Perhaps I'm a bit paranoid. But I just got done reading Naomi Klein's shock doctrine book, and Senator Hillary, and Senator MCCain's gas tax proposals contain elements that are clearly laid out in Naomi's book.

According to Naomi, the ruling elite have trouble passing the economic 'reforms' that they want when democratic societies are humming along normally. Common themes include less government spending, elimination of trade barriers, privatization of state owned wealth, eliminating price controls, corporate and financial deregulation, and bath-tub blah blah blah. You know what I'm talking about.

Since these 'reforms' cannot easily be implemented with normal democratic processes, other methods are employed. Naomi documents in her book the evolution of the shock therapy that is employed just before the Reaganomics are shoved down the throat of unsuspecting countries.

Please note this is an issue diary. It doesn't contain the name of a democratic candidate, nor bitter whining or intense concern about either one of the choices we are left with.

Please click here if you have accidently arrived at a non-candidate diary and are reeling in horror.

Thanks.

Actual candidate-free issue on the flip.

Hundreds of real and suspected Allende supporters were gunned down in Santiago's soccer stadium, fashioned into a torture center and concentration camp.  Across the nation, in the streets and military detention centers, Pinochet's forces murdered 20,000 and tortured 60,000 in the first few months after 9/11/1973. One million Chileans were forced into exile. According to leading international relations analyst William I. Robinson, it was "the bloodiest coup in Latin-American history" (Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony [Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1996], p. 46).

Remembering Chile's 9/11 by Paul Street

The terrorists hate our freedoms," the Chilean workers, peasants and students could have echoed George W. Bush's post 9/11/01 comments. They would be explaining, however, what lay behind the US and Chilean military plotters who helped make the coup possible, just as George W. Bush simplistically explained the 2001 attack from the mostly Saudi Arabian terrorists.

Chile: The Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11 by Saul Landau

I just read that piece by the Churchill historian who compared Bush to Neville Chamberlain, and I couldn't help feeling that it was unfair to Chamberlain, who was wrong but not an ignorant wannabe dictator.

It is likewise unfair to compare Bush to the first rank of evil dictators of the 20th century. He lacks the staying power of Stalin or Mao, and the propaganda flair of Hitler that made him so memorable.

Therefore, the proper analogy is to Third World thug kleptocrats. But which one?

The Politico raised two eyebrows when it got a shout-out from Bush at a recent press conference and was then discovered to have a strange love affair with Drudge, chronicled by Media Matters here. The new online magazine boldly states that “Our answer to this [ideological war] will be journalism that insists on the primacy of facts over ideology.”

A third eybrow was raised last night when along with MSNBC and the Reagan Library they hosted the Zombie Reagan Party first GOP debate.

Today Greenwald unloads a bonanza of information regarding the organizations ties to Texas Republicans and amazingly, Pinochet. Let's start calling these wolf tickets right now.

Update:Edited for clarity.

(not why you think)

Helmut, over at Phronesisiacal, got it right:

Two dead tyrants: Saddam and Pinochet. Two tragedies: that neither death is justice, whether the death came naturally or as the result of a bogus, politicized trial and state execution. Apologists for Pinochet on the right ought to be ashamed. Apologists for Saddam from the left ought to be ashamed. To the extent that neither are ashamed, they're moral cretins. The point is tyranny and the prescription is to bring tyrants to justice, real justice, for their abuses. Killing someone for expediency's sake or political reasons itself sleeps on the side of tyranny and only makes space for future tyrants and future states of exception.

 But our desire "to bring tyrants to justice, real justice," raises the obvious question is "What is real justice?" and the non-obvious question is "Should justice ought to be our concern anyway?"

Saddam's swinging corpse invites a comparison with another infamous,  newly- deceased, sociopathic strongman: Chile's General Augusto Pinochet. Both owed their acension to power to the CIA and Friends in the Highest Places in the US. Each owed their tenuous control over their people to the liberal use of murder, torture and mayhem. Both were stridently anti-communist and turned to the US frequently for military assistance; requests which Washington fell all over itself to fufill, albiet covertly.

Sure they were Sonofabitches...but they were OUR sonofabitches, after all!

But history, as they say, is written by the winners. And the putative winners have applied their own curious brand of moral relativism to the Dastardly Duo.

Hecklers, admirers bid farewell to Pinochet - CNN.com
QUICK VOTE
How will you remember Chile's General Pinochet?
Savior
Despot
Won't remember him"

Chilean journalist Jorge Fernando Garretón emailed, "Friends, the campaign to prevent a moral victory to Pinochet supporters is gaining in strength. Voting results have changed in the past two days since we became aware of the poll. Pinochet supporters have gained 1,556 votos this past 24 hours. We democrats have gained: 2,899 votos."

The current results are at 70% for Pinochet as a savior, 23% despot; and 7% won't remember him at all.

Why give them even this pathetic symbol of false victory? Click here to vote.

Just when you thought the corporate media couldn't get any worse, the Washington Post editorial staff weighs in on the death of Augusto Pinochet.

"For some he was the epitome of an evil dictator. That was partly because he helped to overthrow, with U.S. support, an elected president considered saintly by the international left"

Pinochet is not considered an "evil dictator" because he overthrew Allende, he is considered an evil dictator because he was an evil dictator, ruling with an iron fist, and killing and torturing thousands of innocent people. He could have overthrown Hitler and he'd still be considered an evil dictator. As for the "considered saintly" part, Allende's "saintliness" comes from his becoming a martyr because he was overthrown (and either was killed or killed himself, depending on what you believe). As a ruler, he was no more saintly than many other elected leftists throughout the years.

Because I'd have a lot less to talk about if it wasn't for his hypocritical, hot-air filled writings.

