Spreading Democracy when it suits us

Occasionally, one finds a smackdown so definitive in a comment board that it simply needs to be preserved for posterity. From this Nathan Newman post on the recent subversion of democracy in Mexico:

From Confederate Yankee:

It's very simple. If Bush and the neoconservatives do not protest this attempt to disenfranchise the left in Mexico, NOTHING they say about "democracy" in the rest of the world should be taken seriously.

You wrote this while sober?

The United States is continuing to establish two fledgling democracies in former totalitarian republics that have not seen freedom in this lifetime, after freeing 50 million people, while covertly supporting the peaceful overthrown of Syrian dominance in Lebanon, while being the primary caregiver to a tsunami-ravaged southwest Asia, while still trying to act as a buffer against a looming potential invasion of Taiwan by China.

Are you so blind that you really think a pissing match in domestic Mexican politics amounts to anything worth a President's time?

Nathan Newman replies:


Bush isn't trying to "establish democracy" anywhere. He is trying to establish regimes useful to US power. Where dictatorship is useful to that end -- as in Pakistan -- we support dictatorship. Where conservative suppression of democracy is useful to corporate interests allied with Bush -- as in Mexico -- we apparently don't care much about this "democracy" stuff.

Mexico has a far larger than Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq combined; if bush allows democratic rights to be denied there because it suits his conservative ideology, why should anyone take his rhetoric seriously? We're in Iraq for the oil and to enrich the military-industrial complex. Everything else is apparently just rhetoric-- just like the WMDs.

Well said. I'm kind of getting tired of Bush supporters pretending that we went into Iraq and Afgahnistan to spread Democracy, that we'll get to Syria and North Korea eventually, but the people in Sudan have better wait their turn because we've only got so many resources.