This lame behavior has been the trademark of former
Colombian president Alvaro Uribe Vélez for the last couple of months, since he left office and came back from his failed
Georgetown University gig. Hah, you know this isn't even true. This lame behavior has been the trademark of former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe Vélez since he was campaigning for president for the first time.
That's not true, either. This erratic, aggressive and mean behavior has been Uribe's trademark for his entire life. At the beginning, he had the youth, then he got the power. Now that he's an ex president, he really looks pathetic and lame when he attempts with a strange and out of order furor to defend his presidency and his former aides from all the attacks, political and judicial, received in the last couple of months.
Taking the novelty of his
Twitter account aside (which he couldn't understand how to handle at the beginning, witness the gaffe of trying to issue a lengthy press release this way), Uribe has incurred in so many contradictions, the biggest of them all was to claim there was no possibility of a fair trial for his former aides regarding the colossal wiretapping scandal that marked the end of his presidency.
In fact, it was a multi-gaffe. First, he uttered this whopper outside Colombia, something he vehemently condemned when his political adversaries did the very same thing during his tenure. Second, after tirelessly insisting in how things worked out in his presidency, now that every Colombian could travel across the country without the fear of being kidnapped, and how the overall security substantially improved, it was a curious paradox how things were different a mere few months after his appointed successor,
Juan Manuel Santos, took the oath as the new Colombian president. Well, it is not a secret that his heir apparent, Andrés Felipe Arias, couldn't make it past the primaries. Otherwise, things could have been really different (and to his satisfaction). And third: he's right. There's no reasonable way to figure there could be a fair trial, because his former employees waged a war against the judiciary, the first and foremost victim of the wiretapping scandal. That means they brought all this unto themselves (Maybe it was intended as such, since victims cannot judge the offenders).
And now, Uribe faces the inconvenience of
Wikileaks. The leaked Department of States cables are beginning to produce a steady embarrassment to him. For starters, his no-nonsense, no-concessions approach to the war against the guerillas has been shattered: it was revealed he was looking for secret peace talks. Besides, everybody knows
Hugo Chávez, the
Venezuelan president is an authoritarian, not a democrat. But it sounds kind of awkward when Uribe, according to the cables, uses a very non-diplomatic language to assert that Chávez is a
Hitler and the
Venezuelan situation is akin to the Third Reich Germany. Like Uribe himself were the madman.
And now, Yidis Medina, a congresswoman found guilty of receiving bribes to vote the constitutional reform that allowed Uribe's re-election, says in her tell-all book, that the president begged her for her definitive vote... down in his knees in a rest room.
That does it, he's completely bat-guano insane.
As a progressive hero, what I detest the most is when so-called "liberal" or "progressive" entrepreneurs are so prone to suck it up to certified dictators, opressors and world bullies just to make another fistful of dollars. Zuckerberg pulls a Google: you know you can't make your big entrance to China without licking the boots of a few chi-coms, getting a politically debilitating wedgie, and granting that you won't interfere in any way with their iron-fist rule and you will be sure your precious social network will keep it that way.
