Politics: boring as usual

I've been having less and less time to write posts lately for a variety of reasons. For example, I took May 1st off — I slept all morning, then had to eat asado with certain members of the extended family that I didn't want to see, and then found relief in the form of an improvised mate-and-chick-spotting picnic with some friends at Parque Urquiza. And yesterday, I wasted the whole afternoon calling the service hotline of Ciudad Internet, my ISP, since I asked for a 1.2 Mbps ADSL service, I'm being charged for a 2.5 Mbps one, and I'm getting 480 Kbps since March. As expected, nothing was accomplished, except a promise that Telecom will look for the problem and a 50% reduction of the fee for three months as a compensation, to shut me up for the time being.

Now I'm leaving aside important politics news... but bear with me. That politics is dirty and corrupt is not news; yet the background of all these news that I'm letting unreported is sheer corruption, plus the general knee-jerkiness and lack of sophistication that are probably the single most definite mark of politics in the Kirchner era. And before you say anything else, Kirchner is only one of the culprits; it takes two to tango, and it takes a very stupid opposition to reply to Kirchner in his own terms.

And this is still better than the Menem era, where political debate was inexistant — at least now the politicians are flamboyantly showing their true colours. I have the distinct impression and the fervent hope that many who are now speaking their minds, displaying utter contempt for their own public image or for simple common decency, will regret having opened their mouths in the future.

Anyway, that's not really a motivation for writing, and I feel I may be repeating myself. The ridiculousness of politicians is reaching unprecedented levels but that's only a matter of degree. Of note, the presidency accuses the Radical Party of sending a guy with a truck to crash it on president Kirchner's home in Santa Cruz, despite the fact that this guy has been declared insane and looks exactly like a garden variety madman with driving skills slightly worse than the average Argentinian; and Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, de facto head of the Argentine Catholic Church, emphatically denies that he's doing politics when he speaks of the state of the country and such, even as the press notes that he personally hosted a summit of the opposition leaders to coordinate their efforts to bring down Kirchner. And he's a Jesuit, for Ignatius of Loyola's sake!