Priming Chavez

Tonight, Fox News is doing a special on Venezuela's populist president, Hugo Chavez. I've been wainting for some time for the mainstream media to get to demonizin' him. I guess we've had too much on our plate. Justifications for going into Venezuela are slim. In the Cold War, he would have been an obvious communist menace on the order of Nicaragua or Chile. (Perhaps they will still pin him up as a drug smuggler.) Now, he's just a guy who would like to continue nationalizing Venezuelan oil instead of giving it away. This is threatening to wealthy interests both in his country (which compromise the 20% who oppose him) and in the U.S. The CIA attempted a coup that worked for about 24 hours in 2002 (See the fine documentary, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"). He's a very popular leader, and in anticipation of another attempted coup, he has armed his citizenry a la Switzerland.

The Fox News promo took an interesting tack. They went right for the argument that Chavez could disrupt the oil supply - the "lifeblood" of America. All the arguments for going into Iraq having fallen through, perhaps the corporate establishment has given up on lofty justifications, settling instead for fin de siecle real politix of resource scarcity. I don't know which is worse, being flim-flammed by lovely humanitarian language or the acceptance that people don't need those sorts of explanations anymore. This Fox Online article makes reference to the State Department's criticizing of Chavez's government for restricting freedom of expression. How? By limiting sex and violence on television. Not much to work with there.

If you have eMule, by the way, here's a wonderful site for accessing all kinds of provocative and interesting documentaries - including The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.