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Last updated on July 24th, 2017 at 08:17 am
Daniel Ortega and his little Sandinista buddies face revived claims of crimes against humanity. Remember when lefties adored these goons? Possibly they still do.
You can bet this wacky old sandalnista thinks those Crazy Central American Cocaine commies are kewl.
I don’t recall anyone saying sorry they were ever wrong wherever thay allege to be on the political landscape.
My memory has Ortega been voted in and out and then losing again later.
Not surprising given his appalling record as President.He was installed as Pres following the defeat of Somoza but won elections I think in 1982 with over 60% of the vote.
I don’t think you can call him a dictator however he was a poor president who let ideology get in the way of improving people’s lives which is why he lost.Posted by Homer Paxton on 2005 08 05 at 12:21 AM • permalink
indeed but one who got elected despite ronnie’s attempts to stop it.
Posted by Homer Paxton on 2005 08 05 at 12:31 AM • permalink
Homer, did Ortega hire you as an INTERNET propangandist? Or do you apologize for blood drenched communist dictators as a public service?
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2005 08 05 at 12:56 AM • permalink
C’mon, Tim, the lefties would have dropped Ortega years ago! For God’s sake, the man is just too damned ugly – the moonbats want their heroes young and beautiful like Che, who, let’s admit it, looked fantastic on a T-shirt.
Posted by SwinishCapitalist on 2005 08 05 at 12:58 AM • permalink
the real Jeffs perhaps you need lessons in english.
can you show where I am apologising for him.
As I recall it Ortega has been savaged by allegations of improper sexual realtions by some close relations.
Posted by Homer Paxton on 2005 08 05 at 01:53 AM • permalink
- Posted by SwinishCapitalist on 2005 08 05 at 02:21 AM • permalink
“the real Jeffs perhaps you need lessons in english.”
From Homer.
Ha!
Pot, meet Kettle.
Posted by Quentin George on 2005 08 05 at 02:29 AM • permalink
Careful- the Homeboy has a problem with things being called black.
#13- same goes for a swag of Argentine refugees; I’ve got a client who’s El Salvadorian, and he’s the hardest working bugger I know, and has his family and a lot of his community involved as well, sposors a soccor club etc, so it’s not a Central/South American/been persecuted by scumbag dictator thing. Then again, I know some Cubans who are lazier than a 3 toed sloth employed as a council road worker- go figure.
Ortega took power as part of a five-man junta in 1979, which he then consolidated into personal rule. The Nicaraguan constitution was suspended, the press was muzzled, dissidents were persecuted, and the Miskito Indians force-marched into re-education camps.
Five years into this dictatorship, symbolic elections were held. The constitution was still suspended, the press was still under government control, there was intimidation of opposition candidates by Stasi-trained secret policemen. These were the “free and fair” elections by which Ortega’s dictatorship was ratified by a supposed margin of 60+%.
Posted by Warmongering Lunatic on 2005 08 05 at 02:55 AM • permalink
Homer, if you are not apologizing for Ortega, read post #15 (thanks, Warmongering Lunatic!), and then re-read your comment #:3
I don’t think you can call him a dictator however he was a poor president who let ideology get in the way of improving people’s lives which is why he lost.
Now, clearly describe how you not calling the dictator Ortega a dictator is not apologizing for him.
Oh, God, waitaminute! I’m talking with Homer Paxton, The Man Who Is Communication Challenged, asking him to be clearin his communications.
Never mind, Homer. My bad.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2005 08 05 at 03:47 AM • permalink
Habib, that’s kinda wierd about the Aussie Cubans. In south Florida those mo-fo’s worked so friggin’ hard that they run the place now.
And, of course, the “African-American Community” bitches and moans about the power the Cubanos have, considering the fact that blacks and cubans are pretty much equal in population.
Of course, when you have one “community” that is dedicated to being slum-bound, and another “community” that is dedicated to being sucessful, you know who is going to end up running the place.
Posted by David Crawford on 2005 08 05 at 04:29 AM • permalink
David, he said Nicaraguans, not Cubans. In any case, as I lived in Miami for most of my life I can tell you that the Nicaraguans that came to the States were just about as hard-working as the Cubans were. Probably because they were all the ones with money that left the country when the communists took over there, same as in Cuba.
