I don't have a problem declaring support for Chavez. I actually believe in democracy and self determination. Chavez has been chosen by the people of Venezuela by large margins on more than one occasion. This probably has something to do with the fact that he is implementing policies that benefit the large majority of Venezualans rather than a small oligarchy. It's obvious to anyone who's paying attention that the Bush Administration is ramping up to some serious intervention against Chavez. If they succeed in overthowing Chavez it will be a tragedy.
true, chavez was "elected" by large "majorities", but the results were/are highly suspect. in any case, being democratically elected hardly means the chavez is acting in a democratic manner. he abrogated an enormous amount of power to himself, and agressively stifled dissent. i'm not so sure venezuela really qualifies as a democracy anymore, despite the process that put chavez in power. what i find most interesting however, is this is yet another example of how desparate the left is to smear bush, so desparate that, yet again, they come down on the side of a murderous tyrant. how do you guys sleep at night, knowing you're making common cause w/ the likes of basher assad, hosni mubarak, hugo chavez, and yes, saddam. who's next, kim?
Ahhh, the Basso Doctrine- a leader must be certified by the Bush administration before they can be considered democratic. I've only expressed support for Chavez. He is the only one on your list that I do support, as he is the only one who was democratically elected in a legitimate process. However, it doesn't surprise me that you are trying to link his name to those other true tyrants. We will see a lot more of this from Bush supporters as the propaganda machine kicks into gear.
Actually the elections were clearly a victory for Chavez. Chavez is the person who actually asked outside observers to come in and help make it a fair voting process. In 2000 there were irregularities, but the Carter Center, found that the irregularities wouldn't have changed the outcome of Chavez' victory in which the President won 60% of the votes. Furthermore the Carter Center oppened up an office in Caracas. Both parties signed agreements to respect not violate human rights. The Carter Center worked with groups opposing Chavez, and the Chavez govt. themselves to work on reform, and layout the foundation for a recall vote. Chavez actually faced a recall vote in 2004. Again Chavez won 60% of the vote, and this time there were only nominal irregularities. Any claims that Chavez isn't the leader elected by the people of Venezuela is inaccurate at best and at worst disengenous. Chavez has been confrontational in his style of governing, which upset some folks. He hasn't been a door mat for U.S. interests which also upset people. However Chavez has been elected by larger margins than Bush, more times than Bush, and never had to have a court order that votes not be counted in order to assure is place in power. There were seven elections in a two year period. At one point the govt. even postponed the elections because of technical problems in order to assure fairness. Chavez has won all of the elctions brought in Cuban doctors to set up clinics in the poorest parts of Venezuela, and the people there are proud of the work being done. The Chavez govt. is as democratic as it gets. International observers on the ground atest to this, the people of Venezuela atest to this. There has already been one coup attempt against Chavez. Once again we see that if a democratic process puts someone into power against the liking of the Bush crowd it isn't called democracy. In Basso's post he actually had the nerve to try and claim that Chavez' govt. wasn't really a democratic one anymore. Chavez is up for re-election in 2006 by the way. An odd move for someone Basso claims is a tyrant. The Bush crowd didn't promote the democratic elections in the Palestinian territories when the result was Yassir Arafat, though he did win a an election that was certified by international observers again. Somehow it is only now that Democracy is taking place there. Basso, I ask you, do you support democracy or not? For any interested in the real story of elections there here are some links. http://www.cartercenter.org/activities/showdoc.asp?countryID=87&submenuname=activities# http://www.cartercenter.org/doc1690.htm http://www.cartercenter.org/peacepr...ramID=15&docname=lacpqa&submenu=peaceprograms
if your going to say that than i think this is fair... true, bush was "elected" by large "majorities", but the results were/are highly suspect. in any case, being democratically elected hardly means the bush is acting in a democratic manner. he abrogated an enormous amount of power to himself, and agressively stifled dissent. i'm not so sure america really qualifies as a democracy anymore, despite the process that put bush in power.
This isn't completely accurate. Bush was only elected by a "majority" once and the one majority he did win with could hardly be called "large."
