Voters elect a fresh face with ideals who promises to root out corruption and get rid of the good old boys’ crony networks — and then turns into a good old boy himself.

It can’t happen here, right?

Oh, wait, it did happen here, right here, twice, in the important Riverside and Los Angeles sheriff’s races of 2018. Voters were sold a pig in a poke with both Chad Bianco and Alex Villanueva. Bianco was affiliated with the extremist Oath Keepers — and refused to protect the public safety by enforcing the vaccine mandate among his deputies. Villanueva is a deputy gang enabler — and refused to protect the public safety by enforcing the vaccine mandate among his deputies.

Sheriffs are important in their counties. But presidents can wreck a whole country, or at least give it a go.

That’s what we saw with the Former Guy.

And next door in Mexico, that’s what the Mexican electorate is seeing with the inane term of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who’s like a Former Guy who had been wearing Bernie Sanders clothing.

Bernie-Bro popular when he was the left-leaning populist mayor of Mexico City, AMLO as president is driving most Mexicans crazy with his lousy leadership on the pandemic, based on a crazy denialism; with his killing of the country’s effective tourism-promotion budget in favor of spending on the Maya Train for tourists no tourist ever asked for, in the Yucatan; and. enormously sadly, and I would hope not just for people in my profession, his evil laxity on the epidemic of journalist killings throughout his country.

It’s evil, not merely ignorant, because rather than just throwing up his hands in despair —  murder is rife in his large, poor country, and there’s only so much a president can do, given police corruption — AMLO essentially actively encourages the massacre of the press.

As Kate Linthicum reported last week in the Los Angeles Times, AMLO “has long derided journalists as biased, pretentious ‘sellouts’ who are aligned with his political enemies. His morning news conferences feature an occasional segment called ‘Who’s Who of Lies,’ in which he names and shames reporters whom he accuses of peddling ‘fake news.’” Mmm, call anyone else to mind?

But in our country, while journalists aren’t popular either among politicians or elite CEOs with something to hide, there is not a murder epidemic among the ink-stained.

Whereas in Mexico, in the very short year so far, five journalists have already been gunned down, one of them the day before the president held a whacko press conference at which he laid into a prominent journalist and claimed that the scribe was paid too much just after said newsman had reported an expose about the lavish lifestyle of AMLO’s son.

“This would-be dictator is out of his mind,” the reporter later wrote.

Lourdes Maldonado López was an investigative journalist in Tijuana who was killed in January.

Related Articles

“Before she was shot to death outside her home, Maldonado attended one of the president’s news conferences to plea for help,” Linthicum reports. “I fear for my life,” she told López Obrador.

And then she was killed.

When asked about this fifth killing of a reporter in his country in six weeks, AMLO said the murders would be investigated. “Then he railed against his political opponents and said he hoped they would not use the violence against journalists to ‘attack his administration,’” Linthicum reports.

This is what happens to a culture when the politicians start confusing their own popularity with the welfare of their people.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. [email protected].