Por Todo el Mundo, ...y Parte de Bolivia

Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
- Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Wonderful news from the Southern hemisphere greets us this beautiful morning: Evo Morales has won the election in Bolivia! There are a number of reasons this is good news for us here but off the top of my head, here are just a few:

1. Morales campaigned on the promise that he would make
Bolivia "America's worst nightmare." So no longer must we worry about nuclear devices being smuggled into our cities through our porous ports. Gone are the logistical and cultural problems dealing with the hordes of underprivileged streaming across our southern borders or lashing themselves to inner tubes to wash up on our shores...about a million a year apparently. No more foreign entanglements with primitives. Maintaining economic growth will be a worry we won't have. Our very worst scenario will be dealing (or not!) with a tin pot lefty from a two bit country. Now that's a hell of a Christmas present.

2. And there are immediate financial incentives too. No need to look further for savings to fund the tax cuts for the most wealthy of us here. About ten billion is suddenly on the table. Talk about windfall profits!
http://www.iisec.ucb.edu.bo/papers/2001-2005/iisec-dt-2003-10.htm

3. Every few years, the stoned denizens of the fantasy world of the latino left need a new cautionary tale and why not Bolivia? It's fresh, it's got the Indian piece for color, and Bolivia is exotic enough to be amusing for fifteen minutes. Fidel took Cuba from highest GDP in Latin America to last. Argentina had the sixth highest standard of living in the world before Peron. Allende and Danny are a big snooze. We need a new drug and Evo is going to legalize the cultivation of coca.

I find it dryly humorous whenever the strutting poseur of day,
Hugito, Lula or this new clown, threaten to use oil as a weapon against us. I wish they would, just once, make my day and refuse to sell us any oil. OH please...oh please!

Look, like 99% of all Americans, I couldn't care less who the
president of Bolivia (or any other country, for that matter) is or what his agenda might be. If he wants to drag his people back to the stone age (they're pretty close already), if he wants to govern with voudou, if he wants the women there to dress up like batman or to wear plants for clothing, or if he just wants to create headlines in order to make a name for himself, just dial 1-800-I-DON'T-CARE. Just so long as he keeps the miserable little world he builds over there and doesn't attempt to export it to me.

People get the government they deserve. Good luck to them.