If you're an American and you read this site, you are almost certainly embarrassed by this nation's government. Was it for this, you wonder, that our forefathers pledged their sacred honor to fight the tyrant British, or rose up to free themselves from bondage and discrimination, or travelled across the ocean with nothing but the clothes on their backs: so that we could live under a government where venality and corruption are the order of the day, where criminals make war for profit and a surprising number of powerful individuals use their influence to procure the favor of teenage boys? Wouldn't we better off living somewhere, anywhere, but America? Don't foreigners have it better than we do?
To respond to those understandable sentiments, let me tell you a story:
 James Yali was a member of the parliament of Papua New Guinea up until 2006, when he was convicted of raping his sister-in-law. While he was appealing his sentence, he had a stroke, and then was forcibly removed from the hospital where he was recovering by an angry mob of his "supporters," who then "escorted" him to the elections office, where, before he was re-arrested, they forced him to sign up to run for Parliament in 2007. Which election he won. Largely due to his reputation forsorcery.That's right, people,motherfucking sorcery.Makes Florida's problems with electronic voting machines look like a pile of puke, doesn't it?
That, in a nutshell, is what this new weekly Wonkette column is all about: despite your liberal beliefs that American politicians are infinitely more loathsome, and our subversion of democracy more transparent, than that of our non-American brethren, foreign "dignitaries" are just as self-serving and awful, and, unless they're from a few well-coiffed Western European nations, they generally have shabbier suits and worse haircuts than our guys. (Plus:sorcery.) And so, until Gawker Media sees fit to launch Wonkette Bulgaria or Wonkette Indonesia,The Foreigns -- They're Just Like Us!will keep you abreast of the sex crimes and naked power grabs going on overseas. (We of course leave the assessment of the hot foreign man-meat to our formerly Anonymous Lobbyist.) This week: PMILFS! Latvia! India! Jews!
UKRAINE: MPs baffled by electronic voting geegaws, stymie hottie PM!
Yulia Tymoshenko, whose seven-month tenure as Ukrainian Prime Minister a few months ago earned her a spot on the PMILF shortlist (along with Canada's Kim Campbell and Turkey's Tansu Ciller ), looked to be roaring back into office after coming out on top in the October elections . The last ten weeks were eaten up by wrangling between the two main pro-Western (but largely anti-each other) parties, Our Ukraine (motto: "Ukraine is ours!") and the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc (motto: "YULIA FUCKING TYMOSHENKO, BITCHES!"), which together had a two-vote majority in parliament. Yesterday, they finally seemed set to vote her into office except that -- oops! -- she came up two votes short . Now a couple of guys are claiming that the Parliament's spiffy new electronic voting gadgets, which allow the presumably drunken Ukrainians to cast ballots without getting out of their seats, malfunctioned or they pressed the wrong button or something, so they're going to have a do-over today. The MPs who failed their fair party leader will no doubt find themselves horribly disfigured or beheaded , as that's the sort of thing that happens to you when you screw up in the Ukraine.
INDIA: Shocking sex scandal elicits techno-nostalgia for the early days of digital porn
Voting is underway in India's Gujarat state, but the election has been roiled by an anonymously distributed sexy CD-ROM! The silvery discs, of the sort that Americans used for pornographic purposes for a brief window in the late '90s before Internet connections were adequate for transmission of dirty pictures, contains footage of Bharatsinh Solanki, the head of the state Congress Party, " loving and caressing " an unidentified woman. While images of an American politician engaging in such acts with an adult female would be seen as rather sweet, apparently in India it's a bad thing. A Congress Party spokesman said that the video is "totally doctored and morphed", deploying a term that Americans haven't used unironically since roughly six months afterTerminator 2came out.
UNITED KINGDOM: Polite Jewish conspiracy secretly rules Britain with grace, manners
Britain was in the midst of a quaint little campaign finance scandal, involving sums of less than $1.2 million, which wouldn't even pay for a day of Mitt Romney's Iowa field campaign, when suddenly things got a little bit Jew-y! David Abrahams, accused of circumventing the UK's campaign finance limits by giving money to Labour through third parties, insisted that everything was on the up and up and that he only gave the money secretly to avoid accusations of being part of a Jewish conspiracy ! Because, you know, the best way to avoid the appearance of a shadowy cabal is by buying influence through mysterious, back-door channels. The next day, Abrahams claimed that he never made any such ludicrous statement . The day after that, Abrahams angrily denied that there was any such person as "David Abrahams."
LATVIA: Boring political crisis in nowheresville
So scenic Latvia had kind of a thing, with the government pissing everyone off by firing an anti-corruption investigator because he got it into his head to investigate government corruption. Thousands of Latvinians or whatever the hell they're called poured into the streets in the largest protests since the fall of the USSR, prompting the government to quit , except that pretty much all of them are going to be back in the new, improved government, which should teach those Latvoids a valuable lesson about caring about stuff or trying to change anything. Mainly I'm including this item as an excuse to run the picture to the left there of Latvish Prime Minister Aigars Kalvitis, who, by all the principles of politics as I understand them, must be in the ninety-fifth percentile for handsomeness among Latvarians.
Until next time, Wonketteers, I bid you adieu, perhaps more secure in the knowledge that Trent Lott isn't the worst, or at least the least attractive, that Planet Earth has to offer. And if any of you foreign readers (and yes, Canada counts as "foreign") have any juicy tidbits to share, don't hold back !