Towel pushed slightly toward destination
Bolsonaro manages what Trump never has and probably never will:
Jair Bolsonaro has reportedly thrown in the towel after his presidential election defeat in Brazil on Sunday, telling members of the supreme court: “It’s over.”
He went silent for nearly two days after being beaten by the leftwing former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the vote. When Bolsonaro finally appeared before the cameras on Tuesday afternoon, he failed to explicitly concede defeat or congratulate his vanquisher.
However, shortly after that appearance, he made his way to the supreme court where he met seven of its judges, including Edson Fachin, who later told journalists that Bolsonaro had indicated to them that he understood the writing was on the wall.
He could tell Brazil, or he could tell seven judges. He’s not all that different from Trump.
In an interview with the newspaper O Globo, Bolsonaro’s vice-president, Hamilton Mourão, made it clear he accepted the defeat. “There’s no point in crying any more, we lost the game,” he said.
Mourão also signalled that he opposed the pro-Bolsonaro protests that have involved hardcore supporters blockading roads to demand a military uprising, bringing traffic chaos to cities including Rio and São Paulo. “There are 58 million people who are unhappy,” Mourão said of Bolsonaro’s voters. “But they agreed to take part in the game. So they now need to calm down.”
Bolsonaro appeared to send a different message with his deliberately ambiguous two-minute address on Tuesday. In it, the rightwing populist called the demonstrations “the fruit of indignation and a feeling of injustice about how the electoral process played out”. “Peaceful protests will always be welcome,” Bolsonaro said, although he said destruction was not welcome.
“We love you, you’re very speshul…”
Way too many people seem to think democracy means they get what they want.
What Columbus and those who came after were seeking was a new route to the spices of India. Hence the name they gave to the native Americans they came across was ‘Indians.’ Central and South America was preferred by the Spanish and Portuguese because it had Inca and Aztec gold just waiting to be plundered. North America was seen as highly deficient, and was a leftover later settled by the Pilgrim Fathers, whose society was a sample of post-Reformation Britain.
By contrast, Central and South American colonies were founded by pre-Reformation feudalists, leading to giagantic ‘latifundia’ estates and a preference towards feudal absolutism, the modern form of which is military dictatorship. Before any social progress could be made, these had to be overthrown.
A further complication was that modern industial post-feudal, post-Reformation societies sprang up in North America, and came to regard Latin America as their rightful bailiwick. Hence the Monroe Doctrine.
The Castroists in Cuba in their Second Declaration of Havana denounced the North American Monroe mentality, but not the feudalism still at the core of their own Latin American society. Into the too-hard basket.
– WB Yeats
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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming
I am confident the reason there was such a delay was because Bolsonaro was canvassing his political and military allies to see if he had a shot at disputing or at least delaying the result of the vote. Only after he was sure there was insufficient support for that idea did he refrain from trying the Trump path.
I tend to agree… Definitely smarter than Trump then…
Not exactly a high bar to clear.