WHEN MOULITSAS WAS A nine-year-old boy living in civil war-torn El Salvador, his parents received a strange envelope in the mail. Inside were photos of Moulitsas and his brother being driven to their grandmother's, and getting on and off the school bus. It was a message to the right-sympathizing family from the communist guerilla fighters: We can take your children at any time. Terrified, the family fled to Chicago in 1980. (Emphasis added.)This is the first time I recall a mainstream newspaper making the obvious observation and stating as fact the reality that Marcos C. Alberto Moulitsas Zúñiga (MAMZ) comes from a "right-sympathizing family."
The Indictment of Markos C. Alberto Moulitsas ZÚÑIGA (MAMZ) by Justice and History (Updated with Additional Information and Counts) pointed this out in 2007. This fact is important because MAMZ has consistently lied about it and because it stands at odds with MAMZ's own incredible assertion, through his Cato Unbound biography, that his heroes are the late (assassinated by the Salvadoran right wing) Catholic Archbishop Arnulfo Romero, who was identifying and organizing increasingly with goals of the the Salvadoran leftist majority when he was assassinated, as well as Cesar Chavez, the famous Latino union organizer.
On September 9, 2006, the editors of Cato Unbound wrote of MAMZ,
Moulitsas’s heroes are Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, Cesar Chavez, and, above all others, his father. Moulitsas currently resides in Berkeley, California, with his wife and son.The Cato Institute can only have written this because this is what MAMZ told them.
The media has never asked MAMZ to explain why someone like himself, who acknowledges voting for President George H. W. Bush in 1992, when the right-wing Salvadoran Government's civil war against leftists was raging, would also admire the leftist Archbishop Romero, who was assassinated after increasingly supporting the Salvadoran left wing in its opposition to the right-wing Government's war against its leftist opposition. MAMZ tries to position himself as a leftist while acknowledging that he voted and politically organized as a Republican.
MAMZ has said of his politics at the time of the election of George H.W. Bush, in an autobiographic piece at the American Prospect:
I was also a Republican. As a 17-year-old precinct captain in 1988, not even old enough to vote, I helped deliver one of the district’s best precinct performances for Henry Hyde. I had a framed picture of me with George H. W. Bush.George H. W. Bush was elected in 1988, when the Salvadoran civil war was raging between a right-wing Government and a left-wing populace, which populace was supported by some Catholic Church officials who found themselves morally compelled to side with the terrorized leftist public against the Government.
PBS has written:
Truth Revealed With continuing reports of atrocities and murders in El Salvador, the U.S. Congress no longer accepted the State Department's assurance that things were getting better. Speaker of the House Tom Foley created a special task force to monitor El Salvador's investigation of the murders.
Congressman Joe Moakley of Massachusetts was selected to head up the investigation. During his research and visits to El Salvador, Congressman Moakley encountered a massive cover-up, deep problems with the Salvadoran armed forces, conspiracy and lies, which led him to challenge U.S. policy. He discovered that from a very high level, the armed forces of El Salvador had been responsible for the murders of the Jesuits. His investigation also led to the conclusion that certain levels of the U.S. government had known about the situation long before the task force was created.
Moakley's report revealed the cruel injustice of the U.S.-backed Salvadoran government, setting in motion an international process to end the war. Both sides of the conflict in El Salvador approached the United Nations for help in negotiating a settlement. The United Nations sponsored talks, which culminated in the January 1992 signing of the Peace Accords, ending 12 years of civil war.So, what did MAMZ, who came from a right-wing family and voted for a right-wing President in the United States, nonetheless admire about the left-leaning Archbishop Romero and Cesar Chavez? And how did MAMZ's admiration for Romero and Chavez become convoluted into his support for Republican politics in the United States? Jessica Lussenhop's story in Minneapolis-St. Paul's "City Pages'
seems to offer a ready answer. MAMZ is from a "right-sympathizing family"and his assertions to the contrary are simply bold-faced lies.
MAMZ disingenuous and dishonest in his identification of his "heroes," and was engaging in political positioning that derived from his desire to be seen as a "leftist." Since MAMZ has admitted being trained by the CIA to be as a secret agent between 2001 and 2003, while he started DailyKos in 2002, wasn't MAMZ's incredible assertion that he admired Archbishop Romero and Cesar Chavez just more CIA-trained misinformation, or does that sort of self-serving posturing come naturally to MAMZ? It seems that both motivations have a basis in fact.
What stands out about the two leaders whom MAMZ claims to admire, is that they led Latin Americans in fighting for liberation from oppression. And yet MAMZ himself has apologetically and categorically rejected any such role for himself with respect to Latin Americans. After the Northern Illinois University "(NIU) student newspaper assigned MAMZ to write about "racism", and MAMZ wrote a mult-part series on the topic, MAMZ wrote an unassigned piece summing up his attitude toward the task and the people he had been assigned to cover.
He said in the Northern Star,
"And as I left the ugly reality of racism behind, it struck me that what was such an easy and trivial exercise for me would be impossible for anyone whose skin color or religious persuassion (sic) made them the target of bigotry and discrimination. They would never be able to escape who they were." (Emphasis added.)MAMZ has made good on his promise to ignore Latinos; Quantcast.com says that only 1% of the readership at DailyKos is Latino, even though 67% of Latinos voted for Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008. The quote above shows why a Black presidential candidate is so much better at leading Latinos than is a Salvadoran blogger "from a right-sympathizing family" with the resources to fly to Chicago, with legal immigration status, when necessary. (Emphasis added.)