I know this was somewhat touched on already, but I've got a somewhat expanded and different take.

Jonah thinks Iraq needs a dictator again:

I THINK ALL intelligent, patriotic and informed people can agree: It would be great if the U.S. could find an Iraqi Augusto Pinochet. In fact, an Iraqi Pinochet would be even better than an Iraqi Castro.

Wow, I guess that democracy thing went out the window.  He's not even talking about it as an option now.  Goldberg is going with rightist dictator over leftist dictator.  What about the purple fingers?  What about all those votes?  Oh, they can't stop fighting each other and us?  Well, guess we need to find a new dictator.

We'll continue this after the jump.

    (Courtesy of CNNNN)

    Despite rumors to the contrary, soon-to-be Presidential candidate John Edwards will not in fact be raising the dead in New Orleans, whether with his shiny white teeth or any other miracle aspect of the former U.S. Senator from North Carolina. The smily Senator may merely be announcing his run for President; it is widely suspected by pundits that the fanaticism of his followers has accounted for the "raise the dead" rumors, not to mention the widely bruited rumor of an Edwards/Oprah ticket, or the more unlikely but still possible Edwards/Santa Claus ticket.
    In related news, Edwards publicly denied that he will be playing the part of Little Orphan Annie (cf. "The sun will come out, tomorroooow") in the new coast-to-coast touring production of "Annie". "I'm optimistic enough to play that part, though!", the candidate smiled--as he so often does. "Let's all have that positive outlook on life! Hey, I still have mine even though Dick Cheney beat my sorry *ss during that debate!!!"

    In unrelated news, Francisco Franco, Augusto Pinochet, and Evan Bayh are still dead.

 In September, 1976, a bomb exploded beneath a car driving on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C.  The explosion killed Orlando Letelier, who had been a foreign minister for the government of Chile under Allende.  When Pinochet came to power, Letelier fled to the US and was working for the Institute for Policy Studies.

  Someone else died in that explosion.  Her name was Ronni Moffitt.  She was 25 years old.  She, along with her husband of four months, worked at the Institute. He was also riding in the car.

  I will never forget that day....

I’ll not apologize for the smile brought to my lips by Augusto Pinochet’s death this week. He deserved a trial, but, obviously, his protectors were going to make sure he never got one, So, adiós sin compasión to the beast. His final hours were a good deal more comfortable than those of his thousands of victims. If I could afford the flight, I’d shit on his grave ... except that his family took his ashes home to their ranch to avoid such acts of desecration.

My grim glee has been tempered because another mass murderer enabled by U.S. machinations and complicity and money, a man still very much alive, may Pinochet himself out of the grasp of justice. His name is José Efraín Ríos Montt, retired general and president of Guatemala, graduate of the notorious School of the Americas, and right-wing evangelical Christian who counts Pat Robertson as a personal friend. In the 18 months he headed the country after a CIA-backed coup d’etat in 1982, Ríos Montt presided over at least five times as many killings as Pinochet, and, with other generals, rained terror onto hundreds of Mayan villages and towns. Ronald Reagan, the sainted Republican icon, helped him do it and publicly defended him for getting a "bum rap" at the same time Ríos Montt’s soldiers were tying people’s thumbs behind their backs, shooting them in the head and dumping them in mass graves across the Guatemalan highlands and elsewhere. All in the name of crushing a communist guerrilla insurgency that arose because U.S. ideologues couldn’t stand to see democracy in Guatemala.

Today, Ríos Montt has it much better than Pinochet in his final years. He roams free as head of one of the country’s largest political parties, the Guatemalan Republican Front, and came in third in the 2003 presidential election. The good news is that he might not be free that much longer.

(Apologies to Unitary Moonbat for borrowing his series title...)

The discussions since Pinochet's unlamented death last weekend have demonstrated serious misconceptions about exactly what happened economically in Chile during his regime.  Much of this is due, it appears, to people's justifiable revulsion at the brutality of his dictatorship, and their discomfort at acknowledging what we might call the inconvenient truths of the regime's economic legacy.

Facts, however, are facts, and accepting their reality does not – and should not – imply approving of their existence.  And the simple fact regarding Chile is that Pinochet left behind a very different country than the one he brutally seized in the late winter of 1973.

It is always edifying to watch Charlie Rose kiss the butt of power.  Not a syllable of his question list could be construed to be of an adversarial nature.  On the occasion of Pinochet's death, Henry reminded us that we did not wish to have another Cuba to the south.  Thus, in the moral universe of HK, it is perfectly in keeping with the realpolitik to have the CIA assist in his assassination.  Not an unkind word about Pinochet from HK.

What a bad time for Pinochet to die. Here we were, almost to the end of what Atrios calls the "Year of the Dirty F'ing Hippie", the scapegoat of all things ailing us. And nothing brings out the Dirty F'ing Hippie meme in liberals better than Pinochet. Current world politics dining fare includes the end of habeas corpus in America, 3000 Iraqis dying a month, 300 thousand people killed in Darfur (not to be confused with the 2 million killed in the previous 2nd Sudanese Civil War), 4 million killed and still rising in the ongoing conflict in the Congo, etc., etc. But for a few days at least our attention will be drawn back 30+ years to a minor tin-horn dictator at the cone of South America.

In a commentary published in today's L.A Times Johan Goldberg has come to the "brilliant" conclusion that what Iraq needs is its own Augusto Pinochet. In the belief that a ruler with Pinochet'sabilities can rebuild Iraq  creating a strong  civil society and economic model similar to what Pinochet did for Chile after the 1973 coup that ended the Presidency of Salvador Allende. In the editorial Johan draws comparisons between Fidel Castro and Pinochet in justifying why a Pinochet like leader is best for Iraq.