Not this Nation

Ah, Dave Zirin, this blogger has to argue with you.

Right-wing and left-wing aren’t useful terms when it comes to Brazil. Politics here revolve not around ideology, but people. The alliances are fluid, constantly reevaluated and remade. Politicians switch parties the way dieters switch menus. Plus, there is what the public sees and then, what we don’t see (as we learned, so painfully, from last week’s wiretaps.

Rio mayor Eduardo Paes, now with the PMDB (having cast off two other parties) is certainly good at samba, as Piauí magazine described in a recent profile. But the things he said in the tapped phone conversation with ex-president Lula? Who knows if his career will ever recover. His disdain for the poor was evident as never before. His words also revealed a problematic relationship with PMDB governor Luis Fernando “Pezão”, himself seriously ill in the hospital, named, yet so…