Bedbug on AMLO

AMLO is terrible, but that’s beside the point. Bret Stephens spent some time growing up extremely wealthy in Mexico City and he learned nothing about the place except that he has some rich friends. This leads to horrible columns where he says AMLO is the equivalent of Chavez and Maduro and Mexico is becoming the new Venezuela. For this, he provides evidence of some moves AMLO is making to dismantle some agencies of government that theoretically oversee elections, but in fact, are tools of corruption. I know this latter point from people in Mexico, who don’t like AMLO–I would say those educated people who don’t hate AMLO have largely been massively disappointed by him–but who certainly don’t trust the INE either.

The bigger point to make here is not so much that Bedbug has even less business commenting on Mexico than he does the United States. It’s to wonder what these people do to be completely above even basic accountability for the facts and quality of their articles and why the Times let them get away with it for years and years. How can Bret Stephens–of all people!–have reached this status. At least Tom Friedman sells a lot of books and Maureen Dowd is some kind of institution. They are still terrible. But I’d rather read another made up conversation between Friedman and his cab drivers or Dowd talking about taking too many edibles than this crap. He literally says AMLO is worse than Donald Trump. You don’t have to think AMLO is anything but an idiot to know this is utterly, completely absurd. Among the reasons for this is that AMLO will leave power when his term ends like every other Mexican president since the implementation of the 1917 Constitution and the establishment of the PRI government in the 1920s. That has hardly been a guarantor of democracy–lord knows Mexico has its problems–but the last person in the world we need to hear this from is Bret Fucking Stephens. Christ.