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Bush: Imperialist Assassin

The Revolution will be over when the entire world is populated by people like this proletarian. He speaks the truth.


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And there's one man who can make it happen: The People's Hero. Homeland or Death!


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See what a compassionate dental system can accomplish? His seventeen shiny ones are a tribute to honest medical care.

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I think he might just have his dentures in wrong, or his head....

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United Butt-heads Eat Sh*t.
I have no idea what the -4300 means.

UBES-4300
Unidentified Bolshevik Experiencing Stupidity (for the 4300th time that week)

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Comrade Otis wrote:Viva la Revolucion!
Red Square wrote:Vive le jihad!
$.$. Halliburton wrote:Viva my new oil contracts with the Venezuelan people and their great Leader!

Viva drug rehab... It's the only reason Maradona is still around to do lines with Chavez...

... and apparently, the UN is giving it one more go and has started an "Oil for Drugs" programme...

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And Viva La Cheating... (Javier is crushed... is vowing never to watch Futbol again... I've never seen him like this...)

Maradona dupes Latin Americans

Steven Edwards
National Post

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Image CREDIT: AFP, Getty Images
Diego Maradona, left, shares a joke with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.

NEW YORK - Argentina captain Diego Maradona claimed God helped him dupe the referee when he used his hand to score a crucial goal against England in the quarter-final of the 1986 World Cup.

Now the soccer cheat is helping dupe the Latin American people as he becomes the latest in a line of celebrities using their notoriety to push a political agenda.

Appearing with Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez last week at a rally in Mar del Plata, Argentina, billed as an "alternative" to the Summit of the Americas, Mr. Maradona let fly at George W. Bush, the U.S. President, and the U.S. and Canadian push for a hemispheric free trade area.

"I'm proud as an Argentine to repudiate the presence of this human trash, George Bush," he said.

That the former soccer star is being hailed as a political hero shows the intoxicating power of celebrity -- or perhaps the anti-American bias of his audience.

In contrast to such celebrity activists as Bono and Bob Geldof, Mr. Maradona makes an odd role model. Some may wonder about the effectiveness of the rock stars' proposed remedies as they advocate more international aid to end world poverty. But their moral rectitude is not in question.

In contrast, Mr. Maradona has a checkered personal past.

He embarrassed his country when he was expelled from the 1994 World Cup in the United States after failing a doping test. He blamed a CIA plot, though there are many documented cases of his cocaine abuse and at one stage he was reported near death in a clinic. At about the same period, Italian authorities ordered him to pay US$21.3-million in unpaid taxes and interest dating from his five years playing for Napoli in the 1980s.

Worldwide, soccer fans overlooked his moral shortcomings as they voted him, in 2000, the 20th century's greatest soccer player.

But if forgiving personal adversity is a virtue, how do his latest admirers explain the hypocrisy of his support for Mr. Chavez?

Capitalism's free market wage system handed Mr. Maradona huge wealth as he traded his soccer skills for a US$5-million salary in Europe. There were endorsement contracts worth US$10-million a year and US$325,000 each time he trotted onto the field in exhibition games in Arab countries.

Yet Mr. Chavez, self-proclaimed leader of a new wave of Latin American "populist" socialism, rails against the capitalist system.

His big-government remedies have been tried and failed historically in a string of Latin American countries, from Mexico to Brazil to Argentina to Peru.

Mr. Chavez can revive them thanks to Venezuela's huge oil wealth, which has enabled him to buy political support in Caribbean nations by selling them the commodity on credit terms as low as 1% down

He also sends money to leftist politicians in Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, and has expressed sympathy for -- if not funded -- armed groups such as Colombia's FARC, designated a terrorist organization by the United States.

All of which echoes 1960s attempts to export leftist revolution by Cuba's Fidel Castro, one of whose cigars Mr. Maradona was smoking as he addressed the crowds last week.

The former soccer star's embrace of an ideology that would deny fellow Latin Americans the individual freedom he had to prosper would be irrelevant if his audience could see through the ruse.

But his hypocrisy reflects a mentality that, many agree, is apparent on the streets of Latin America, where people are often heard blaming their continent's economic ills on the invasion of American capitalism, yet do their best to enter the United States to benefit from the same system.

Of course, the riotous protests whipped up by Mr. Chavez's vow to "bury" the Free Trade Area of the Americas and defeat U.S. "imperialism" may represent only minority opposition since all but five of the 34 countries at the summit agreed to further negotiations.

But UN surveys in recent years have found a bare but growing majority of them are not convinced democratic reforms have improved their lives and say they prefer authoritarian rule.

Powerhouses such as Brazil and Argentina, the region's most efficient farming countries, have a point when they say the United States must play fair by ending U.S. farm subsidies.

But while Argentina went on to win the World Cup after Mr. Maradona's "hand of God" goal, soccer is just a game and listening to the likes of Mr. Chavez will not bring prosperity to Latin America's masses.

© National Post 2005


 
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