Beware of Paranoid Freaks

"I'm not a vulgar opportunist", he says. One thing you can say about AMLO is that he is utterly transparent. You can take pretty much everything he says and the opposite will be true. He is not a vulgar opportunist, but a dangerous one. In his delirium, he is now portraying those who are not with him (not only the rich, but the sane), as conspirators in a big scheme to dethrone him.
He claims to defend democracy, while it seems that he seeks to undermine it with his bully tactics. Not accepting the results of what for everybody else seems to have been a fair election and not accepting the ruling by a legitimate independent election tribunal does not strike me as particularly democratic. But AMLO will easily manipulate the minds of the many downtrodden who have been discouraged by years, if not centuries of injustice. It is a pity that they can't tell what a nefarious character he is, how thoroughly undemocratic, how dogmatic and impractical, how irresponsible and inmature and unfit to be a leader. A small example, to wit:

Mr. López Obrador has also taken pains to discredit the news media, painting reporters as part of the conspiracy against him. One reporter, Heliodoro Cárdenas of the newspaper Milenio, was roughed up by bodyguards when he tried to ask the candidate a question on Sunday. Mr. López Obrador saw the incident but did not acknowledge or stop it.

Later Mr. López Obrador told the crowd that the media had decided to anoint Mr. Calderón. “Don’t worry about the lynching going on in the media, in which they talk badly about me and our movement,” he said.

This is the level of discourse. A regular George Bush Jr., when it comes to populist locutions. He is as ignorant as Bush but as machiavellian in his handling of spin as Karl Rove: an awful combo. Milenio is a left-friendly publication, as far as I understand, but in AMLO's mind even questions are out of the question. As Enrique Krauze points out, when almost seven hundred thousand Mexico City residents took to the streets to peacefully protest the horrid insecurity in the city, as the mayor he decided it was a conspiracy against him from the rightists and the federal government and from some of the media. He was contemptuous of the marchers, saying they were "pirruris", rich kids from the upper classes, completely insensitive to the fact that the poor are the worst victims of crime in Mexico City.
The man is of a puny dictatorial bent. I can only hope that those frustrated Mexicans who chose to hang on his every word soon tire of his tirades.
That the poor believe his crap is understandable. As for the pathetic leftist "intellectuals" who support him, it is inexcusable. But I wonder how many of them pay lip service to their anachronistic ideology while their life savings are safely squirreled away in U.S. banks abroad. I bet not a few.
Now, Felipe Calderon and the wealthy bastards who run Mexico would do well to pay attention to the people's frustrations. If one good thing could come out of this is that the poor are making themselves heard. Which means the few have to stop ignoring with their accustomed disdain the frustrations of the many. Otherwise, it's going to be AMLO six years from now.
Which brings me to this:
AMLO can still run for president for the next sexenio. He has plenty of time to start campaigning and to win cleanly and by a huge margin, if after this shameful debacle, there are still people who think he is fit to rule the country. Instead of creating chaos and paralysis, why doesn't he vow to come back, like a responsible politician?
Because he is a bully.