Benazir Bhutto

Over at his blog at the Atlantic's site, Matthew Yglesias reminds us that "smart correspondents have made the point that one of the...oddities of western press coverage of Benazir Bhutto is that you tend not to hear about how she's a huge crook. Corruption in a middle-income country, of course, is nothing new and Pakistan in general is not a paragon of good governance. Still, the best of my knowledge Bhutto and her husband [Asif Zardari] stand out as unusually corrupt by Pakistani standards, which is precisely how she wound up ejected from power."

Yglesias links to an article by the New York Times's John F. Burns, published on January 9, 1998--a long piece, but extremely illuminating.

Comments

[Chris McKitterick]

Interesting! I wasn't aware of that. But I guess I mostly assume people who strive for political positions are, by definition, less savory than the average citizen.

Chris