Zim

Zimbabwean's will be going to the polls in a few hours so if you've got a prayer to spare send one along asking for peaceful, fair and uncontested elections.  There's a good roundup of where things stand over at Foreign Policy but the really interesting story is this one from NPR this afternoon.  Its a piece with Heidi Holland who wrote a recent book entitled Dinner with Mugabe.  You forget that thirty years ago Mugabe was Nelson Mandela before Nelson Mandela, until things went to hell.  Holland paints a picture of a sad, lonely, very shy man who never learned how to cope with the world outside of his own head much less run a post-colonial country - deluded is the term she uses several times.  One of the most telling exchanges she recounts is over the state of the economic collapse and Mugabe's insistent claims that the economy is essentially fine and healthy, the only minor problem he claimed is that "there just aren't any goods in the stores."  Ouch.  Worth a listen.