Hah! i can't believe you're trumpeting Jimmy Carter's role in ensuring the "fairness" of the elections in venezuala. most independent observers consider the elections, and carter's role in them, a farce. here's some more background, from a journalist in venezuela. note how he calls out a noted conservative for shilling for the regime. -- http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/785ruylo.asp?pg=1 Hugo Chavez vs. the Media The Venezuelan strongman tries to crackdown on his country's journalists while Jack Kemp shills for him in America. by Thor Halvorssen 06/09/2003 6:40:00 AM Caracas, Venezuela EARLIER THIS YEAR, the U.S. media was atwitter with coverage of the protests against ousting Saddam Hussein. At the same time, just weeks before the war in Iraq began, a record-setting one and a half million Venezuelans marched in protest against a law proposed by the president of Venezuela, Lt. Col. Hugo Chavez. Simultaneous marches against Chavez took place across the world. It was the largest peaceful protest in Latin American history. These protests did not register even a blip in the international and U.S. media. There were no page-one articles or photo-spreads about this widespread rejection of the Chavez regime. That the international media failed to cover these events is particularly dispiriting, since the protest was organized specifically to support the Venezuelan media, which has been tirelessly exposing human rights violations by the Chavez regime. Despite being followed, harassed, arrested, tear-gassed, fire-bombed, shot at, and even killed by Chavez supporters and party members, journalists here have bravely persevered in their jobs and serve as the only effective check to arbitrary government power. Given that the courts, congress, military and the executive branch are firmly under Chavez's control, it's little wonder that in poll after poll, the Venezuelan media ranks as the most respected institution in the country. Since January, using a presidential decree, Chavez has interrupted regular television and radio broadcasts on 60 separate occasions, forcing all media to transmit his hours-long tirades and pro-government propaganda. And Chavez now seeks to formalize his control through the "Media Contents" law, a bill that controls TV programming by defining time slots suitable for children. The law assumes that children will be watching television for 18 hours a day and prohibits the broadcasting of news or any content with violent images or political language except between 11:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. For example, live footage of Chavez militia members shooting at innocent protesters, would be content unsuitable for children. IN ADDITION to controlling the programming, the law criminalizes any content that "promotes, condones or incites disrespect for the legitimate authorities and institutions." Known locally as the "gag law," it states explicitly that mocking or criticizing the president and his henchmen is illegal. Broadcasters face million-dollar fines, loss of their broadcast licenses, and even jail time for noncompliance. If this column was published in a newspaper or read on television here in Venezuela, it would be in violation of the proposed Chavez media law. When journalists expressed opposition to the law's barefaced censorship, Chavez responded: "That's just like drug traffickers opposing anti-drug laws or criminals complaining about crime-fighting." And to further control the media, Chavez has imposed exchange controls. No Venezuelan citizen may purchase foreign currency without government permission--an act that renders the local currency worthless for import transactions. As a result, any television company that needs to purchase electronic equipment or any newspaper editor wishing to order newsprint paper or buy ink must petition the currency control agency that is, conveniently, headed by a man who assisted Lt. Col. Chavez in his failed 1992 coup attempt. TO MAKE MATTERS WORSE, some American elites are actively shilling for the Chavez regime even as the media crackdown proceeds. Jack Kemp, notably, has been busy opening doors for the Chavez government. Recently Kemp and the Venezuelan ambassador visited the Wall Street Journal's editorial board in an unsuccessful attempt to charm the paper away from its anti-Chavez stance. Since that visit, the Journal reported that Kemp has been trying to broker a complicated deal to fill the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve with Venezuelan oil via an intermediary company--Free Market Petroleum LLC--on whose board Kemp sits. Since hooking up with Free Market Petroleum, Kemp has visited with Chavez and his ministers in Caracas. Surely he must have noticed Chavez's brutality here. American elites should be helping pressure the Chavez regime and publicizing its anti-democratic doings in Venezuela, not seeking to profit from collaboration with it. Thor Halvorssen is a human rights and civil liberties activist. He grew up in Venezuela and now lives in Philadelphia.
