We were wondering what he’d been up too. You may recall that when we last left our hero, it was the middle of the night before Venezuela’s presidential election, and the poor guy had just been sacked by his U.S. polling firm for embarrassing their reputation with phony poll results. The firm’s president (and top Hillary Clinton advisor) Mark Penn was forced to fly to Caracas to relieve Schoen of his responsibilities and take over the day’s operations.
Apparently, Schoen stayed on in Venezuela to freebase bitterness with the craziest of the Caracas glitterati. And today, he’s made his triumphant public return by co-authoring a delusional Op-Ed in the fourth-rate New York Sun. It’s quite a piece. It reads like a high-school essay, but without all the required documentation.
Schoen opens with a claim that Chavez never won the 2006 elections at all. You see, a new “study” from Caracas showed “fraud” in the voter registry, where Hugo Chavez single-handedly “added 4.4 million favorable names to the voter list and ‘migrated’ 2.6 million unfavorable voters to places where it was difficult or impossible for them to vote.” Wowza. That would have been quite the trail of tears. You’d think somebody would have noticed this in the middle of the most heavily monitored election in Latin American history.
It gets weirder from there. Eschewing prose, the Op Ed devolves into a list of twenty-three bullet pointed facts about Venezuela, about half of which are half-truths and the rest pulled straight from his heiny. Some are priceless, (Chavez is “considering declaring a national religion with him as its spiritual leader”), while others are just demonstrably false (Chavez “decreed … that he can run for re-election to the presidency for life”—the same “fact” that has already prompted retractions by the Miami Herald and the LA Times).
So don’t cry for Doug, Venezuela. He may not have many marketable skills, but he’s clearly been picked up by the State Department.
UPDATE: Of course! Why didn't we think of it before? There is a perfect job out there for Doug Schoen. He just went to work for Fox News.