I worked with a Nicaraguan girl who told how the Sandinistas invaded their house in her country: one of them, a woman, beat their maid (so much for being for the People) and did things like smash all the perfume bottles on her mother’s dresser, just because. But yeah, let’s shed a tear for poor “elected by 60%” Ortega. Not.
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2005 08 05 at 07:14 AM • permalink
Yes and there was the case of English speaking blacks on the North Coast of Nicaragua that were slaughtered by the Sanidanistas.
Posted by Andrew Ian Dodge on 2005 08 05 at 07:16 AM • permalink
And, of course, the “African-American Community” bitches and moans about the power the Cubanos have…Of course, when you have one “community” that is dedicated to being slum-bound, and another “community” that is dedicated to being sucessful, you know who is going to end up running the place.
Ditto for blacks vs Vietnamese and Koreans in NY, from what I’ve read.
Posted by walterplinge on 2005 08 05 at 07:32 AM • permalink
In one of PJ O’Rourkes books, I can’t remember which one, he describes the 1990 Nicaraguan election where the Sandinistas were routed despite polls predicting they would win, and how crestfallen all the Western lefties who there to ‘observe’ a Sandinista victory were such as Jimmy Carter and Bianca Jagger. Particularly when he and his mate started reenacting Ceaucescu’s recent execution in front of them in the hotel.
OT, looks like some election promises weren’t kept after all:
Americans didn’t flock to Canada after Bush win
Posted by Art Vandelay on 2005 08 05 at 09:19 AM • permalink
All those wannabe emigrants have been too busy ranting on Daily Kos and DU to get the paperwork done, I guess.
But hey, they’re lefties…they talked about doing it, that’s exactly the same as actually doing it, right?
Money graf:
But official statistics show the number of Americans actually applying to live permanently in Canada fell in the six months after the election.
Gee, I guess people prefer the Bushitler dictatorship over the liberal utopia after all. Wonder why.
Andrea – Florida freaks me out, but I envy your access to all that great, great Cuban food – so much better than what you actually get in Cuba, where ingredients are as hard to find as bad economic news in Granma, the dreadful Party newspaper. Another side-effect of Fidel’s glorious revolution – the migration of authentic Cuban cuisine to Miami and New Jersey.
Posted by rick mcginnis on 2005 08 05 at 10:10 AM • permalink
And, of course, the “African-American Community” bitches and moans about the power the Cubanos have, considering the fact that blacks and cubans are pretty much equal in population.
In my home town of Buffalo, blacks were getting upset that Arabs were buying grocery stores in their neighborhoods – stores that served the black communities and that no-one else wanted because they were so dangerous to operate. One black city councilman said, “We resent this intrusion of other races into our neighborhoods.” He didn’t get any flack for that comment at all. Not a word.
Spike Lee could have made a balanced, sober film about it. Snort!
From the article on the non-flocking of American lefties:
Canada generally tilts more to the social and political left than the United States.
There’s that tilt again! Lefties love their compassionate tilts! The MSM sez so!!
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2005 08 05 at 10:32 AM • permalink
“Tilts” is more, in actual practice, like “staggers”.
Posted by rick mcginnis on 2005 08 05 at 11:07 AM • permalink
But those dashing brown revolutionaries are so earthy and authentic… how can the latte lefties NOT love them? Remember when Leonard Bernstein used to invite the Black Panthers to his penthouse parties as scenery?
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 08 05 at 11:52 AM • permalink
The P.J. O’Rourke essay is in Give War a Chance. It’s one of my favourite pieces of political writing.
Where I live, Nicas do all the scut-work (my maid is from Nicaragua, and works like a demon—my flat is gleaming). Of course the Costa Ricans resent the hell out of them for it. It’s just like Mexicans in California. If you see a guy trimming hedges or sweeping the streets, odds on he’s a Nica. The fact that a million people fled south from Nicaragua is entirely due to Danny Boy and his band of thugs. The big problem with peaceful transitions from Communism: you don’t get to take members of the former regime and machine-gun them.
Posted by David Gillies on 2005 08 05 at 01:01 PM • permalink
Yipes! Stop the world for a minute if you please. A point of clarification is needed here. I realize that not everything is rendered clear to an aging Yojimbo but.
