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And Now, a Gut-Wrenching Juan Carlos Navarro Advertisement for Panama’s PRD Primary

I wanted to slip this one in before the month was out but I feared I wasn’t going to be able to due to the simple fact that Panamanians and encoding TV to the internet don’t really gel too much. Personally, if I had a video capturing card i would have it overload and bust my computer rig within six months of use since there’s so much unintentional comedy gold to mine out of that nonsense, but after some ninja research I found exactly what I had been looking for, and I’m glad to be able to share this with you.

This is the set-up: a man that’s known both online and off as Rob Rivera is lying down in bed thinking about the things people like Rob Rivera think about when they’re lying in bed (answer: chocolate) perusing the TV channels of his basic cable service. Mind you, my TV set has been busted for months. After some DIY inspection it is determined that my 3-year old CRT (a.k.a “boob tube”) TV is kicking the bucket, two of its three color bulbs being shot to hell. Watching “Hellboy” with a thick blue layer over the image, I contemplate the prospect of jumping out of my 6-story window to my death, where I’m sure they have much better TV sets and better cable service. Something stops me, though: during a commercial break I catch one of several political ads PRD presidential candidate hopeful Juan Carlos Navarro has been hammering out for the last month or so.

It doesn’t matter who these people are to you if you don’t know them already, dear reader: I could break down their rap sheets, but it ultimately is a n excercise in futilty. In the end, and in my own personal opinion, they’re all crooks in one way or the other. The question voters should be asking themselves should be “which one of these people is the lesser evil?” But, I digress. The PRD is Panama’s biggest pollitical party, with nearly 500,000 subscribers. This Sunday September 7th of 2008, they will all vote to decide who from the party will represent them in the coming 2009 elections. Of course, all eyes are on the three presidential hopefuls: former Panama City Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro, Former Minister of Housing Balbina Herrera and a few other people that don’t hold a pubic hair’s chance at winning anything ever in their political lives for reasons that are too many to mention without me getting brain hemorrage. So, in the end it’s all about these two, a man and a woman that have swaved the PRD flag for decades, and they’ve both done plenty to make the capital and country better throughout their careers. As it is with these primaries, when they reach the home stretch the candidates start showing their claws and it’s often a dirty, no-holds-barred beserker barrage going back and forth. Comparatively to campaigns in the past, these adverts that have been popping up on TV have been quite harsh but not below the belt, with only Balbina Herrera not engaging in that questionable display of sportsmanship. Juan Carlos Navarro has gone nuts railing on Balbina, since there’s plenty of stock footage of Balbina openly supporting Navarro earlier this year when she wasn’t even thinking about running. These new ads, though…? These new ads are downright unbelievable. Watch, true believer:

The opposition criticizes me for giving away free food to poor families. But, we are facing human tragedy.

Mrs. Maria lives in the capital city with her four children. She earns $183 a month, ironing clothes. The prices of basic food items have doubled… she doesn’t have enough money to feed four children. She can barely provide for two.

She then made a very hard decision: send two of her children away to live with relatives in the interior. But, how does a mother decide which of the children to send? Maria chose the oldest of them, but her oldest, her daughter, began to cry.

She said: “Mommy, please, don’t make me leave… I promise you, I promise I won’t eat as much if you let me stay with you… If you let me stay, I promise you that I will never eat ever again… please, don’t separate me from you!”

No mother, no child should have to be faced with this situation.

I will give a STRONG HAND to prices, because the poor cannot wait.

STRONG HAND TO PRICES!

So, Strongbad over here is trying to lure you in by playing around with emotional chords, I see. This whole thing fascinates me as I’m an admitted Reality TV junkie and all its decadence, and I can’t believe people still use this practice to coerce people into siding with their causes. Of course, if this was nuclear war or something I would see the point to it, but for the love of Cthulhu, when a political candidate uses this sketchy tactic to earn votes it just fuels the skeptics. He’s setting himself up for big expectations coming from the country at large (if he wins the primaries). I’m gonna stay unbiased here and not link to the YouTube user page up to its seams with these political ads, but you should check them out when you have the chance. They’re hilarious.

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