May 16, 2010  ECrisis has often written about the real plague that has destroyed Ecuador: its addiction to manipulative adolescent dishonesty. This disgusting personality disorder and psychiatric disease has reached epidemic proportions today. It is the nation’s cancer and can be treated only with insistence that mature, well informed honesty replace the hysteria that lurks behind every temper tantrum, every shallow-hollow decision that Correa’s presidency entails and every vapid stupidity that reigns across this land.

Not less than Carlos Alberto Montaner tackles this stupid, lazy psychiatric malaise in his current analysis of the pathetic Colombian presidential candidate, currently backed by the USA’s Obama fools and Hugo Chavez, Sr. Mockus.

Is this showoff fit to be Colombia's president?

Carlos Alberto Montaner

Antanas Mockus, the leading candidate in the next elections in Colombia, is a peculiar man.

He has a well-earned reputation as a mathematical genius and an honest official. He was twice mayor of Bogotá, a job he performed gloriously, leaving a trail of extravagant efficacy.

The problem is that his personal puzzle contains a disquieting piece for someone who's running for president of his country. Mockus displays a clear personality disorder: He's a show-off.

He had his picture taken in a Superman costume; as a university dean, he bared his bum to some students who shouted at him while he delivered a speech; for some unknown reason (it isn't easy to find an explanation for this), he urinated publicly on a university lawn; and he was married in the main ring of a circus.

There appear to be other, similar episodes, but these are the ones the press has cited most frequently.

Is it worrisome to have a president who's afflicted with histrionics? U.S. psychiatry, which sets the guidelines in these matters, describes histrionics as one of the many personality disorders and treats it with psychotherapy or anti-depressants that control the flow of serotonin.

Histrionics is a comical relative of exhibitionism and choleric hysteria. It also shows up in narcissistic personalities.

According to experts, it is practiced by egotistical persons who have tenuous amorous leanings toward others. Generally, they are beings lacking in inhibition mechanisms, totally uninhibited people who have repressed the sense of ridiculousness in their constant effort to summon attention at all costs.

Why do they do this? The most widespread theory is that they are people who developed outsized egos to compensate for childhood traumas, but all that sounds like Freudian jargon. Actually, nobody knows. Quite simply, there's people like that.

Contemporary history is rich in famous show-offs full of talent. Salvador Dali is the best known example. His long moustache, his madman's stare and his constant quips enriched the gatherings at European cafés for decades. He was a funny genius who had become a professional eccentric.

Dali began his career as a grand show-off when André Breton made the esthetics and the ethics of surrealism fashionable. Among other things, surrealism was literature affected by histrionics and the psychoanalytical discourse.

Around that time, Ramón Gómez de la Serna gave a lecture about an elephant. Two generations later, Andy Warhol inaugurated a paradoxical variant of histrionics; he mixed it with an unexpected dose of timidity and added a gesture of supreme boredom. The surrealist variant of histrionics dissolved into Pop Art.

In a sense, Mockus is the political expression of surrealism. He will not be accused of being a neoliberal but a neosurrealist.

The obvious question is whether histrionics incapacitates the practitioner from becoming a president. I fear it does. It is one thing to be amused by, and smile at, an Oscar Wilde who delivers a speech wearing velvet knickers and a gladiolus on the lapel, and quite another to watch your country's president reviewing the troops in that attire.

After all, among the 20 examples of great contemporary statesmen we know -- from Churchill to Mandela, including Rómulo Betancourt and Oscar Arias, to mention a couple of our people -- there are no show-offs. They all had the sense of decorum that came with the responsibility to lead and represent their compatriots.

In any case, Mockus would not be the first histrionic president in the region. That tribe includes individuals who are ideologically very different from him but similar in their pathological passion to be the center of attention: Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro are two good (or bad) examples. Juan Perón is another.

More than governing, histrionic presidents perform for the gallery. They are always more ready to resort to gestures than to substance. They live to dazzle society, to mock their adversaries and to be admired. They are like sparklers: an intense crackling followed by obscurity and silence.

That's not good.

May 12, 2010

ECrisis says it again: manipulative persons, such as Mockus and Rafael Correa can never be trusted. Their primary concern is their pathetic selfishness, their childishness, the mandate to control all around them like little princelings and vapid princesses, insisting that they world fall down and pay them obeisance. And they are cruel in their rejection of those who do not follow their silly, empty-headed games. They reject, they lie and they extort if you do not believe their hypochondria.

