Reply #118: I wish I could recommend your comment. You've nailed it!

[Peace Patriot]

And I think we should be very, very worried about the NYT's escalating campaign against Chavez. It is much too like Judith Miller and the WMDs in Iraq.

WHY is the NYT concerned about golf courses in Venezuela? WHY is it coloring this report with words like "tirade"? WHY is it trying to make a socialist president's legitimate concern about the use of a country's resources seem like a lunatic idea? WHAT is going on, here, with the NYT's obsession with Chavez? And I do mean obsession. The tripe I have seen them publish over the last two years--and with even greater frequency and craziness recently--would be shocking to me, if we hadn't seen this movie before, not that long ago. The NYT might as well be the Miami Herald! It is putrid on this subject. Are we looking at Oil War II-South America? That is my fear. And it is more than a fear. We are seeing a dramatic U.S. military build-up in South America, and an intensifying psyops/disinformation campaign, focused on two oil states, Venezuela and Ecuador, both adjacent to Colombia, where the U.S. is establishing seven new U.S. military bases, and is larding the Colombian military (one of the worst human rights abusers on earth) with $6 BILLION in military aid.

What do Venezuelan golf courses have to do with this? They elicit just the right note of ridicule and diminution to touch up the portrait they have created of bogeyman Chavez, so that we will not care if the CIA succeeds in assassinating him and plunges Venezuela into civil war, and the U.S. then "rescues" Venezuela by slaughtering a hundred thousand people to steal their oil.

Donald Rumsfeld hinted at this war plan, in his 12/1/07 op-ed in the Washington Post, entitled, "The Smart Way to Defeat Tyrants Like Chavez," in which he, among other things, urges "swift action" by the U.S. in support of "friends and allies" in South America. Swift action. What "friends and allies" do you suppose he was thinking of? And why--a year after his retirement from the Pentagon--was Rumsfeld interesting himself in how to "defeat" elected presidents with huge popular support, in South America?

Yup, we need to tend to our own house, with evildoers like Rumsfeld running around loose, and our news media gone off the charts in support of corpo/fascism and war. Thank you for saying so.