Dictator Chavez steals second Hilton hotel in Venezuela

The issue is the structure of the media, vs. structure of the elections. When the people that are running for office have an editorial stranglehold over media voices, that is when it is an issue.

Certainly, the increasing corporations of what used to be independent media outlets that has occurred in the last 30 or so years tends to make media manipulation theoretically closer to possible. Silvio Berlusconi's media empire, IMO, is pretty close, but even then he just controls a large but fractional share of the media voices, not a near monopoly.

To do so under the current setup would require a Red Chocolate/ToyCen428 type conspiracy between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party and it would have to include public corporations like The Hearst Corporation, Clear Channel Communications, The Tribune Group, Conde Naste, Time/Warner, and a large number of other publicly traded companies that are in competition with each other.

It isn't impossible, but the level of coordination and the level of flat out good luck required to make it happen would be silly. You would be trying to convince each one of the the news groups of large media corporations, whose whole sense of self-worth is built around about breaking exclusive stories, to sit on the biggest story ever. It would be like trying to heard cats.

A similar (though significantly less massive but still ridiculous) idea was made fun of in the South Park Episode, "About Last Night" where they made the Presidential campaign a Ocean's Eleven style scam to steal the Hope diamond:

<embed src="http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:southparkstudios.com:209730" width="480" height="400" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="window" flashVars="autoPlay=false&dist=www.southparkstudios.com&orig=" allowFullScreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" allownetworking="all" bgcolor="#000000"></embed>


(Full Episode)

 

How is it stealing if no one does anything about it? Sounds like a savvy business move IMHO.

 

Chavez is a dictator and he did steal that Hotel - but how stupid were the hotel owners to try to dictate to Chavez???

I think you're kidding yourself if you think Chavez is democratically elected at this point and anything less than a strong man.

That said, comparing him to Obama is just stupid as well.

 

Elections decide if he was democratically elected, and they had those, and the results were valid.

How is that not democratically elected?

I know it's fun to bash the guy, and there is plenty to bash him for. But because he's done some horrible things, doesn't mean every single thing he's done is bad.

Which candidate that he ran against was more popular and really should have won the election?

 

Thanks for giving us another example of how the democratically elected "dictator" acted democratically. We have amended the Constitutution and IIRC (lol) that is how we changed our own consitution so that the president can only have two terms around 1945.

 

Saddam Hussein had elections and won all of them too - so by that definition, Saddam was a democratically elected leader as well?

So is Iran's leader (who clearly actually lost).

Being Democratically elected implies the election was fair - and from what I understand, there are not fair elections going on in Venezuela.

 

From what I've seen of the Venezualan elections they were fair, at least according to international standards. That doesn't mean though that the winner isn't going to act like an authoritarian.

 

Again, the Venezuelan elections were monitored by respected international agencies and the outcomes were deemed legit.

That was not true of Iran, or Saddam.

There are other articles as well.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5710814/

 

Conservatives should just come out and say they don't like Chavez because he is a leftist and against US foreign policy as they like it. Why try to push the "dictatorship" angle? It just makes them look silly or unprincipled.

A major problem with conservatives is that they use the term "democracy" as a weapon. If they don't like a country they attack any form of deviation. If an outright dictatorship with no elections at all such as Saudi Arabia is compliant you never hear a peep out of them about "democracy".

In the US they are afraid of democracy and try to limit as much as possible. They support poll taxes (historically), voting only during working hours, the necessity of having official ID's. knowing that in many cases due to lack of money or even unpaid traffick tickets folks have a hard time getting the proper ID's-- anything to keep down the voting among the poor and lower middle class that despite Fox doing its best still tend to vote against the conservative agenda.

 

Jackie, you should be honest about this or at least use a definition of "dictator" that comports with some sort of common useag or dictionary definition.

 

[rquoter]
In modern usage, the term "dictator" is generally used to describe a leader who holds and/or abuses an extraordinary amount of personal power, especially the power to make laws without effective restraint by a legislative assembly. Dictatorships are often characterized by some of the following traits: suspension of elections and of civil liberties; proclamation of a state of emergency; rule by decree; repression of political opponents without abiding by rule of law procedures; these include single-party state, and cult of personality.

[/rquoter]

http://www.reference.com/browse/dictator

Yep. That's him.

 

....because if they don't, those dissidents, their families and their friends will be disappeared so this lunatic can torture and slaughter them with impugnity.

 

You mean like pinochet? Peron? Somoza? Daubisson?




If it ever gets to the point where chavez would torture, I think playing one of his 8 hours speech would be the cruelest method. I would rather go through that than being waterboarded..just saying.

 

You can be democratically elected into a position of dictatorship.

But for the subject at hand, what Chavez is doing is wrong. Taking something to help "the people" is very grey but taking something because "they looked at me weird" is just plain childish and arrogant. What a d-bag.

Btw, Paris Hilton faints...

 

According to Venezuelans I know who escaped him and got to America, Chavez is worse, much worse. Saddam Hussein could have learned sadistic techniques at the Chavez School of Torture, I'm told.

 

Please, give me a friggin break.

Some of you guys and the American media might be able to fool the multitude of idiots out there but anyone with a brain bigger than a frozen pea knows the man is not a dictator.

Just because you don't like his policies (and i think most are ridiculous), it does not make him a dictator.