BBC pushing Mugabe talking points as fact

The admittedly leftist biased BBC is running interference for Zimbabwe socialist dictator Robert Mugabe while Mugabe is in the midst of stealing another election.  The party opposing Mugabe’s 150,000% inflation and 85% unemployment policies is accusing Mugabe of trying to assassinate their leader before June’s run-off.  The Beeb’s headline?

“Zimbabwe scoffs at plot fantasy“!

The same BBC that refuses to use the word “terrorist” to describe Islamic terrorists (and on the rare occasion it does use the word, it puts the word terrorist in quotes to show a dispute of the word’s usage) has no qualms about using the word “fantasy” without the quotes to convey a sense of fact on Mugabe’s allegations.

I would use my usual tagline “Nope…no liberal media bias!”, but since the Beeb is open about its bias, I guess I don’t need the tagline.

Mugabe: I have not yet begun to fight destroy my country!

Tinpot socialist thug ruler Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has a fee-vah, and the only prescription is more socialist economic ruin!  From Capt. Ed:

With his nation facing an economic collapse of massive proportions, one might think that Robert Mugabe would seek out all of the foreign investment he could find. Instead, he has decided to go protectionist, and chase out what little foreign capital remains in Zimbabwe. Mugabe signed an indigenisation law that requires all businesses in Zimbabwe to have at least 51% ownership by black Zimbabweans:

Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe has approved legislation giving local owners the right to take a majority share of foreign companies.

Mr Mugabe’s formal approval of the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Bill comes three weeks ahead of his country’s presidential elections.

Under the legislation, every company must have at least 51% of their shares owned by black Zimbabweans. If not, the government will block new investment, mergers or restructuring.

Zimbabwe already faces 150,000% inflation and unemployment that now may have reached 85%. Their economy has ceased any meaningful production, and domestic capital is non-existent. Now Mugabe wants to ensure that foreign capital also flees by forcing companies to sell their assets at a pittance for Zimbabwe’s worthless currency.

Mugabe has attempted to run the statist playbook with no success at all. He has tried wage and price freezes, rationing, and wealth-redistribution to respond to the economic collapse that he himself created — largely through wealth redistribution, rationing, and wage and price freezes. He has turned Zimbabwe from a net exporter of agricultural and manufactured goods to a pauper nation where most farm land now stands unused, thanks to its control by Mugabe cronies and Mugabe himself.

This latest indigenisation law mirrors what got Zimbabwe into trouble in the first place. After freeing the former Rhodesia from control by supposed neo-colonists, Mugabe forced white farmers off the land in order to ensure that black Zimbabweans could rise to power. Unfortunately, the move destroyed the agricultural industry, and successive similar moves through the rest of Zimbabwe did the same kind of damage.

This law is nothing more than a threadbare attempt to convince Zimbabweans that a little more isolation can cure all of the ills that Mugabe’s policies of massive isolation produced. He still wants to be seen as the champion of the poor. He may even succeed, even though Mugabe has turned into the greatest single source of Zimbabwean poverty in history. His opponent, Simba Makoni, needs to make that point clear in the upcoming elections later this month. 

This is what happens when you let a functional economic illiterate run a country: 150k% inflation and nearly universal unemployment.

The same left who shilled for Mugabe now having “buyer’s remorse”

Better late than never, huh, leftists?  From Protein Wisdom:

There was a good essay about Robert Mugabe in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, pointing out how all the Left-wing journalists, politicians, and academics who were Mugabe cheerleaders from the start are now trying to cover their tracks.

Some samples:

As Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, presides over what might be the most rapid disintegration yet of a modern nation-state, it has become de rigueur for journalists, politicians and academics to offer what has become a near-universal analysis: Mugabe, who has ruled his country uninterrupted for 27 years, was a promising leader who became corrupted over time by power.

This meme was popularized not long after Mugabe began seizing white-owned farms in 2000. Four years ago, in response to these raids, the New York Times editorialized that “in 23 years as president, Mr. Mugabe has gone from independence hero to tyrant.” Earlier this week, Archbishop Desmond Tutu said that “I’m just devastated by what I can’t explain, by what seems to be an aberration, this sudden change in character.”

…

But this popular conception of Mugabe — propagated by the liberals who championed him in the 1970s and 1980s — is absolutely wrong. From the beginning of his political career, Mugabe was not just a Marxist but one who repeatedly made clear his intention to run Zimbabwe as an authoritarian, one-party state.

…

And over several years in the early 1980s, Mugabe executed what arguably might be the worst of his many atrocities, a campaign of terror against the minority Ndebele tribe in which he unleashed a North Korean-trained army unit that killed between 10,000 and 30,000 people.

Yet, even in the midst of these various crimes, Mugabe never lost his fan base in the West. In 1986, the University of Massachusetts Amherst bestowed on Mugabe an honorary doctorate of laws just as he was completing his genocide against the Ndebele.

…

In 2000, at the start of Mugabe’s seizures of white land, New York Times columnist (and early Mugabe fan) Anthony Lewis admitted, on behalf of quite a few journalists, diplomats and academics in the West, “how wrong we were” about Mugabe. But he offered the qualification, “at least over time.” Lewis, and everyone else who ever feted Mugabe, was not just proved wrong about the despot “at least over time.” They were wrong the minute they endorsed him.

PW has a commenter who gets this 11,242% (accounting for Zimbabwean inflation) correct: the left has a track record of supporting maniacal genoicidal tyrants who lean to the left (Castro, Che, Mao, Stalin, Mugabe, Chavez, etc.) but getting their San Fransicko leather #ssless chaps in a bunch if George Bush wants to listen to a phone call between terrorists.