“…he was a poor president who let his ideology get in the way of improving people’s lives…”
I guess I was under the mistaken impression that this WAS the ideology that was supposed to improve people’s lives. Does the left have some other ideology out there that they bring out on holidays or something for the express purpose of improving people’s lives? I fully admit that I’m sometimes not nuanced enough to grapple with the various patinas of truth on the march so I guess I will just apolgize ahead of time.
By the way, I want to now present the case for not prosecuting this bastard. It’s very, very simple—he peacefully handed over power to an elected opposition government.
Look, he deserves everything that can be thrown at him. But, it is useful to let dictators know they can give up power and retire peacefully. Otherwise, we create an incentive for a dictator to hold on for life just to avoid being brought to account for his crimes.
The example that comes to mind was the Pinochet extradition. While a Spanish magistrate was demanding Pinochet, Fidel Castro was able to visit Spain in full soverign immunity from prosecution. If you’re a dictator, it becomes obvious that it is unsafe to surrender power; that for self-preservation, one should cling to power as long and as hard as one can. Which means either more of the bloodshed of tyranny or the bloodshed of a successful revolution.
Accordingly, while justice says Ortega belongs in prison or at the end of a noose, the better policy choice is to allow dictators to peacefully retire. If you couple that with an active policy of overthrowing dictators and putting them on trial, like in the case of Saddam Hussein, then you have an incentives system that should help end tyranny.
Posted by Warmongering Lunatic on 2005 08 05 at 06:47 PM • permalink
I think that the wonderfully named Warmongering Lunatic is right, creating disincentives to dictators to retire is a very bad idea. Before the Iraq war, Bush publicly offered Saddam a chance to stand down peacefully, and not be pursued, and although Saddam is far worse even than the Sandinistas I think it was right to offer that chance.
Of course this doesn’t mean Ortega shouldn’t be charged over the alleged sexual abuse of his step daughter.
But official statistics show the number of Americans actually applying to live permanently in Canada fell in the six months after the election.
Hey, do you know how much Starbucks and granola cost in Canadian money?!
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 08 05 at 07:41 PM • permalink
One always has a period in a country when a dictator is gotten rid of until one has elections.
This happened when Somoza was deposed and Ortega took over.
It is a bit rich to call this a dictatorship.One can certainly criticise the electoral procedures in the first elections held however they really had nothing to go on.
Ortega was alwas going to win because his opponent was wrongly tainted with the somoza brush.The same procedures were involved that led to orgtega losing the election primarily becuase the people realised he was incompetent and wanted market reforms.
there was one good thing to come from the revolution.
The clash’s best album.Posted by Homer Paxton on 2005 08 05 at 08:03 PM • permalink
The Clash sucked. I can’t believe an entire generation fell for that bunch of can’t-sing, can’t-play, can’t-arrange-a-song frauds. Oh I forgot—DIY, punknotdead, blah blah blah.
Suckers.
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2005 08 05 at 09:09 PM • permalink
I adore you but we part company when you say The Clash suck.
Despite crossing the aisle politically, I still maintain The Clash were one of the greatest rock bands ever. And yes, that’s even after reading the myth busting group bio “The Last Gang In Town”.
The only reason I know of (and own) Peter Garrett and Midnight Oil LPs is that they were often described as the Australian Clash.
I take comfort that Joe Strummer was reportedly reading the Telegraph (UK) when he died. I think he had great talent but, as we know, it’s lefty boilerplate that pays the bills.
RIP Strummer.
PS—What WAS the result of those sexual abuse charges v Ortega? I remember them but never heard any result. My (still) lefty friends think I made it up reading about it to discredit Saint Danny Boy.
It’s very, very simple—he peacefully handed over power to an elected opposition government.
Yeah, I’m of the same mind most of the time myself. Yes, it’s galling and disgusting to think about people like that spending out their lives in a peaceful exile, but sometimes bringing them to justice just costs too many lives.
Posted by John Nowak on 2005 08 05 at 11:51 PM • permalink
Whoa, even by Midnight Oil standards, Sandanista! was not the best Clash album. London Calling maybe, or the first album, but the nicest thing about Sandanista! was that it was a decent single album hiding inside a triple album monstrosity.
