Quico says: So, get this. "Comando Nacional de la Resistencia" spokesman Antonio Ledezma (groan) has formally asked Prosecutor General Isaías Rodríguez (double groan) to drop any ongoing investigation relying on the testimony of well-known fantasist Giovanni/Geovany/Jovany Vásquez de Armas (quadruple groan with triple back flip.) You've got to hand it to a story that manages to put the utter dregs of Venezuelan and Colombian public life together in just one sentence!There's too much idiocy compressed into too little space here to quite go over it all. But indulge me as I rant briefly on the Comando Nacional de la Resistencia. These are the folks who, as you'll recall, "refuse to recognize the Chávez regime" and are therefore "resisting" it - just like Jean Moulin resisted Nazi occupation.
Ummmm, ok. Try to picture Moulin walking up to his neighborhood Nazi field commander to hand him a carefully argued legal brief asking for an injunction to block the next batch of deportations to the concentration camps. Ermmmm... doesn't quite work like that, resistance, does it?
And yet, not a week seems to go by without some CNR blowhard demanding an injunction from one of these courts they don't recognize. You can barely turn on Globo without seeing one of them, implicitly or explicitly, recognizing the authorities they say they are resisting. Worse, the penny never seems to drop for them that the second you file an injunction, you are in fact recognizing a court's authority to grant it.
Am I missing something, or are these guys catastrophically failing to grasp some not-at-all subtle differentiations here? Gandhi did not plead with the High Court in London to overturn British taxes on salt making...he walked to the sea and made salt. That's resistance! Hamas does not file finely argued briefs for the end of Israeli occupation...they blow up Israelis. That's resistance! CNR wraps itself in the rhetoric of resistence...and then goes plead with Isaías to pretty please do his job properly. That's pathetic!
Turning the opposition movement (well, their bit of it anyway, cuz, as they say, "not in my name!") into the same morass of superficiality and empty talk as the government they are un-resisting, they sap the movement of the moral seriousness it would take to either resist or oppose the government successfully.
Fools.
