[Kirchner at the apogee-->]

A honeymoon and quicky divorce? Christina Fernandez de Kirchner, the successor to her husband Nestor and president of Argentina, is doing her best imitation of a Hollywood marriage.

The new president of Argentina and her country's farmers have been at war. Though a 30-day truce has temporarily ended the dispute, Argentina's politics have become harshly confrontational. Just a bit more than 100 days into Cristina Fernandez's presidency, Argentina has witnessed a spectacle of demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, of rhetoric and bombast, all ominously reminiscent of the dark days of previous presidencies and bad economic times. Cristina, as her followers like to call her, has just seen her honeymoon come to a dead halt; she is now presiding over a deeply divided country.

Her husband was generally credited for sound economic policy, but the current crisis signals near total collapse of the political system. To experience a popular revolt of this magnitude only 100 days after taking office suggests massive dissatisfaction and a lack of mandate. How bad is it? When an Argentinian president brings up Las Malvinas, you know its really bad.

"The sovereign claim to the Malvinas Islands is inalienable," she said in a speech marking the 26th anniversary of Argentina's ill-fated invasion of the islands, located 480 kilometers (300 miles) off shore.

The Falklands war, in which 649 Argentinians lost their lives, was largely the result of a government desperately seeking to distract the country from its administrative failures. Considering the outcome, to rattle that particular saber is a huge "hail Mary".

Argentina's economic situation may well be in no small part due to the decline of the American dollar. The Argentinian financial crisis of the late nineties which lead to the country defaulting on its foreign loans, was largely resolved by pegging the Peso to the American dollar. With the value of the American dollar declining, energy and other costs of imported goods have soared, creating even more pain in a bleak economic landscape. Kirchner's redistributionist policies are a matter of taking from the hungry to feed the starving, and were predictably headed towards social revolt.

There are a couple of interesting lessons for us in this. As I've said before, socialism's inseparable companion is oppression. The only way you can impose policies like this is at the point of a gun. Think about that when you hear Bill Clinton or Al Gore talk about the economic retrenchment necessary to impose a Kyoto-like regime...