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Sunday, June 04, 2006

How stupid is the NY Times?

I'm reading David Rieff's NY Times article about Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), the "leftist" candidate for president in Mexico's July 2 election, when I come across this sentence (emphasis added):
Although some American observers remain fearful of his leftist tendencies--The Wall Street Journal ran a column in March worrying that AMLO might be "laying the groundwork for an assault on the private sector"--none of the Americans I spoke to in Mexico seemed to believe that Lopez Obrador will nationalize oil and gas resources, as Evo Morales has done and Hugo Chávez has threatened to do.
I imagine few of those Americans believed, either, that AMLO would lose California to the United States or join the North American Free Trade Agreement--because those things have already been done! Mexico nationalized its oil industry in 1938; the national oil company is called PEMEX. And Hugo Chavez can threaten to nationalize Venezuela's oil all he wants, but it won't change the fact that Venezuela's oil industry was nationalized in 1975 (PDVSA), long before Chavez came to power.

I wonder what Rieff's Americans in Mexico think about the chances of George Bush annexing Alaska and Hawaii to the United States.