They yell. They screech. They spy. They refuse to grow up. They demand total attention but give back nothing of any value. They care nothing about the TEN COMMANDMENTS because they believe they are way above all of this world’s social contract because they alone have and hold all wisdom- their wisdom which no one else can even counter. This is not goodness. This is not honest and this is not helpful. Ever see one of your neighbors actually lifting a hand to help a person in real distress? The next time one of Quito’s volcanoes blows, check your neighbors to see how many actually volunteer for anything. Food help? Red Cross help? Oh no- they are too busy lying about their self inflated selfishness and complaining that the world is not safe enough for their adolescent munificence.

No better example of Correa’s perfidy exists than in his monied support and political propaganda to extort money with a wold-eyed liar from the USA named Donziger after reading a 2007 VANITY FAIR propaganda, Rather than have or hold actual facts, Correa decided he wanted fake fame from global idiots who also were lied to by the Donziger-Cabrera fiction to pretend that companies are evil and Marxist communism will save the world. Scratch the surface of Correa’s hollow deeds to save your world and you get the point.

By now of course you know that Rafael Correa is addicted to lying. Correa is a Cuban communist who lied a lot to get elected to the presidency and he has every intention of lying a lot more. For some odd reason, and we suspect this is due to Correa’s serious hatred of truth tellers and even-handed law and order, he despises American conservatives, often called the U.S. Republican party which he has deemed evil. That is to say, the laws of the USA are anathema to Correa because he never understood them, chooses to never understand them and rejects the fundamentals of conservative success in all ways and with his entire effrontery to mankind’s successes. Correa was taught to be this way by his family and is enabled by his criminal cartel cabinet while playing dirty, corrupt games with all Ecuadoreans to seize dirty money. But consider how to grow up and be a man and lead by example and integrity? Never. Correa thrives on manipulative dishonesty and corruption and extortion. But…..you knew this. We especially like his childish rants that he will quit Carondelet if he does not get his way. That is our favorite. Just like a child who refuses to eat his green beans, Correa refuses to grow up. Worse yet, like all good manipulative families, he closes the ring around his stubborn childishness as if protected by the saints. Correa is not protected by the saints: he is a disgrace and a liar who uses people when the mood suits him. 

May 16, 2010

Why Conservatives Love the Founders
By James Lewis

A Salon writer wonders, "What's the conservative fetish with the Founding Fathers?"

It's because we read history, my sadly ignorant friend. So did the Founders.

History is full of Obamas, and the people who idolized such power-hungry self-glorifying narcissists. The Founders understood human history in their very bones, because they read history from the Bible to the Roman Empire, Europe's bloody and tyrannical history, and the Americas. If you want to understand Obama, just look at any idolized hero in Latin America: Chavez, Fidel, Bolivar, Juan Person. Look at European monarchs. Look at Napoleon.

They are all the famous Man on Horseback, the hero of the hour who instantly turns into a tyrant. Even today Latin America is bedeviled by its own Obamas, who all demand to be idolized and worshipped. Obamas are a dime a dozen.

The Founders knew about abuse of power by arrogant and ignorant narcissists, over and over again in human history. They read it in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. They read it in the Book of Kings, where you can find out all about Saddam Hussein, because the politics of the Middle East hasn't changed much. They saw it in the Middle East of their day, which was full of clan tyrannies and immense cruelty. Arab slavers were still raiding Britain when the Founders proclaimed the Declaration of Independence.

They read it in Plutarch's Lives of the Ceasars. They read it in the history of Athens, torn between bloody factions, and constantly raising new Obamas to power.

You see, all you Salonistas, the Founders were profoundly educated people. They were passionate believers in the Enlightenment. They understood the role of free speech, free thought, free political debate, and free trade. They saw the benefits of freedom in their own lives. 

The Founders knew about slavery in the South, and they were deeply ashamed of it. But unlike contemporary liberals, who are massively ignorant of everything but their navels, they also knew that slavery was the norm in the British Royal Navy, for example, which recruited its sailors by force, using press gangs in London and other port cities. The British Navy also kidnapped American sailors. 

The Royal Navy abolished the African slave trade. But common British sailors were whipped to work every day. They slept in 28 inches of space, almost as bad as African slaves, and were kept in bondage (deserters were hanged), and drug-addicted on daily grog and beer. The Founders knew about slavery in Biblical times, and among Russia's serfs. They knew about slavery in France and the German states, where violence was used routinely to keep peasants tied to the land. The Founders also knew about the mental slavery that comes from indoctrination, which is why they loved liberty, including liberty of faith.

The Founders understood that liberty had to come in stages. Only tyrants claim to create instant paradise. Practical statesmen work step by step. They created the intellectual and legal framework for the liberation of the slaves. When Abraham Lincoln came along, Americans were willing to fight a terrible war to free the slaves, even if more than half a million people had to die. Read the lyrics of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and you can see the real campaign for human liberty, not the fantasy version liberals entertain today. Liberty is bought very dearly, in blood and suffering. (And it was Christian Abolitionists who created the campaign to liberate the slaves.)

