Charles you have jumped the shark.

The guy is killing political opponents and terrorizing a nation.

Do you blame this on global capitalism too?

Meanwhile the govt. of South Africa --you know the big neighbor, with a big army, industry, an economy, and democracy -- stands by and does nothing.

Charles right now it's Mugabe's fault, it's South Africa's fault, and it's the fucking OAU's fault for doing nothing.

Proving once again that people everywhere of every race are all equally fucked up.

Go ahead. This is the only comment you can make ...to suggest Mugabe is equal to Bush so.....gee,he's not so bad?

Sick.

Bush won't murder people on their way to ballot boxes. It's as simple as that. There's no comparison.

in charles' defense, i think it's safe to say that more people have died as a direct result of Bush's administration than Mugabe's.

sure, charles' post is hyperbolic, but it's important to remember that we're looking at at LEAST 100,000 *documented* civilian deaths since the occupation. the real number is probably up in the half million range.

http://newmexiken.com/wp-content/images/2008/06/_NYTimes.png

What about intention? Does Bush organize militia's to terrorize voters? Does he torture and kill his political opponents and their supporters on a vast scale? Does he systematically starve opposition supporters by taking away the food stamp privileges if they are registered for the wrong party?

what about cultural influences? For instance, to say that Bush is entirely responsible for all the deaths in Iraq, lets Americans who voted Bush into office twice, off the hook. It also lets the people off the hook, who didn't vote for Bush but didn't particularly act to prevent his election.

But you've missed the discussion entirely. Charles' rabidity comes from Bush calling the Mugabe government "illegitimate." At least, that's what he bolded, so it's only reasonable to assume that his point was that Bush is worse than Mugabe in that context. Which is simply batshit crazy and unsupportable -- whatever shenanigans went in in 2000, nobody was executed or maimed.

If you want to get into the moral equivalency of terrible (even criminal) policies that lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths versus organizing death squads to terrorize the citizens of one's own country, well, LMSW said it better than I could.

God, I hate knee-jerkers who only know volume-at-eleven outrage and hyperbole.

but he did come to power fraudulently and then defrauded a nation into war and used the most powerful and deadly military in human history to occupy a nation with the world's largest oil reserves, in the course of which, at least 4000 US soldiers and 100,000 iraqi civilians have been killed.

so i'd say he and mugabe are pretty karmically equal. by your rationale, we can't blame mugabe either, it's not like he's *personally* breaking baby's legs etc...

Whenever Bush denounces other leaders as dictators and blithers on about their illeagal elections, doesn't "President Kettle has a lot of Chuzpah to chastise Dictator Pot" pop into EVERYBODY'S head?

It sometimes attempts to do actual reporting -- as in calling sources, doing research.

Then it has inane posts such as the one by Mr. Mudade, followed, of course, by inane posts from the regulars on Slog.

Then it also prints just crap that is supposed to ironic/just kidding/we're so cool so like, can't you take a joke.

Then it has staffers who proudly publicize their credentials as drunkards and druggies.

Well, that's all great if your main audience is people who don't read anything serious, anyway, and couldn't manage to get past the first paragraph of any kind of substantive story.

But the problem is that this reverbarates through how readers perceive all stories in The Stranger.

Is this a for-real story?

Or is this a joke story?

What a reader ends up doing is not trusting any Stranger story, which is too bad for the few stories in the paper in which an actual effort was made.

I also think it should be noted that South Africa's lack of action is because who the fuck fought with them while white people made every black person a second class citizen in their own country? Yeah, Mugabe has lost his fucking mind but he used to be a well-respected ally, basically a fucking hero to the cause of independence.

He's nuts now. That needs to be fixed. A million things have caused the problems in Zimbabwe (need I mention the AIDS crisis? Half the people there are dying anyway) and clearly Mugabe is not a good leader. But 1 - it's actually none of our fucking business and getting all imperial on their asses is only going to strengthen his support and 2 - it needs to be done carefully, gently, and in a way that is not damaging to the citizens of Zimbabwe. Or shall we go in, ignoring all the *actual* politics of the place, and cause a civil war?

"War may be bad for children and other living things, but there are times when peace is worse for children and other living things, and this is one of those times."

"The War on Iraq will make it clear to our friends and enemies in the Middle East (and elsewhere) that we mean business: Free your people, reform your societies, liberalize, and democratize... or we're going to come over there, remove you from power, free your people, and reform your societies for ourselves."

Washington Post June 27, 2008

"Bomb Kills Marines, Iraqi Tribal Leaders
At Least 40 Die in Two Separate Attacks"