The scruffy young man who arrived in Nicaragua in 1988 stood out.And they f%$#ing put it on the f%$#ing front page.
He was tall and sometimes goofy, known for his ability to mimic a goose’s honk. He spoke in long, meandering paragraphs, musing on Franklin D. Roosevelt, Karl Marx and Bob Marley. He took painstaking notes on encounters with farmers, doctors and revolutionary fighters.
Bill de Blasio, then 26, went to Nicaragua to help distribute food and medicine in the middle of a war between left and right. But he returned with something else entirely: a vision of the possibilities of an unfettered leftist government.
As he seeks to become the next mayor of New York City, Mr. de Blasio, the city’s public advocate, has spoken only occasionally about his time as a fresh-faced idealist who opposed foreign wars, missile defense systems and apartheid in the late 1980s and early 1990s. References to his early activism have been omitted from his campaign Web site.
But a review of hundreds of pages of records and more than two dozen interviews suggest his time as a young activist was more influential in shaping his ideology than previously known, and far more political than typical humanitarian work.
………
By the beginning of 1990, Mr. de Blasio had a foot in two worlds — government official by day, activist by night.
He was becoming a part of the institution he had railed against — the establishment — as a low-level aide to Mr. Dinkins in City Hall. On the side, he helped raise funds for the Nicaragua Solidarity Network and forge alliances between New York and Nicaraguan labor unions.
Gee the US government was funding terrorist operations against the Sandinistas, and they did so in violation of the law.
I think that maybe some of the more overpaid New York Times staffers are upset that de Blasio won't be genuflecting to the rich like Bloomberg did.
*It's a term for political dirty tricks, allegedly made popular by Nixon dirty trickster Roger Stone.
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