Case in point: Sean Penn (whose role as a mentally retarded man in I Am Sam was more insightful into his real-life persona than we ever knew) demonstrates, leftards are more than willing to accept…nay, embrace…totalitarianism, so long as it’s left-wing totalitarianism.

Socialism causes people to eat their pets & rats to invade homes

Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of Africa until socialist brutal dictator Robert Mugabe got a hold of it, has seen staggering inflation and severe food shortages. The people in that left-wing shiitehole are starving. Observe:

Pets are being slaughtered for meat in shortage-stricken Zimbabwe and record numbers of animals have been surrendered to shelters or abandoned by owners no longer able to feed them, according to animal welfare groups.

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals said it could not feed surrendered animals or find new homes and was being forced to kill them and destroy the corpses.
…
In Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown, meat, cornmeal, bread and other staples have vanished from shops and stores. A government order to slash prices of all goods and services in June worsened acute food shortages and has left stores virtually empty of basic foodstuffs.

Food and food waste shortages have also emboldened rats to forage for scraps in homes and far beyond their usual hideaways, pest control specialists said.

Leftover food that would have been discarded has become too precious to throw away and common garbage was in short supply, said a rat catcher in western Harare.
…
The prices clampdown aimed to tame official inflation of more than 7,600 percent, the highest in the world. Independent estimates put real inflation closer to 25,000 percent and the International Monetary Fund has forecast it reaching 100,000 percent by the end of the year.

Illegally slaughtered meat sells for more than 10 times the government’s fixed price on the thriving black market. It comes in plastic bags of 10 kilograms (22 pounds) and more, containing bone, fat and offal and no indication of types or cuts of meat.
…
A court case is pending in the eastern city of Mutare where a family dog was butchered and eaten. Police and SPCA inspectors were called to a shopping center in Harare earlier this month where a man was offering frozen dog meat for sale from the back of a pick-up truck, activists said.

The joys of socialism! Naturally, in the face of such a glaring model of economic and sustainability failure, it only makes sense that the UN would tap Zimbabwe to chair its Commission on Sustainable Development.

Jimmy the Dhimmi funded commie land seizure in Zimbabwe

Whenever I mention that Jimmah Carter never met a dictator he didn’t like, the left gets angrier than Ted Kennedy at the bottom of a Dewar’s bottle. It can be denied no longer. From Jammie Wearing Fool:

Here’s a shocker.

Presidential disaster Jimmy Carter agreed to have the U.S. underwrite the communist takeover/redistribution of property in Zimbabwe in 1980.

Of course, the communists at the Beeb call it land reform.

US backed Zimbabwe land reform

The key role played by the United States ahead of Zimbabwe’s independence in resolving the sticky point of land redistribution has just come to light.

The land issue has always been emotive in Zimbabwe — as can be seen with the current crisis sparked off by the government seizure of mainly white-owned farms in 2000.

Cutting to the chase, Mugabe and his revolutionaries took property away from white owners and gave it to his buddies. During the negotiations of all this with the British government, who wanted to get out of that mess, they needed a sucker to write some checks to make it all happen.

Enter Carter.

“He secretly contacted the US ambassador in London, Kingham Brewster, and asked him to get the then US President, Jimmy Carter, to promise money to pay white farmers for their land.

Mr Mugabe was angered when the UK stopped land payments.

“Brewster was totally supportive. We were at a stage where Mugabe and Nkomo were packing their bags,” he explains.

“He came back to me within 24 hours. They had got hold of Jimmy Carter and Carter authorised Brewster to say to me that the United States would contribute a substantial amount for a process of land redistribution and they would undertake to encourage the British government to give similar assurances.”

To put this in perspective, the U.S. was in the middle of a major recession at that point, and Carter agreed to help underwrite the Communist takeover of property in another country.

So how did that work out?

“But the UK government found that some of the farms were being given to President Mugabe’s close associates, and refused to continue the payments.

Mr Mugabe was furious, claiming bad faith.

The path to the seizure of white farms was opened and thus began the long slide to today’s economic chaos.”

Today, as a direct result of Carter’s contributions to the effort, Zimbabwe is falling apart. They have approximately 5,000% annual inflation, life expectancies in the 34- to 37-year range, and thousands hungry and leaving every day.

And today the left sees Carter as some kind of hero.

Actually, the inflation rate is more like 7,600%, but why quibble over a couple thou when it comes to hellishly high inflation? You get the picture.

Did this schmuck get anything right?

Zimbabwe starving, so UN rewards them

I swear, only at the United freakin’ Nations does this make sense. From Moonbattery:

It looks like socialist dictator Robert Mugabe’s policy of stealing farms from Caucasians and handing them out to the goons who support him isn’t turning out too well for Zimbabwe:

Some 2.1 million people in the country’s southern provinces will face serious food shortages by the third quarter of 2007, and the number will reach 4.1 million in the first three months of 2008, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Food Programme said. About 352,000 tonnes of cereals and 90,000 tonnes of other food aid will be needed to meet the basic needs of the population, the Rome-based agencies have calculated.

The crisis can be attributed primarily to “the country’s unprecedented economic decline,” according to Amir Abdulla of the World Food Program. Zimbabwe used to be called the breadbasket of Africa. Thanks to the totalitarian application of liberal politics, it has become hell on Earth, making it the ideal choice to chair the United Nations Commission of Sustainable Development.

Makes sense. The country is starving and farmland is wasting away, rendering the country unsustainable, so according to the pointy-headed elites at the Useless Nations, this situation is a model of “Sustainable Development” for the world to mimic.