Even in Brazil, a country that is no stranger to crisis, the recent, rapid-fire succession of financial, economic and political blows has been breathtaking.
After a week in which the nation’s top young financier was thrown in jail alongside a senator -- pushing his bank into a struggle for survival -- and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. warned the economy was slipping into a full-blown depression, impeachment proceedings were initiated late Wednesday against President Dilma Rousseff.
Though the hearings will ultimately center on whether Rousseff violated fiscal laws, the root of her widespread unpopularity is the same that landed the banker, Andre Esteves, in jail and crippled the economy: an unprecedented corruption scandal that’s hamstrung the country’s biggest companies and triggered policy paralysis in the capital city. With gross domestic product now shrinking at an annualized pace of almost 7% and the budget deficit swelling to the widest in at least two decades, Brazil’s currency and local bond markets have posted deeper losses than those of any other developing nation this year....
Lower house speaker Eduardo Cunha said Wednesday night he accepted one of thirty-four requests to impeach the president on charges that range from illegally financing her re-election to doctoring fiscal accounts this year and last. Impeachment hearings could take months, involving several votes in Congress that ultimately may result in the president’s ouster. [emphases added]
This was four and a half months ago. Yesterday, Dilma Rousseff was finally impeached, and her senate trial will soon begin. Who knows if she'll be convicted and removed from power, because evidently half of the Brazilian congress that will be trying her are on the take in one way or another themselves, and I'm sure Rousseff can buy them off or otherwise influence the proceedings (or as she puts it, "fight").
Sounds a lot like something Hillary Clinton would say, doesn't it?
Would - or, rather will - she ever have to battle impeachment proceedings against her? Hard to see now how such a situation could ever arise. She will take office next year with restored large Democrat congressional majorities, and after the extent to which Trumpmania has shattered the GOP, there will probably be no mid-term GOP comeback on Capitol Hill, nor any serious opposition to Mrs. Clinton's reelection in 2020. And if she keels over during that time, Vice President Julian Castro will take over without missing a beat.
In other words, the Brazilian government might be corrupt and the Brazilian people foolish, but they've got nothing on their American counterparts in either category.
All of which means that Dilma Rousseff picked the wrong country in which to be a corrupt old harridan, as her sister up north seemed to be implicitly telling her on multiple occasions over the past few years:
[Mrs.] Clinton pointed to Rousseff as a great example of an enemy of corruption.
“So we now have a chance to set a new global standard for good governance and to strengthen a global ethos of transparency and accountability,” [Mrs.] Clinton said as she wrapped up her remarks that day, according to a State [Commissaria]t transcript. “And there is no better partner to have started this effort and to be leading it than Brazil, and in particular, President Rousseff. Her commitment to openness, transparency, her fight against corruption is setting a global standard.”... [emphases added]
Here comes that Bizarro World vergito-inducing surreality again. You'd think I'd be used to that sort of thing by now.
You can see why I refer to Rouseff and Rodham as sisters: Greedy, megalomaniacal, power-mad, and, of course, card-carrying leftwingnuts. So of course one lied and the other one swore to it, and vice versa. It's almost as if the Empress was trying to insulate a Imperatriz against the wrath of the far more vigilant people of the latter's country. Something about which she doesn't have to worry in her own right in the slightest, beginning 277 days from now.
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