The Legitimate GOP

There's something funny in a not so, but only a little, ho-ho way about this story. It's in the WSJ, so you'd need a ticket to read, but you can also get a glimmer of it from Wonkette. It's about Mexico's so-called "Legitimate Government", complete with a Legitimate President and Cabinet.

It's real, too. This is their foundation statement:

We have constituted a cabinet with honest men and women who are committed to the majority of the population as well as the legal and legitimate minorities. They are six men and six women that will accompany me in the management of the government. This team will formulate a series of diagnoses on the main problems of the country and will propose solutions and recommendations. Therefore, as of today we announce the first 20 measures of this people's government....

The Legitimate Government is set up by a liberal block of functionaries who lost the 2006 election. Since it is a liberal block of blockheads, of course Murdoch's WSJ would pillory it, and not unrightly so.

The Journal story says,

It all began in 2006 when the former Mexico City mayor almost became Mexico's real president, losing the election by a hair. He cried fraud, launched street protests, and excoriated the winner, President Felipe Calderón, as a "presidential usurper." Then, as a culminating gesture of defiance, he held a mock inauguration in the country's main square, donning a replica of Mexico's red, white and green presidential sash and took a pretend oath of office.

With this, many assumed they had seen the last of Mr. López Obrador -- at least until the next election in 2012.

But while the leftist has faded from international headlines, he never really went away in Mexico. He went on to found a parallel executive branch of government that proposes new laws, issues statements, holds elections, officiates during Mexican Independence Day, and even circulates its own form of identification card for Mexicans (some 2.8 million Mexicans carry them, according to a Legitimate Government spokesman).

Nowadays, Mr. López Obrador tours the country giving presidential speeches where he is introduced as the real McCoy. After three years of this, he will soon have visited all of Mexico's 2,438 municipalities. That would make him, he says, the first politician -- indeed, maybe even the first man -- ever to have done that.

To Guambat, it sounds a bit like the Cheney-Rove-Palin Grand Old Tea Party.