BoRev.Net

Also plotting to kill a president:

http://www.vtv.gob.ve/videos-emisiones-anteriores/23325

...guess which one.

We have movies about the awful repression of the East German Stasi, as they're listening in to the private lives of citizens, while in Colombia, the U.S.-supplied DAS (the Colombian Stasi) leaders joked about being able to listen to a liberal senator as she snores.

Totally different.

Miss Piggy may be one of the world's greatest dictators for all I know, but Presidents Zelaya, Chavez and Correa are all democratically elected leaders.

Why don't they just come out and say "All those wetback "Presidents" are dictators because they do things differently!"

Neither does how they got into office, come to that.

(Of course, it bears repeating that Hitler was elected *to a measly seat in the Reichstag*, but as a minority leader whose popularity rating never topped 38%, he only became Chancellor through backroom dealing and arm-twisting.)

Okay, Tim Padgett was the name I was looking for ... (he has actually written some sensible articles on Vzla as well in the past) ...

Actually you can always find good things that dictators have done too, so in and of itself that tells us nothing ...

Time, or Tim Padgett, did have a good article on Honduras this weekend:

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1920725,00.html

Why Obama Won't Use the M-Word for Honduras' Coup

But the Administration also sent a significant mixed signal. It didn't use the m-word: Military. Its lawyers have determined that while Zelaya's overthrow was a coup d'etat, it was not technically a military coup. The main reason: even though soldiers threw Zelaya out of the country at gunpoint, in his pajamas, he was not replaced with a military leader.
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The U.S.'s non-military coup rating is especially dicey given that two of Honduras' neighbors, El Salvador and Guatemala, recently elected leftist presidents who could also find themselves in the crosshairs of their countries' overweening generals. "I think the armies and the business elites they back in those countries are watching the Obama Administration's moves on Honduras very closely," says Vicki Gass, a senior associate at the independent Washington Office on Latin America. While Gass applauds Clinton's threat to reject Honduras' November election results as a "very positive step that shows the U.S. is serious again about multilateral effort in Latin America," she fears the U.S. has "created risks in other countries" by not designating Honduras' putsch as military.
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A negotiated settlement is indeed the preferred solution. But the problem is that the U.S. loses leverage in that process when, by not calling Zelaya's ouster a military coup, it gives coup leaders the impression that what they did was merely second- or third-degree coup-mongering instead of the first-degree military kind. When the military hauls away a democratically elected president, it's a military coup, period, regardless of who takes power afterward. It's a rule that needs to apply not just in Honduras, but whenever the U.S. has to take on coupsters.

BTW, I can well believe that Menem and Fujimori were dictators (and that Uribe IS one), but not because of how long they were in office. It's all the stench of fucking DEATH, stupid!

"Widely accused of squandering", yes. But he never says BY WHOM. That's because the accusers are all fucking idiots and/or greedheads who are only miffed because they can't squander that money on themselves, coke and hookers.

And if being re-elected even once makes them dictators, then what on Earth does having been re-elected numerous times (3 or 4? I forget) make our late, great PM, Pierre Trudeau, definitely the Chávez of his time and place? Christ, he was first elected when I was in diapers, and I practically grew up with that man in office the entire time...

Oh. I get it. It's COMPLEX, duh. That is, it's only really wrong when South American guys who aren't tame to Big Amurrican Bidness do it. And worse still if they're brown.

Silly me, to have ignored the complexities of it all!

Actually, the rightwing in the US for a long time claimed FDR was a quasi-dictator. So this is actually not that new.

As I have always said, your average journo is stupid, period :) But Correa has only been reelected once!

Hehehe, so much goodness to share here! Great to note that after just two years Studmuffin is A DICTATOR! Sheesh, it took Stalin decades to get that honour. And I love this bit about H-man:

"The Good: Amid an oil-fueled economic boom, he spent billions on health care and education.

The Bad: Chavez has been widely accused of squandering the country’s oil wealth.... "

Funny to watch how oppo arugments move to EpicFail status when they try to be logical and even-handed. Seriously, this tosser should just go the normal route and aim to appease the molten-lead pouring section of readership.