Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Ecuadorian Chutzpah

Once again, it is a bit early in the week to be homing in on the Chutzpah award. However, since the news just seems to keep getting worse, I find myself more and more attracted to those who invoke chutzpah with a positive connotation. Thus, unless a more worthy candidate comes along before the end of the week, I am prepared to grant this week's award to Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa. This comes with an Honorable Mention award (yes, I know, the first of its kind) to Amy Goodman, whose news headlines on Democracy Now this morning provided the only coverage I could find of why President Correa deserves the award:

Ecuador Refuses to Renew Lease for U.S. Military Base
Meanwhile a dispute continues over a U.S. military base in Ecuador. Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa has refused to renew Washington's lease on the Manta air base. In an interview with Reuters Correa said he would renew the lease on one condition -- the United States allow Ecuador to build a military base in Miami. Correa said: "If there's no problem having foreign soldiers on a country's soil, surely they'll let us have an Ecuadorian base in the United States." It is estimated that United States has over 700 military bases in foreign countries.

I have no idea why this story did not show up on the Reuters RSS feed for International News. However, regular readers have seen enough accounts of how all is not well in the Reuters garden; so this particular lapse should come as no surprise. So thank you, Amy, for not letting this story languish on the cutting-room floor; and thank you (oh so much), President Correa, for taking just one symptom of American imperialism and shoving it back into the imperialist faces!

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