here's another charming story about your boy chavez -- Horror in Venezuela Jesus Soriano and the price of dissent in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela. by Thor L. Halvorssen 01/23/2003 12:00:00 AM VENEZUELA IS NOW an abyss where there is no rule of law. A rogue government tortures innocent civilians with impunity while paying lip service to democracy and buying time at the "negotiation" table set up by the Organization of American States. Venezuela's foreign minister, Roy Chaderton, has funded an effective multi-million dollar public relations campaign to smear the opposition as coup-plotters and fascists intent on bringing about violence. Jesus Soriano has never met Roy Chaderton or Hugo Chavez. Soriano supported President Hugo Chavez's meteoric rise, volunteered during the election campaign, and is now a second-year law student in Caracas. His law-school peers describe the 24-year-old as a cheerful and happy young man. Soriano, a member of the Chavez party, is part of a national student group called "Ousia," a group that brings together moderates who support the government and opposition members seeking a peaceful resolution to the current crisis. On December 6, Soriano witnessed the massacre that occurred during a peaceful protest in Altamira, a neighborhood in Caracas where the opposition has a strong presence. The killer was Joao De Gouveia, an outspoken supporter of Chavez who has an unusually close relationship with mayor Freddy Bernal, a Chavez crony. Gouveia randomly began shooting at the crowd. He killed three--including a teenage girl he shot in the head--and injured 28 people. As Gouveia kept shooting, several men raced toward him to stop the killing. Soriano was one of the men who wrestled Gouveia to the ground and prevented further killing. Soriano also protected Gouveia from a potential lynch mob that swarmed around the killer. Soriano's heroic accomplishments did not cease that day. He became a national figure in Venezuela when he brought a small soccer ball (known in Venezuela as a "futbolito") to a sizable protest march organized against the rule of Lt. Col. Chavez. Soriano and other pro-Chavez partisans made their way towards the march intending to engage the opposition members in dialogue. That hot afternoon, Soriano kicked the futbolito across the divide at the members of the opposition. They kicked it back. The magical realism of the event is evident in the extraordinary television footage of what occurred next. By the end of the match the anti-Chavez protestors and pro-Chavez partisans were hugging and chanting "Peace! Unity! We are Venezuela! Politicians go away! We are the real Venezuela!" In one particularly moving part of the footage, Soriano and a member of the opposing team trade a baseball hat for a Chavez-party red beret. In one hour this sharply divided group of strangers accomplished more than the high-level negotiation team that seeks to defuse a potential civil war. Chavez was reportedly furious with the televised soccer match and even angrier that the reconciliation was a product of the efforts of one of his supporters. Soriano was declared an enemy of the revolution. Last week Soriano organized another soccer match. On Wednesday he visited the Universidad Central de Venezuela, the main university in the capital, to attend a meeting of the student government. Violent clashes erupted as members of the Circulos Bolivarianos, an armed militia sworn to protect the revolution, began throwing rocks and tear gas grenades at the students. The militia identified Soriano and captured him. They then tied his hands and feet, lifted him up, and paraded him through the street like a sacrificial lamb chanting "Judas! Judas!" The entire spectacle was recorded by a cameraman who works for the official government television entity. Soriano was beaten so severely that he was left at the hospital emergency room. At the hospital he was detained by the DISIP, Chavez's secret police, and taken to their headquarters for questioning. During his interrogation, fingernails in his left hand were torn out. After being further tortured and injected with drugs, the secret police took him into the bowels of the building and placed him in a cell. His cellmate: Joao de