And I’ve heard that Strummer was tilting faintly rightward when he died – an unattributed quote just after 9/11 saying that the left had no idea who they were supporting when they talked about “root causes” comes to mind, but I’ve never seen it properly sourced.
He was the guy who wore the Red Brigades t-shirt onstage, then got all apologetic when someone gave him the backstory on that particular organization. I’d like to think that one of my youthful heroes was able to navigate his way out of the leftist swamp, but I think I might just be projecting…
Posted by rick mcginnis on 2005 08 06 at 12:38 AM • permalink
I Agree with Andrea, I remember when Strummer died the BBC and the rest of the British media went into paroxysms of grief about the music “that defined a generation” I remeber thinking “Eh, that was my generation, I don’t remember anybody that liked the Clash.” Oh hang on there were a couple of nerdy types in class, the sort that hung around with themselves convinced they were the only ones ‘who got it’. They would go to their horrible little bedrooms and listened to their Clash LPs in between bouts of mutual masturbation.
Oh God, it then dawned on me, they’ve taken over, they are now the ones defining the nature of society and I realised then why the country’s in such a mess; the ‘wankers’ are in charge!
Posted by Harry Flashman on 2005 08 06 at 12:57 AM • permalink
While I’m at it, I can’t stand Bruce Springsteen either. As for Midnight Oil… let’s just say of Australian groups I’d rather listen to AC/DC or the DiVinyls. Jet’s pretty good too.
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2005 08 06 at 12:49 PM • permalink
With you on Springsteen – I grew up in a working class ‘hood, and nobody listened to the Jersey bard, as far as I could tell.
Except people from Jersey, of course. And Patti Smith.
Posted by rick mcginnis on 2005 08 06 at 02:42 PM • permalink
…But then again, I loved Kiss and Air Supply.
My sense of cultural redemption rests with the fact that I’ve always thought “The Boss” and his entire E-street were total fuscia-scarved dorks.
The only volk I knew who fawned over ‘the working class bard’ were the Che shirt wearing sort whose idea of a sweaty days work involved a monthly hungover dormroom phone call to daddy morebucks.
The Clash make me recall a John Mortimer character; a radical left wing lawyer who smoked rough hand rolled tobacco to show his affinity with the “working man” – while the REAL workers were smoking filtered low tar cigarettes anyway. The Clash were a bunch of middle class radicals who liked to pretend they were the voice of unemployed, council estate, youth. But REAL unemployed youths from council estates were rotting their minds to Def Leppard and committing suicide to Judus Priest at the time.
I’m agree with Andrea on this. They couldn’t play for shit and their politics were nauseating.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=18739
Given the rate of firing squad executions in Cuba in the early 60’s, thousands of gallons of perfectly good, perfectly valuable blood gushed from the bodies of young men only to soak uselessly into the mud, wash into gutters or get sopped up by buckets of sawdust. By 1961 Cuba’s government was already desperately short on foreign exchange. In two short years Castro had rendered a nation with a living standard higher than half of Europe and with a peso always on par with the U.S. dollar, utterly destitute, utterly bereft of foreign exchange. The massive Soviet subsidies could never compensate for the destruction of Cuba’s vibrant pre-Castro economy.
In 1961 an ocean of fresh, plasma-rich Cuban blood was being freed from its confines by bullets and spilling in torrents daily. The Castroites hit upon the scheme of collecting it and selling it.
*****
In a film titled “Cursed Be Your Name, Liberty,” Cuban exile Vladimir Ceballos documents how in the mid 80’s over one hundred Cuban youths deliberately injected themselves with the aids virus. At the time Castro’s Cuba had developed a very efficient method of dealing with the malady. The patients were banished to “sanatoriums” in the middle of the countryside and basically left alone till they died. “Left alone” is the key phrase here.
Apparently to some tortured souls banishment in those AIDS sanatoriums smacked of freedom, as compared to life on the outside.
Adam B – not to rain on a perfectly good rant, but at least half of the Clash – Mick Jones and Paul Simenon – were actually working class youth, products of London’s awful tower blocks, which were supposed to replace the tenements and council terraces. Strummer, on the other hand, was the son of a civil servant – the sort of middle class voyeur you talked about, who lived in squats and downgraded his accent. So – half right. (Don’t know about Topper Headon, however.)
Posted by rick mcginnis on 2005 08 07 at 10:59 AM • permalink
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