Lula! Lula! Lula! Lula! Lula! Lula! Lula! Lula! Lula! Lula! Lula! Lula! Lula! Lula! Lula! Lula! Lula! Lula!
I'm very happy that Lula has won the presidency of Brazil, again, although there remains an undercurrent of fear that right-wing fanatics (including the President himself may try to pull a Jan. 6 style coup) may commit themselves to political violence to retain Jair Bolsonaro as President.
The entirety of the time that I lived in Brazil was under Lula's presidency, and I spent some time in Brazil under his successor Dilma Rousseff. There is not a single way in which Brazil is better now that the fascist dictator fluffers conducted their "soft” coup to oust Dilma and went thru a string of horribly each-more-corrupt-than-the-previous-guy presidents. The thing that Dilma was impeached for ("pedalagem fiscal”, a form of moving funds between government accounts to make things look better than they were financially), was legalized the week after she was impeached. Also, the vast majority of politicians who voted to impeach her were actively under investigation for corruption, even though she was not, despite them all saying they voted to impeach her because she was corrupt. And then the investigations into their corruption just magically came to a halt. Weird. Just a little history lesson to remind everybody that conservative, authoritarian governance makes things worse for a country.
Many people have written a lot about how the political styles Bolsonaro and Cult45 are similar in their adulation for authoritarian displays of what they think looks like macho strength. They also both openly flaunt their ignorance and try to act like it's some sort of god-given brilliance. The one thing Bolsonaro (aka Bozo) actually has on Cult45 is military cred. Bolsonaro actually was a Colonel in the Brazilian army and has legitimate support among active, high-ranking military officers, and broad support among the armed forces in general. Americans are lucky that Culty did not have that power behind him.
So how is Glenn Greenwald involved in this? Well, once upon a time GG actually had some pretty decent left-leaning or left-wing journalistic cred. And during that time, he had an insider leak to him a lot of very explosive and revelatory details about how the prosecutor and judge that convicted Lula, and got him sent to prison, colluded together and broke pretty much every ethical legal norm known. Greenwald published an extensive series of articles revealing the blatantly corrupt, and in many cases illegal, actions that were used to convict Lula. These revelations sparked great outrage in the Brazilian public, and eventually led to Lula's conviction being overturned, paving the way for him to be able to run for office again. There is no other Brazilian politician who could have cobbled together enough voters to defeat Bolsonaro otherwise. Had Greenwald not published those explosive reports that absolutely destroyed the basis for Lula's conviction and eventually led to the annulment of said conviction, Bolsonaro would very likely still be president today. And that would be a great tragedy for the Brazil, and the world.
I have lost most of my respect for Greenwald, particularly for his COVID pandemic related verbal diarrhea and pro-Russia military imperialism, but I will always be grateful for the exposé he produced that not just shined a light on, but absolutely eviscerated the entire structure of the incestuous puss-filled boil and ooze that is the entirety of right-wing politics in Brazil.