Blast from the Past

Second post, second strike against the New York Times. Really, what were the editors thinking when they committed ink and precious space to Ginger Thompson's "Old Foe of U.S. Trying for a Comeback in Nicaragua"?

The article is a hatchet job against former Nicaraguan president and Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, who is again running for office, and cavalierly disregards ongoing U.S. meddling in Nicaragua. As FAIR points out, the piece is "one-sided and inaccurate." That's putting it politely.

When I read the article this morning, I suddenly felt transported back to the unpleasant old days when Ronald Reagan said with a straight face that the Sandinistas were a threat to Harlingen, Texas, and that he had no choice but to arm the Nicaraguan Contra "freedom fighters" (make that terrorists in post-9/11 parlance). It's like the elephant warning that it is about to be crushed by a mouse.

(For those too young to have lived through the era, Reagan--just like "W" today--loved to babble endlessly about freedom while engaging in policies such as the mining of Nicaraguan harbors, then telling the International Court of Justice to get lost when it agreed that such actions were patently illegal.)

The Times article makes the Sandinista government of the 1980s out to have been little more than a front for world communism. It parrots feverish neocon chatter of Al Qaeda recruiters operating in Latin America and a "new axis of evil" of Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba emerging.

So obsessed is the article with Ortega's terrible machinations that the reader looks in vain for even a hint of the real issues confronting Nicaragua, still a desperately poor country. It might be expected that Faux News presents such gibberish, but the New York Times? Is this a blast from the past, or a taste of things to come?