Karl Rove built a successful career based on his deep understanding of the human condition, mostly the understanding that people are gullible morons. Attack the Strength™ was the strategy that made America proud again with winning catchphrases like “Swiftboating,” “non-covert agents,” and “John McCain’s illegitimate black babies.” While the U.S. electorate has tragically moved on to the next big fads like Hope and Experience, other corners of the world continue to rock the ’04 idiom.
Which brings us to Francisco Rodriguez, the first member of the Venezuelans abroad committee to seriously pursue the theory that the life of a poor Venezuelan is actually worse today than before Chavez. It’s a ballsy thesis, considering that the case against it is not only intuitive but also sort of empirically obvious to anyone who has ever visited the country (Attack the Strength!) Fortunately for Rodriguez, virtually nobody in the US media has ever been or plans to go to Venezuela to look into it.
So! Rodriguez gets to feed his little thesis to Foreign Affairs, which then gets digested by The Economist, and then excreted out again through quasi-respectable internet outlets.
Of course his entire premise is not just politically biased but also demonstrably false, which is why today an independent analysis carves his study up like Easter Tofurkey. As it turns out Rodriguez is guilty of a number of methodological violations like cherry picking some data points, making up others, and conducting studies that are “not robust.” Ahem. You can read the whole takedown for yourself.
So will history be corrected? Probably not. Rove and Rodriguez both know that rumors are a lot like McCain’s adopted kids and Easter Tofurkey: they exist, so it doesn’t really matter where they came from in the first place.
