Latin America's Going...Left? Right?

A troubling update: Nora Conner at The Revealer notes that not all the leaders that the U.S. media is identifying as "leftist" are actually all that progressive. Zeroing in on the victory of new Nicaraguan president, former Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, Conner notes that "the New York Times described it as "another gain for leftists in Latin America"; and the Washington Post insisted that the Ortega victory was "an embarrassing setback for the Bush administration."

Conner argues persuasively that Ortega's basically abandoned his leftist roots. For example, he's allied himself with an old rival, retired cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, in support of an awful, extremely strict ban on abortion. Yikes.