astroturfed” groups, like the “tea-party movement” that you think are meaningful.
Obrador won the election which was blatantly stolen from him by the piece of shit who’s currently sitting in that office. He would have been great too. I know, I live in Mexico City, where he instituted single payer health insurance for everyone who lives there, including myself.
What’s Al Gore doin’ down in Messico?
[re=457499]Dolmance[/re]: And, yes, Obrador had his presidency ganked from him even more blatantly than Al Gore’s was ganked.
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