Gouveia. Gouveia has the keys to the cell and comes in and out of the secret police headquarters at will. His only restriction is that he must sleep in the precinct, lest Chavez's police are revealed as allowing a confessed killer to roam free. Soriano's mother (who is also a Chavez supporter) tearfully claimed that Gouveia sodomized Soriano and beat him with such force that Soriano cannot open his eyes. Soriano was released last Friday afternoon after Roy Chaderton advised Chavez that the case could filter out of Venezuela and could become a "human-interest story" with the potential to derail their PR campaign. The government denied that Soriano had been mistreated. A thorough medical examination by a civil surgeon reveals that, beyond lacerations, severe bruising, and cracked ribs, Soriano had been repeatedly raped while in custody. His right arm shows that he has been injected. Nails are missing from his left hand. Soriano's internal organs have been crushed to the point that he urinates blood, and he cannot walk without assistance. Once the medical report was made public, the secret police immediately began saying that Soriano was a member of a "right-wing paramilitary organization." This tactic, engineered by Chaderton, is used frequently to disqualify and discount opponents of the regime. All enemies of the "revolution" are coup plotters and fascists. The government now circulates a photo of Soriano in military fatigues. Carlos Roa, Soriano's attorney, showed me that the picture is a yearbook photo from when he was a schoolboy in military academy. Although it was obvious that Soriano had been tortured, Iris Varela, a Chavez congressional representative, offered no apologies: "I am glad they did this to him. He deserved it." That such savage treatment is what greets government supporters who seek a peaceful resolution to the current crisis speaks volumes about Chavez's ultimate intentions. Soriano, now recuperating at home, must wonder why he ever supported the Chavez regime. Thor L. Halvorssen is a human rights and civil liberties activist who grew up in Venezuela. He now lives in Philadelphia.
American elites should be helping pressure the Chavez regime and publicizing its anti-democratic doings in Venezuela, not seeking to profit from collaboration with it. This is complete and total BS.
So are you saying every American should be able to have an assualt weapon? I mean it won't destabilize the western hemisphere.
Ha! I can't believe you are trying to deny Carter's involvement in monitoring elections. I'm waiting for you to show me that most respected independent observers feel that the Carter Administration's role in this was a farce. You haven't even shown that the elections were a farce. For your information the Carter Center is probably the foremost respected organization monitoring elections. You pointed out some articles that say bad things about Chavez. The media one is certainly no different than what Bush has done by buying off reporters to hype his policies, giving out press passes so a fake reporter can ask softball pro-administration questions. But if you had checked out the websites I listed you would have seen that the Carter Center did address media role, and the fact that the Chavez administration didn't do enough to educate voters on the issues at hand. The Carter Center even labaled one of the elections as - flawed because of Chavez' doings. The Carter Center isn't giving anyone a pass. They did point out that despite being flawed Chavez would have still won the elections. The truth remains that Chavez asked for outside monitors to come in. That happened and the Carter Center refused to certify one of the elections as unflawed. Not one of the articles you posted shows that Chavez wasn't popularly elected. Not one of them shows that the Carter Center's role in monitoring the elctions was a farce either. Please name some of the more respected international election monitoring groups if you think the Carter Center is so unfair. So far you have made unbacked accusations against Chavez, the Carter Center and the elections in Venezuela.
Yes, every American armed forces personnel who needs an assault weapon should have one. Why is this a controversial or inconsistent position?