America's wars of liberation were real, not frauds like the Marxist ones. We brought liberty to Europe in World War I, in World War II, and in the Cold War. We brought liberty to American slaves in the Civil War. No other nation in history can claim anything close to that.

The Founders created the first land of liberty in human history. To be sure, they learned a great deal from British political thinkers like John Locke and Edmund Burke, and from the classical writers. They demanded for themselves the rights that were (theoretically) granted to Englishmen of their time. Meanwhile the French Revolution led to massive bloodshed and twenty years of bloody war to conquer Europe. Napoleon was another Obama idol.

Read your history, my friends. Real history, not the Leftist propaganda version.

America gave the first great opportunity in human history to start afresh. The Founders used that opportunity to create the greatest political foundation in history -- because they understood that human nature hasn't changed, and that there would be those (like Obama) who were so power-oriented that they would try to lord it over all Americans. The Constitution was carefully designed to stop and balance human power mongers, like Obama.  It has done so for two hundred years, and today it is the Marxist Left that is mounting a great assault on the US Constitution. But Marx never changed human nature.

The Left seems to believe the Karl Marx found a better way than the American Founders did. But look at the works of Marxism: The Soviets, Maoism, Pol Pot. One hundred million human beings killed by Marxist regimes in the 20th century alone. Look at North Korea, my sadly ignorant friends. Look at Robert Mugabe and his ilk. Look at the Nazis and their close affinity for Marxist totalitarians.

Karl Marx was just a throwback to all the slave-taking empires in history. Marx was born in Prussia, and idolized the chief propaganda philosopher of Prussia for his own "philosophy." (That was Friedrich Hegel.) Marx wanted a militaristic state, run by an elite of Marx followers, who would indoctrinate all the workers to march in lockstep to the Central Commander. Is that what you want? It's what Obama is creating for the United States today.

Read a little history, my poor friend, and you will see Obamas everywhere you look. Lenin was an Obama (and the Obama campaign deliberately used Lenin imagery for its propaganda). Stalin was an Obama. Mussolini was an Obama. Napoleon was an Obama. Putin is an Obama. Ahmadinejad is an Obama. Saddam was an Obama.

America never had a rock star president until the Obama campaign. George Washington made very sure no one would suspect him of being an Obama. Lincoln never claimed to be an Obama. None of our presidents have paraded themselves as Obamas -- not until Obama came along and brought the psychology of self-glorifying narcissism to these shores. And the Left snapped to and saluted Obama, worshipped at his feet of clay in that ancient and corrupt way that humans have known for millenia.

Are rock stars your idea of an American president? If so, please go back to school and read a little history.

Russian president Medvedev this last week said it out loud, to the deaf, dumb and blind Leftists of the world:

"President Medvedev has issued a stinging repudiation of the Soviet Union, condemning it as a totalitarian state that had deprived Russians of their basic rights.  He also condemned Joseph Stalin's record of repression before Victory Day celebrations on Sunday marking the 65th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany, an event that many elderly Russians attribute to the leadership of the Soviet dictator.

... "Stalin committed mass crimes against the people. And despite the fact that he worked a lot, despite the fact that under his leadership the country achieved successes, what was done to his own people cannot be forgiven."...

Conservatives love the Founders because we read history. We know that you don't read history. Obama doesn't know history.

That's why you liberals scare us.
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Cuban communists, dishonestly called Ecuadorean progressives, scare us even more. They waste lives. All across the USA are small groups reading weekly Von Mises, Alexander Hamilton. George Washington, James Madison, Locke and Humes and of course Hayek.  One cannot accentuate enlightenment without knowing its foundations nor activate truths.  You can do what these simple people are doing and it will not cost you one penny. These are not what Ecuadoreans call libertarians. That is a fake name. These are simple truth seekers who reject your Cuban communism and know very well how disgusting Cuba is today even though Cuban leaders are moving out of Havana and taking heir blood money with them….to Venezuela, to Chile, to Ecuador and Argentina where they live like pashas as their own are enslaved. You do not have to be a Cuban communist like Correa. You can chose to be a truth teller and stop whining about your life like a dishonest hypochondriac.  Correa, for his part hates the truth tellers and calls them U.S. Republicans. We call it self educating common sense.

Stop being frightening in your hollow days. Grow up. You too can join the new dawn of the enlightened folks who actually like truth telling. If you do, they will actually like you too. Unless and until you end your selfish manipulative addictions, no one likes you at all.

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis