NYT: Venezuelan’s Diatribe at U.N. May Have Backfired

Would you rather have Venezuela on the Security Council as a check to US influence (Guatemala sure ain't gonna be one), or just the sweet memory of Chavez calling Bush "the devil" at the UN?

:think:


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/world/americas/25nations.html?ex=1319428800&en=4532f5fe83cdb4c7&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 24 — Venezuela’s populist leader, Hugo Chávez, earned giggles and guffaws at the United Nations last month with his mass appeal diatribe ridiculing President Bush as the devil. Mr. Chávez said he could still smell the telltale scent of sulfur on the General Assembly rostrum where Mr. Bush had spoken the day before.

Now it appears that Mr. Chávez’s histrionic performance — styled to win him support from the United States’ many detractors at the United Nations — may have cost his country the seat on the Security Council that he has conducted a global campaign to win.

Developing nations make up a vast majority of the 192 countries in the General Assembly and generally warm to rants against Washington. But they also value the United Nations as a place where their voices can be heard in a dignified setting, and both supporters and detractors here say Mr. Chávez may have miscalculated in turning it into his bully pulpit.

Delegates said they also feared that the performance demonstrated the kind of behavior Venezuela might bring to the orderly confines of the Council chamber.

As the General Assembly resumes voting on Wednesday on who should occupy the seat being vacated by Argentina, Venezuela’s candidacy is already considered finished. In 35 rounds over three days last week, the ambassadors kept Venezuela’s competitor, Guatemala, far in front, though not in ready reach of the two-thirds majority needed to win the seat.

...for a couple of cheap laughs.

TS, Hugo. Better luck next time. :hi:

not.

This tiresome tactic of not quoting sources has been used ad nauseum by the war profiteering corporate news monopolies against Hugo Chavez. My favorite has been "increasingly authoritarian" --"according to his critics." I finally tracked it to a rightwing Catholic Cardinal--who was fired from the Vatican finance office during the fascist banking scandals of the 1980s (he was that bad)--who was the only person whom I could find who actually said it. It was and is a completely baseless charge.

So now Chavez's "supporters and detractors say" Chavez "may have miscalculated." I'm not going to register at the NYT to find out, but I would guess that this scurrilous news organization says not one word about Bush Junta bribing and bullying, strongarm tactics on vulnerable Latin American countries to prevent Chavez from winning a seat on the Security Council. $600 million to Colombia, I understand, in military assistance to kill poor peasants and leftists. More military lard on Paraguay, and the rumored purchase of 100,000 acres by the Bush crime family (a kingdom from which to order the killing of peasants and leftists in Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela?). And what did they bribe Michele Batchelet with--Chile's first woman president, a socialist who was tortured by Pinochet--to get her to wink at Bush's penchant for pulling wings off of flies and blowing up innocent frogs?

Could it be that all this interest in decorum and a "dignified setting" and polite lies in the presence of torturers and genocidal war criminals and thieving fascist liars was BOUGHT AND PAID FOR? Or was COERCED?

It is DISGUSTING. And any newspaper with any integrity would be saying so, and following the money. But our Corporate Rulers at the NYT and elsewhere have lost interest in Iraq, and are newly focused on re-conquering Latin America, where an awesome democracy movement has swept anti-US, anti-corporate leftists into power in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Venezuela and Bolivia, and quite soon, Ecuador (the leftist is way ahead)--virtually the entire continent of South America--and in the next election cycle, Peru. Daniel Ortega--leader of the Sandinista revolution (target of the infamous Reaganite Iran/Contra arms traders)--is about to be elected president of Nicaragua. And a huge leftist movement is in progress in south Mexico, centered in Oaxaca, and allied with the huge leftist movement in Mexico City--a movement stymied only be election fraud.

The Bushites have "lost" Latin America--and, having failed to create a global free piracy zone in Iraq--are now bent upon recreating the one that the people of Latin America have been, brick by brick, dismantling over the last couple of years, bent upon self-determination.

So the NYT sends a reporter over to the UN cocktail party to pick up some phrases by which to spit on and belittle Chavez some more, as they have been doing all along.

Chavez's speech on Bush leaving an odor of sulfur behind him earned more than "giggles and guffaws" at the UN--it earned a standing ovation.

But whatever it takes to toe the latest Corporate Ruler line, NYT reporters will invent.

over the "civilized discourse" of atrocity justification by well groomed lizards in suits any day. It's not even a decision.

Those who are spending more time criticizing Hugo Chavez's words then supporting his message are doing a service for the imperialists in our government, and a disservice to justice, equality and the global community.

No one died, killed, really suffered, or caused real suffering in others because Chavez called Bush "the devil". If only the same could be said of the speeches OUR politicians have given at the UN, promoting sanctions and wars that have killed AT LEAST hundreds of thousands of innocent people. This ridiculous emphasis on words and aesthetics over acts and justice is backwards, unenlightened, irrational, fucking stupid... The sort of shoot the messenger mentality I mistakenly assumed was limited to the dark-age mental midgetry of the republican conservatives, but I realize now is a hallmark of servants of the establishment. It's not that they are willfully ignorant, it's that they willfully want YOU ignorant.

I'll mention briefly how disgusted I am by the whole "Rally 'Round the Fuhrer" attitude and nationalistic views even expressed by some supposedly democratic politicians. I'm sure the good patriots in Nazi germany would be just as indignant if some french politician called their fuhrer "the devil" as Hitler occupied Poland and advanced on France. If the german media called that french politician a bully, would it be any less ridiculous then what the Times has done here?

-personman

and puts a US yes-man on it, are the words worth it?

It definitely wasn't the sort of atmoshpere that should be created in the United Nations and I can understand why they feel this way.