Apparently, it isn't just Arab Muslims in high places who feel the urge to pass along power in their families, even if the family members are inexperiences and are vastly underqualified.
At least Gemal Mubarak has some experience running things, but this dude's just bomber-bait right now:
Benazir Bhutto's husband asked the United Nations and British government to help investigate her assassination, and her 19-year-old son was chosen Sunday to succeed her as chairman of her opposition party.Bhutto's son Bilawal Zardari, an Oxford University student with no political experience, is now catapulted to the center of Pakistan's tumultuous public life. Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari, 51, is a powerbroker in the party who served as environment minister in her second government.
All the revisionist historians of the world calling Benazir Bhutto a moderating force for democracy (when she was just a kleptocrat thing like any other false-flag opposition-populist) should be shrieking that her legacy is now being treated like a birthright instead of going to someone who has earned the respect of the people.
But then again, if the people are so set in their ways that they need the next in line for a dynasty to lead them instead of being competent enough to choose it for themselves among their ranks, what does this say about their capacity to handle a transition to democratic rule?
We've seen what horribly flawed mantle-bearers can do to movements. Just look at the horrifyingly rancid track record of those that followed Martin Luther King as heir-apparent to leading African Americans to equality and Justice. Across the board, you've got kleptocrats, shakedown artists, philandering preachers, reverse-racists, anti-Semitic pulpit-pounders, and... and...
What the flying fuck is Danny Glover? Someone please tell me, eh?
Boy-King Bhutto might turn out to be what Pakistan needs, if the people are willing to invest into him their trust and hopes and dreams and ambitions. But looking at the video and the stories of people worried for their friends and family and country back home, it'll be interesting to see the hypocrisy of those who thing that Musharraf ought to be toppled as a bloody-handed military dictator and Bhutto Jr should be elevated to regent status while they thought we should have left Saddam in power and kept sanctioning his country to death while be oil-for-fooded himself to riches.
If you had Benazir on your 2008 dead pool list and you're looking for a substitute, Bilawal will be an excellent choice if he pokes his nose out of the mouse-hole of his safehouse in London like his mother did.
I'm still wondering if Benazir intentionally went home to martyr herself for her cause because of some terminal illness or other circumstance. Considering her greedy, kleptocrat ways, she was more interested in her own survival and socking away the loot like Arafat was than being some kind of "opposition elder statesman" or a hands-on Nelson Mandela type.
(Don't get me started on that ignorance-propagandist Mandela. The soaring AIDS rates of South Africa are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to his band of armed barbarians in the SA cabinet making insane tribal anti-scientific proclamations during his reign. From an apartheid-state to Zimbabwe-2, eh.)