#AbeHamaduhh Praises a Lawless Dictator Who Throws His Citizens in Jail Without Due Process

The MAGA fetish for foreign dictators is disgusting and disqualifying in a democratic polity with respect for the rule of law and civil rights. But Abe Hamadeh (who is running as a carpetbagging candidate in AZ’s CD 8 and was the loser in the 2022 AZ Attorney General race) just demonstrated both his willful ignorance and disgusting hero-worship of such foreign tyrants (not to mention a particular aspiring domestic one…).

After praising El Salvador’s popular but authoritarian president on the campaign trail, congressional candidate Abe Hamadeh said in an interview he wasn’t aware of the foreign leader’s controversial steps to jail thousands of citizens without due process or get rid of checks on his own power.

Laura Gersony, Arizona Republic, April 1st, 2024 (unfortunately, not an April Fools joke…)

To address gang crime in El Salvador, Nayib Bukele has suborned the independent judiciary, turned the military and police loose, and thrown as much as 2% of his fellow Salvadorians into prison without due process. Apparently, the alleged former prosecutor Hamadeh (who as far as I can tell has never prosecuted a civilian criminal case) hasn’t any problem with that, or, perhaps even more disturbing, hasn’t sufficient integrity or intellectual curiosity to investigate the facts before praising a foreign dictator, saying at a recent rally:

“People are waking up, not just here in America. In Argentina, man, they got a pretty good president down there, don’t they? In El Salvador, he’s cleaning up the streets pretty well.”

Ibid.

Of course it has worked! Simply bringing the superior and unaccountable violence and repression of a wholly unconstrained sovereign armed forces and police state to bear on a civilian population has always ‘worked’ to suppress disorder and crime in the short-term: nobody would deny that. But if emulating a foreign dictator’s reign of terror against the civilian population is Hamadeh’s best idea for how to address crime in a free society, we really cannot afford to have such an ignoramus holding power in any government office in Arizona or America.

This week, Hamadeh boosted a video that Bukele posted on social media depicting his government sending thousands of troops to the country’s northern region after there were two murders there. The video depicted soldiers flooding the streets, and the two alleged killers kneeling in front of armed troops.

“Philosopher King,” Hamadeh captioned the video, a reference to Bukele’s self-nickname.

Hamadeh said he has no knowledge of the measures the leader has taken to suspend individuals’ civil liberties or consolidate power in his own office.

“I’m not aware of his methods. All I know are the results of his actions,” Hamadeh said of Bukele. “El Salvador used to be one of the most dangerous countries in the world, to now one of the most safest in the western hemisphere. That’s a good thing.”

Ibid.

A good thing, Abe? Unless you are an innocent Salvadorian chucked in jail without due process, or extra-judicially murdered, of course.

As an American, it turns my stomach to see MAGA fascists like Trump and Hamadeh praising foreign dictators like Putin, Xi, and Bukele. If they are unaware of the anti-democratic and violent methods of such foreign strongmen, that’s bad enough – it bespeaks their own stupidity – but I believe it is so much worse: they know that the objects of their veneration, praise, and hero worship are democracy-wrecking thugs and tyrants, and they aspire to bring such methods here to America.

Real conservatives are disgusted by these MAGA pro-dictator views, as well. MAGA fascists, insurrectionists, election deniers, and wannabe dictators like Trump, Hamadeh, Lake, and so many other MAGA candidates in Arizona and nationally are going to lose because real conservatives find them as repugnant and repellant as we do. All Americans who value freedom and the rule of law will reject them at the polls until they slink off to the obscurity they warrant, or the rule of law here in America catches up to their lawlessness, as is now happening with Trump and Lake.