Almost everybody in the West is now criticizing Robert Mugabe, and the
opprobrium has now gone as high as the next president of the United States
-- that is, both candidates for the office -- so the butcher of Zimbabwe will
barely have a friend anywhere. Except, to be sure, Andrew Young.
Young, with the soft voice and the doe eyes, long ago turned into a cash
carnivore, fronting for Africa's tyrants in corporate board rooms and
congressional offices. Once an idealist and aide to Martin Luther King
Jr., he began to be a cynic-supporter for the terrorizers of the world when
he picked the cause of Yassir Arafat, long before Jimmy Carter did. Now
-- like Thabo Mbeki, the great AIDS expert to whom hundreds of thousands of
South Africans owe their deaths -- Young is defends the despoiler of
Zimbabwe. "He does not steal," Cynthis Tucker quotes Young speaking
in Mugabe's defense, "he is a fundamentalist Roman Catholic." Well, he
does steal, and from his own people. And he maims and murders them, too.