I can’t say that I am surprised

I’ll admit it: I didn’t think very highly of President Clinton. I thought that he was a self-serving opportunist and a thorough egotist. As his final term in office was nearing its end, he said that he loved the job of being President, that it was the greatest job in the world, and that he’d love to be able to run again, and that if he could, he’d have won a third term.

But whether President Clinton agreed with the 22^nd Amendment or not, he obeyed its restrictions, and didn’t make any noises about repealing it.

However, when it comes to socialists and communists, they don’t worry about letting any silly laws get in the way of their ambitions!

Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega renominated for president, despite term limits

Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega is finishing his second term in office, the maximum allowed under the Constitution. But on Saturday he accepted the Sandinista Party’s nomination to run again.

 
By Tim Rogers, Correspondent / February 28, 2011

Managua, Nicaragua: President Daniel Ortega on Saturday accepted his party’s nomination for the presidency, even though his reelection is barred by the Constitution.

Despite an outcry over the allegedly fraudulent presidential bid, early polls show Mr. Ortega is favored to win the November election. And given Nicaragua’s bleak political panorama, the Sandinista strongman is increasingly considered the least-bad option here – at least by the country’s sizable poor population that has benefited from new social programs and government handouts.

“I don’t think that the Nicaraguan citizen relates to the issue of legality or legitimacy as long as fundamental services are provided in an immediate way – and this government is very effective in delivering the fundamentals,” says Arturo Cruz, a political science professor at INCAE Business School and Ortega’s former ambassador to the United States.

A Sandinista majority on the Nicaraguan Supreme Court overturned part of their own Constitution, “allowing” President Ortega to run for a third term.

It’s nothing really new, of course. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez had the rules changed, which allowed him to run for reelection in 2006, and then, in 2009, had the constitution amended so that he could run for a third full term in 2012.¹ Given Señor Chavez domination of the Venezuelan media and virtually all of the political machinery in that poor country — and why a major petroleum exporting nation should be so poor is beyond me — about the only thing which will stop his re-election to a third six-year term will be his failing health.

One of the problems for our friends on the left is that they fail to understand that what they see as socialism and communism, some sort of vaguely defined sharing of wealth among everyone and the uplifting of the downtrodden, is not how people like Daniel Ortega and Hugo Chavez see socialism and communism. To them, those terms are simply the means by which they hold on to political power. When the late Libyan strongman, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, came under seige, Señor Ortega was right there to offer his encouragement, not to the people striving for freedom in the “Arab Spring,” but to Colonel Qaddafi. As for President Chavez, the Arab Spring saw his demonstrations of support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as well as Colonel Qaddafi, and he has previously expressed his strong support for the truly whacked-out President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The only Arab dictator whom Señor Chavez was glad to see fall was Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, because Mr Mubarak was a close ally of the United States.

Since the publication of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, generations of idealistic and enthusiastic readers have fallen for the egalitarian notion that their depressed lot in life isn’t their fault, that they are simply on the oppressed end of the class struggles between the Bourgeois and Proletarians, but that the day will come when the far more numerous working class, proletariat, fighting in the class struggle against the owners of the means of production, the bourgeois, will eventually triumph, replacing private property with common ownership — though they probably would not have extended that to their personal stuff — and the dictatorship of the proletariat. On the other hand, the great (and not so great) socialist/ communist leaders of world history, saw the phrase dictatorship of the proletariat, and stopped reading after the first word. That is why the “socialist” leaders are so chummy with dictators of other philosophical stripes; the dictatorship part is the only truly important part to them, and power is to be surrendered not due to constitutional limits, but only due to death or incapacity due to old age.
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¹ – Mr Chavez was elected in 1998, then pushed through a new constitution which increased Presidential powers, but imposed a two-term limit. He was re-elected in 2000, and then re-elected in 2006.