''Assassin' Bush''

It's an old chesnut for me by now, but I posted recently on Biased BBC about it. I appreciate not everyone has seen the significance of the Beeb's headlining of Chavez's 'swipe' at Bush recently. Actually it's not just the headline, it's the angle that flows from it.

The point was reinforced for me by this introduction (I'm not a subscriber, but I got the general idea) to a Johann Hari column at the Indy, which was linked by Scott from the Ablution. As Hari put it:

'Venezuela is living in the shadow of the other 11 September. In 1972, on a day synonymous with death, Salvador Allende - the democratically elected left-wing President of Chile - was bombed and blasted from power. The CIA and the US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had decided the "irresponsibility" of the Chilean people at the ballot box needed to be "rectified" - so they installed a fascist general, Augusto Pinochet.'

This contextualises the Chavez comment and the BBC reporting of it nicely. What it suggests is that the BBC is giving some considerable credibility to the Chavez perspective on world affairs. I don't think it should be.

Meanwhile, more BBC reporting of Chavez's grandstanding. I know how the Beeb despise Margaret Thatcher's comment about the oxygen of publicity, but if they had anything but reflex leftism in them, they'd think about this more carefully. It's not even as though Robertson can be pinned down definitively as having called for Chavez's assassination- it was more like, 'maybe we should give the guy what he thinks we want to give him'. To quote:

'If he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it'

Note to the world- this was a conditional sentence, conditional on Chavez's own views. It's also not so stupid, even if a mite evil. The problem with the Left today is that they think the US is the root of all evil. They ought to look in the mirror for more than admiring their daring left-wing jawlines. The truth is that the idiocy and paranoia of the Left is the visible manifestation of the problem the world has today- the need to blame the bogeyman for their inability to organise themselves responsibly. Chavez is not only at the forefront of that, he's also, like so many at the head of political leftwing or fascistic movements, totally cynical in knowing that it isn't so, but using it to maintain power and authority.