The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Brazil: ‘Far-Right’ Bolsonaro Wins

Posted on | October 29, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

One of the things I despise most about the media’s liberal bias is the dishonest way they make it seem as if there is no such thing as the Left in politics, so that an extremist like Barack Obama — a companion of radical terrorist Bill Ayers, and a congregant at Jeremiah Wright’s anti-white, anti-Semitic, anti-American church — is normalized, whereas anyone who opposes such extremism is labeled “right wing.” This business of ideological labeling serves the partisan interests of the Democrats, whose policies and candidates are always depicted as mainstream, whereas Republicans are subjected to rhetorical demonization simply for advocating common-sense policies. Meanwhile, in Brazil . . .

Far-right lawmaker Jair Bolsonaro won Brazil’s presidential election on Sunday, riding a wave of frustration over corruption and crime that brought a dramatic swing to the right in the world’s fourth-largest democracy.
With 94 percent of ballots counted, Bolsonaro had 56 percent of the votes in the run-off election against left-wing hopeful Fernando Haddad of the Workers Party (PT), who had 44 percent, according to the electoral authority TSE.
“We cannot continue flirting with communism … We are going to change the destiny of Brazil,” Bolsonaro said in an acceptance address in which he vowed to carry out his campaign promises to stamp out corruption after years of leftist rule.
The former army captain’s rise has been propelled by rejection of the leftist PT that ran Brazil for 13 of the last 15 years and was ousted two years ago in the midst of a deep recession and political graft scandal. . . .
Many Brazilians are concerned that Bolsonaro, an admirer of Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship and a defender of its use of torture on leftist opponents, will trample on human rights, curtail civil liberties and muzzle freedom of speech.

At least Reuters is willing to admit that Brazil was under “leftist rule” for more than a decade, which is something the U.S. media have never admitted about the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Obama. Fortunately for Americans, the separation of powers in our Constitution means that Congress can exercise some restraint on presidential power, and in both 1994 and 2010, Republicans won midterm elections in reaction to the left-wing policies of newly-elected Democrat presidents.

One reason Democrats never seem to accept that they’ve gone too far — they keep drifting more and more to the Left, no matter how many elections they lose as a result — is simply because the news media refuses to tell the truth about Democrats and their extreme ideology. And anyone who does tell the truth is condemned as “right wing.”

Far be it from me, of course, to defend the “use of torture on leftist opponents” of Brazil’s former military government. It’s not my place to lecture Brazil on its policies during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was sponsoring radical leftist revolutionaries around the world, including here in the United States. Perhaps the Brazilians would criticize us for not torturing our “leftist opponents,” and why start that argument? Brazil is our friend, and we don’t want to argue with our friends.

Criminal violence in Brazil has been out of control in recent years. There were more than 60,000 murders in the country last year, and seven of the world’s 20 most dangerous cities are in Brazil. That’s right — the murder rate in those cities is worse than Baltimore (#20 on the list) and in four of those cities, it’s even worse than St. Louis (#13).

Bolsonaro has promised to legalize private firearms in Brazil: “Every honest citizen, man or woman, if they want to have a weapon in their homes — depending on certain criteria — should be able to have one.” So now the bad guys (who already have illegal guns) will have to worry that their would-be victims might be armed. That’s good, and as for Bolsonaro’s “leftist opponents” . . . Well, one of my favorite scenes in Scarface is when Tony Montana is being held in an immigration camp, having arrived in the U.S. during the Mariel boatlift from Cuba.

 

His buddy Manny tells Tony that one of Castro’s former Communist henchmen has just arrived in the camp. The Communist “was one of the top dogs for Fidel in the early days,” Manny explains, “but Castro felt he couldn’t trust him anymore, y’know, and threw him in jail. But while he was on top, he tortured a few guys to death.”

A brother of one of the Communist’s victims escaped Cuba and is now a “rich guy in Miami,” who can arrange for Tony to be released and granted permanent U.S. residency — the coveted “green card” — if he will kill the Communist. Tony’s reply is a Cold War classic: “You tell your guys in Miami, your friend, it’d be a pleasure. I kill a Communist for fun, but for a green card? I gonna carve him up real nice.”

Was Tony Montana “far right”? No, he just knew what a Communist was, which was why he knew what a Communist deserved. Selah.



 

 

Category: Brazil, Media Bias

Comments

One Response to “Brazil: ‘Far-Right’ Bolsonaro Wins”

  1. Jair Bolsonaro, Like Everyone the Media Doesn’t Like, is Labeled “Far-right” | 357 Magnum
    October 29th, 2018 @ 10:07 am

    […] UPDATE: Under the heading of “Great Minds Think Alike,” The Other McCain has Brazil: ‘Far-Right’ Bolsonaro Wins […]