sigh... http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110005586 -- Conned in Caracas New evidence that Jimmy Carter got fooled in Venezuela. Thursday, September 9, 2004 12:01 a.m. Both the Bush Administration and former President Jimmy Carter were quick to bless the results of last month's Venezuelan recall vote, but it now looks like they were had. A statistical analysis by a pair of economists suggests that the random-sample "audit" results that the Americans trusted weren't random at all. This is no small matter. The imprimatur of Mr. Carter and his Carter Center election observers is being used by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to claim a mandate. The anti-American strongman has been steering his country toward dictatorship and is stirring up trouble throughout Latin America. If the recall election wasn't fair, why would Americans want to endorse it? The new study was released this week by economists Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard and Roberto Rigobon of MIT. They zeroed in on a key problem with the August 18 vote audit that was run by the government's electoral council (CNE): In choosing which polling stations would be audited, the CNE refused to use the random number generator recommended by the Carter Center. Instead, the CNE insisted on its own program, run on its own computer. Mr. Carter's team acquiesced, and Messrs. Hausmann and Rigobon conclude that, in controlling this software, the government had the means to cheat. "This result opens the possibility that the fraud was committed only in a subset of the 4,580 automated centers, say 3,000, and that the audit was successful because it directed the search to the 1,580 unaltered centers. That is why it was so important not to use the Carter Center number generator. If this was the case, Carter could never have figured it out." Mr. Hausmann told us that he and Mr. Rigoban also "found very clear trails of fraud in the statistical record" and a probability of less than 1% that the anomalies observed could be pure chance. To put it another way, they think the chance is 99% that there was electoral fraud. The authors also suggest that the fraud was centralized. Voting machines were supposed to print tallies before communicating by Internet with the CNE center. But the CNE changed that rule, arranging to have totals sent to the center first and only later printing tally sheets. This increases the potential for fraud because the Smartmatic voting machines suddenly had two-way communication capacity that they weren't supposed to have. The economists say this means the CNE center could have sent messages back to polling stations to alter the totals. None of this would matter if the auditing process had been open to scrutiny by the Carter observers. But as the economists point out: "After an arduous negotiation, the Electoral Council allowed the OAS [Organization of American States] and the Carter Center to observe all aspects of the election process except for the central computer hub, a place where they also prohibited the presence of any witnesses from the opposition. At the time, this appeared to be an insignificant detail. Now it looks much more meaningful." Yes, it does. It would seem that Colin Powell and the Carter Center have some explaining to do. The last thing either would want is for Latins to think that the U.S. is now apologizing for governments that steal elections. Back when he was President, Mr. Carter once famously noted that the Afghanistan invasion had finally caused him to see the truth about Leonid Brezhnev. A similar revelation would seem to be in order toward Mr. Chavez.
and more http://www.opinionjournal.com/wsj/?id=110005509 -- Observers Rush to Judgment Jimmy Carter gets rolled--first by Fidel Castro, now by Hugo Chávez. BY MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY Saturday, August 21, 2004 12:01 a.m. When Jimmy Carter went to Cuba in 2002, Fidel Castro reveled in the photo-ops with a former U.S. president. Mr. Carter seemed to think he was heroically "engaging" the Cuban despot. But in the documentary "Dissident," celluloid captures something most Americans didn't see: Castro giggling sardonically as Mr. Carter lectures the Cuban politburo on democracy. That foreshadowed what happened when the media splash ended and the former president went home: Dissidents he went to "help" today languish in gulag punishment cells. I was reminded this week of how Castro so artfully used Mr. Carter when Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez took a page from his Cuban mentor's playbook. On Monday, the Carter Center along with the head of the monumentally meaningless Organization of American States, Cesar Gaviria, endorsed Chávez's claims of victory in the Venezuelan recall referendum, rather too hastily it now seems. The problem was that the "observers" hadn't actually observed the election results. Messrs. Carter and Gaviria were only allowed to make a "quick count"--that is, look at the tally sheets spat out by a sample of voting machines. They were not allowed to check this against ballots the machines issued to voters as confirmation that their votes were properly registered. If there was fraud, as many Venezuelans now suspect, it could have been discovered if the ballots didn't match the computer tallies. The tallies alone were meaningless. The problem was clear by Tuesday but it didn't stop the State Department spokesman Adam Ereli from chiming in. "The people of Venezuela have spoken," he proclaimed. Mr. Carter marveled at the huge turnout on Sunday. Venezuelans, who have been voting 2-to-1 against Chávez in opinion polls, waited in