One Day with Evo Morales

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I just watched a half-hour program on RT entitled One Day with Evo Morales in which a female reporter spent the day with President Evo Morales Ayma of Bolivia, starting at 4:30 in the morning and ending at 11 o'clock at night.  At least 25 minutes was worthless, just showing the reporter standing around waiting for him to come out of a meeting, asking him stupid questions like how old he was or getting on and off the presidential aircraft.  

But there was one short episode that was interesting. While onboard, the reporter asked President Morales if they were flying in the same plane that, retruning Morales from a meeting in Moscow back to Bolivia, had been forcibly grounded in Vienna, Austria, on July 1, 2013.  and kept on the ground for nine hours while "they" tried to find out if American whistleblower Edward Snowden was hiding in the toilet or had sneaked into an overhead luggage bin--an unprecedented violation of diplomatic immunity and inviolability. 

Morales was idly thumbing through a newspaper and didn't even bother to look up, replying that yes, it was the same aircraft  in which he had been "kidnapped." Then the reporter asked the only intelligent question of the whole program, inquiring whether he intended to "sue the countries responsible for the incident," presumably the Austrians--not to mention the French, the Spanish and the Italians--all of whom had refused to allow President Morales's plane to cross their airspace.  Still leafing through his newspaper, Morales replied nonchalantly, "They just follow the orders they get from the Empire."

Of course, "the Empire" refers to the United States and "they" refers to all the pipsqueak countries on the planet, that is every country except the United States. 

What this means in practice is that according to the doctrine of "American exceptionalism" the United States government--in reality only the president--can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, wherever he wants and to whomever he wants regardless of international law, American law, the will of the American people as expressed by the Congress or the Constitution of the United States, which he swore to "preserve, protect and defend."

And Morales appeared to be perfectly resigned to being the victim of a realpolitik that he knew he could not fight.

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It so happened that yesterday I was invited for lunch at a friend's place.  My friend's daughter, who lives in Vienna, was also there.  I asked the daughter what she thought about the hijacking of President Morales's aircraft.
  

She replied that she had completely forgotten about the incident. I answered, "Of course! They want you to forget about it!"