Ex-Liberian President Was Hungry For Power
Studies have shown that we here in the United States tend to be uninformed about what is actually going on in the rest of the world. Our TVs, newspapers, the Internet, all the major sources from which we get our information are filled with such riveting stories as how the governor of New York State is dallying with some lady of the evening but generally miss other, larger stories that put our own problems in perspective.
Reuter's today reports on the trial of former Liberian President, Charles Taylor. According to the report, Taylor, once one of Africa's most feared warlords, faces
charges of rape, murder, mutilation and recruitment of child soldiers during a 1991-2002 conflict. He has pleaded not guilty.
"He (Taylor) said we should eat them. Even the U.N. white
people -- he said we could use them as pork to eat," Joseph "ZigZag" Marzah, who described himself as Taylor's former death squad commander, told the U.N.-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone.
Taylor's troubles arose from his desire to enrich himself by destabilizing neighboring Sierra Leone in order to steal its diamonds. In furtherance of this goal he armed rebel forces in that nation, the resulting violence eventually leaving upwards of 250,000 people dead. The cannibalism angle seems unbelievable until you realize the level of violence in that conflict. As Reuters states, Thousands of civilians had their limbs hacked off by drug-crazed
rebels, many of them children.
In 2003, after being overthrown Taylor took up residence in Nigeria (which apparently must not exactly set very high standards on who they allow to immigrate). He was only handed over to the International Court in the Hague after international pressure was applied.
Taylor's and Liberia/Sierra Leone's story here should be instructive to us in the US about the differences between the kind of troubles we have and the kind of trouble that exists in much of the rest of the world. Eliot Spitzer is without a doubt a truly loathsome individual who violated both his state's and his family's trust and his story is worth recounting. But American's should have some degree of perspective. It is no accident that the worst kind of "leaders" the US has are the Eliot Spitzer variety. We haven't had a Charles Taylor and as long as we continue to respect our Constitution and our traditions we won't. We are lucky to be Americans.
Too bad for Eliot Spitzer it takes a Charles Taylor to make him look good.
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Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Couldn't They Tell?
After hearing about New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's admission yesterday of his involvement with a prostitution ring my first reaction was: Oh, so that's what its going to be. By that I mean I was somewhat surprised about the particulars of the revelation but I can't say that I was surprised that Spitzer, well known as arrogant, heavy-handed, mean, vindictive, egotistical and just plain unpleasant, had managed to shoot himself in the foot.
When I heard that he'd been elected, and in a landslide yet, I thought that it was just a matter of time before he would do something stupid, really stupid. Not that Spitzer himself is stupid. Far from it. Scoring a very impressive 1590 on his SATs Spitzer went on to Princeton U. undergrad before going to Harvard Law where he edited the Harvard Law Review. And his ambition has been the equal of his brains. Eliot Spitzer has never missed an opportunity to make an impression, always going after the high profile, big pr cases; going after pregnancy crisis centers to please New York's pro-abortion Left, payola in the music industry, big shot businessmen. He was a legal Master of the Universe. So taken with his own gifts and position was he that he thought anything he did was acceptable merely by virtue of the fact that he did it. He'd make calls threatening people, inappropriately used the State Police to investigate his chief nemesis, Republican State Minority Leader, Joseph L. Bruno, arrogantly issued an unpopular executive order allowing driver's licenses to be issued to illegal aliens.
He was also widely despised by almost everybody who ever had the bad fortune to have dealt with him, which explains why so few people are willing to come to his defense now. So when news came yesterday that he had finally imploded, it was not exactly the year's biggest shock.
What does surprise me however is the way the American people continue to elect catastrophes waiting to happen like Spitzer. Here's a confession: I'm not a genius; just a fairly regular guy (despite being "Right" so dang often) but I knew this guy was, what's the word I'm looking for? Oh, yeah...a freak. Couldn't the 69% of voters who put Spitzer in office see this, too? Apparently not.
But Americans have a long and impressive history of voting for dysfunctional politicians. The last fifty years alone have produced such giants of history as Louisiana Governor Earl Long, who was committed to a mental hospital while in office; Cincinnati city council member and then Mayor Jerry Springer (yes, that Jerry Springer) who resigned after a revelation of his patronizing (surprise!) a prostitute; Washington DC Mayor and crack addict Marion Barry; President Richard Nixon, whose paranoia and generally warped psyche have been fodder for books for decades and Bill Clinton, a self involved narcissist whose entire Presidency was about one thing and one thing only: him. All that is missing from each of these distinguished gents is a day glow etching of the words HELP ME on their foreheads.
Now it is a truism that bright, talented people who seek office often have gargantuan egos. Ronald Reagan was that rarity among rarities who was both an actor and a politician, both lines of work which attract egomaniacs, who was actually well adjusted.
The public can be forgiven for not spotting some political rotten apples. In the ordinary course of life everybody gets surprised by the behavior of some of the people they thought they knew, so politics, too can be expected to provide the unexpected now and then. But how do you explain an Eliot Spitzer? I wish I could provide an answer here but the subject of the election of stone cold losers doesn't come with any. It just comes with one big question for those who put them in office: What were you thinking?