absurdly long lines to cast more meaningful votes on electronic machines. But did the machine really record the vote as registered on the paper ballot? According to experts, it is relatively simple to tamper with encryption codes in electronic voting machines. American Enterprise Institute resident scholar John Lott says, "You can easily write a program that tells the voting machine to record something different in its memory than what it prints out on the receipt that is to be dropped in the ballot box." To rely on the tally sheets alone, as Messrs. Carter and Gaviria did, is to abdicate the heavy responsibility an observer accepts when overseeing an election. A Venezuelan who is a former U.N. deputy high commissioner of human rights wrote of his suspicions in Wednesday's International Herald Tribune (right beside a pro-Chávez New York Times editorial, by the way). Enrique ter Horst cited as cause for concern the fact that "the papers the new machines produced . . . were not added up and compared with the final numbers these machines produce at the end of the voting process, as the voting-machine manufacturer had suggested." An exit poll done by the prominent U.S. polling firm of Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates showed 59% of voters opposed to Chávez and only 41% in favor. (Messrs. Penn and Schoen both worked for Bill Clinton in his 1996 re-election bid.) Raj Kumar, a principal at the polling firm, told me Thursday that the firm has gone back to try to explain the 34-point spread between the PSB poll and the results announced by the government. "While there are certainly biases that can impact any exit poll, we do not see any factor that could account for such a significant difference," he said. At 3:00 on Monday morning two members of the National Electoral Council who are politically opposed to Chávez announced that they had been shut out of the audit process and warned the public that the established protocol had been violated. Some 50 minutes later pro-Chávez Electoral Council member Francisco Carrasquero emerged alone to proclaim Chávez the winner. There is much to question. Mr. ter Horst cites one example: "In the town of Valle de la Pascua, where papers were counted at the initiative of those manning the voting center, the "yes" vote had been cut by more than 75%, and the entire voting material was seized by the national guard shortly after the difference was established." "Yes" was a vote to remove Chávez. There is also a reasonable accusation that the number of "yes" votes at some polling stations was "capped" by software tampering. The charge is supported by the discovery, in some locations, of two or three machines recording the exact same number of "yes" votes and substantially more "no" votes. The opposition is claiming that it has proof that this occurred at 500 polling stations. Again, if Mr. Carter and the OAS observers had demanded an open auditing process instead of blindly endorsing government claims, cheating would have been uncovered. But Chávez refused open audits and the observers went along with him. In the desperate attempt to divert attention from observer negligence, few have been as ardent as Mr. Gaviria, who is flailing about in the waters he helped muddy. He has no idea whether there was fraud because he never conducted an audit. So now he floats the idea that the whole problem is that the PSB exit poll was flawed. Yeah, right. The Electoral Council is now engaged in a minimal audit with Mr. Carter and the OAS. But the opposition has wisely refused to participate on the grounds that the ballot boxes and the machines have been in Chávez control since Sunday and based on what is already known, further tampering can't be ruled out. As of yet there has not been an agreement on how to conduct a fair audit. Chávez has already said that his "victory" cannot be reversed. To underscore that point on Tuesday, a pro-Chávez gang opened fire on a group protesting that the referendum had been rigged, killing one woman and injuring others. There is some speculation that Messrs. Carter and Gaviria threw a veil over a gross deception on the grounds that it will prevent further violence. But Americans have a right to expect a sterner approach from the administration of George W. Bush. State's endorsement of this referendum without a fair audit is a sorry betrayal of not only the Venezuelan people but American ideals. It is tantamount to yielding to terrorism. Observing Washington's supine reaction, Chávez will not hesitate to escalate his efforts to restore authoritarianism on the South American continent.
Oh my god, Basso found an op-ed in the WSJ that questions the legitimacy of Venezuela's electoral process. Of course this equals "most independent observers."
Basso please post something other than op-eds to support your declaration that "most independent observers consider the elections, and carter's role in them, a farce." Otherwise we will have to conclude that you are making intentionally misleading statements, otherwise known as lying.
i just don't understand the left's interest in propping this guy up- he's a thug. doesn't make sense.
I just don't understand the right's willingness to take a dump on a popularly elected leader in favor of a military coup - it doesn't make sense. Oh wait, it does make sense, because every time they pay lip service to the power of democracy and blah blah blah - it is all complete horsesh-t. They don't actually believe it or practice it, because the power of democracy is thrown out the window whenever their personal political agendas are threatened. Lebanon, Venezuela, Uzbekistan, extraordinary rendition, whatever.
