Chavez is not going quietly
Imagine that Barack Obama failed to appear for his swearing-in Monday — and had not been seen or heard from in a month. Imagine that Vice President Biden informed the nation that Obama, though sequestered in a foreign hospital, would remain president and would be sworn in at some unspecified date. Suppose that requests by Republicans for information on the president’s condition were rejected, even as Biden and leading Democrats huddled with foreign leaders to discuss a possible transition.
It’s impossible to imagine a political situation so lawless, scary and downright surreal — unless you are a citizen of Venezuela, where the apparent death throes of Hugo Chavez are unlike anything that even the continent of magical realism has ever seen before. Monday marks the 42nd day since Chavez departed for Cuba, saying he was to undergo new surgery for the cancer he has battled for more than 18 months; it will be the 11th day since his presidential term expired and he failed to appear for the inauguration of a new one.
During that time Venezuelans have heard and read no words and seen no photographs of their ruler — not even a tweet. But his closest aides have been regularly trooping to Havana for meetings with Raul and Fidel Castro, who are openly steering Venezuela’s crisis. Last week Chavez’s vice president, Nicolas Maduro, produced what he said was a Chavez-signed decree appointing a new foreign minister, prompting a furious debate about whether the purported signature — the closest thing to a Chavez sign of life since Dec. 10 — was authentic.
All this would be more amusing if the stakes were not so high. The demise of Chavez — if that is what is to happen — could open the way to epochal change in a region that for a decade has been divided, and sometimes polarized, between rapidly growing and modernizing democracies such as Mexico, Chile and Brazil and a bloc of authoritarian-minded, anti-American, populist throwbacks led by Venezuela. To be sure, the modernizers won the ideological battle long ago — Chavez’s popularity ratings among Latin Americans are lower than any leader in the hemisphere other than Fidel Castro.
More at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jackson-diehl-chavez-is-not-going-quietly/2013/01/20/9c31aa6a-60bf-11e2-9940-6fc488f3fecd_story.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
and of course wasn't even slightly suprised to see Jackson Diehl scrawled it.
We ALL knew so long ago who this man is, no one living would want to waste his time reading his silliness. Clearly he assumes everyone must be dumber than he is and can't see through him.
An article published SIX years ago, when all of us had known about him for ages:
April 18, 2006
Jackson Diehl: Worse Than Page Six?
The Washington Post vs. Venezuela
by ERIC WINGERTER
Anyone looking to keep up to date with the current talking points for the Venezuelan opposition need only follow the writings of Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post. As deputy editorial page editor, Diehl drafts the un-bylined editorials about President Hugo Chavez.
When Diehl writes a particularly unsubstantiated column, the Post publishes his work on the right-hand side of the opinion page, thus minutely distancing his ravings from the official opinion of the paper.
Over the years, progressive Venezuela watchers have come to regard Jackson Diehl Op-Eds as a sounding board for the urban legends and gossip promoted by Venezuela’s well-connected opposition leaders–sort of a Page Six for anti-Chavez innuendo. His columns have given mainstream credence to the ideas that the democratically elected president is actually a dictator, that a media law banning explicit sex on television is an act of political censorship, and that important literacy and health care programs are nothing more than a cynical attempt to buy votes from Venezuela’s unwashed masses.
The power of a Post editorial is significant, and it is partly due to the work of Mr. Diehl that the storylines above, although easily refuted, have framed the discussion of Venezuela in the U.S. press.
Diehl’s propensity for not letting facts get in the way of an anti-Chavez rant have often drawn the man well-merited and well documented rebuke.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/04/18/the-washington-post-vs-venezuela/
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Jackson Diehl, of course. [/center]
