Bush Will Personally Kill Colombian Labor Leaders if You Don't Pass His Stupid Trade Deal

Posted by BoRev, BoRev at 12:03 PM on April 9, 2008.

Note from PEEK guest editor Joshua H: If you, like me, are constantly banging your head against the desk in response to the commercial media's coverage of Latin American politics, BoRev -- a rare pro-Venezuelan perspective --is a hilarious antidote. I read it every day, and you should too.

If we've learned anything about surviving the Bush era, it's this: As the number of Administration and Washington Post staff reiterating a single message increases, the probability of it all being one big, fat lie approaches one.

Yesterday our dumb president went on the teevee to force the legislative branch into a vote on a trade deal with Colombia within 90 days. And while Congress will be allowed to read and discuss the bill, they will not be permitted to amend it in any way, because of the democracy.

This trade pact is all very crucial, says Bush, because the murder rate of Colombian trade unionists has gone down this year, and you wouldn't want it to go back up now would you? Condi said basically the same thing in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, and of course the Post ran an editorial saying Obama must be crazy for "believing" the stories of violence at all, and on the right hand side of the same page George Will helpfully explains that last year "The murder rate of unionists was less than one-eighth the murder rate of Colombians generally."

Clearly we are just one Colin Powell power point presentation away from a never-ending blood spattered Colombian trade quagmire.

UPDATES: You won't know whether to laugh or cry over...today's AP story on how "Uribe's administration has encouraged assassinations of trade unionists who cause problems for companies"...the NYT piece on the ridiculously extravagant multi-million dollar lobbying campaign the Colombian government is financing...the fact that Mark Penn never actually quit or got fired from the Clinton campaign over all this in the first place...this newly-released report on the human rights tragedy that is Colombia...Dan Kennedy's report on "the Clintons' longstanding tolerance of human-rights abuses in Colombia."

Ed note: Also see the op-ed by Dem Reps. Michael Michaud and Phil Hare, two of the best legislators on trade.

Tagged as: bush, propaganda, colombia fta