News of the Restless A door at the end of a dead-end street…

Oh, look. The Wall Street Journal seems to have twigged to the fact that their leading “expert” on Latin America, Mary Anastasia O’Grady, is nothing more than a discredited hack parachuted in from the Heritage Foundation to promote far-right “values” at the expense of honesty and reality. So now they’re handing the job of slamming Chavecito off onto a new guy. Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Mr. Travis Pantin and his stirring rendition of recycled manufactured outrage, “Hugo Chavez’s Jewish Problem”.

Right away, you can see that Mr. Pantin is one for the loaded language: “preaching a gospel”, “blessedly unvoiced”, “decisively rejected”, “dictator for life”, “wild rhetoric and diktats”, “by fiat”, and oh yeah, that wonderfully well-worn phrase, “questions about his emotional and mental stability.”

What a pity that the language-loading Mr. Pantin has only been skimming the surface, and it shows. If he’d sat through as many hours of Chavecito’s speeches in Spanish as I have, he’d realize that most of the Venezuelan president’s language consists not of “gospel”, “wild rhetoric and diktats” OR “fiats”, but of quiet, well-reasoned, informative and calm discourse that would put an Oxford don to shame. That’s one thing that impresses me about Latin American politicians: despite their “fiery” reputation up here, when you pay closer attention to them, the first thing you notice is the contrast between not only them and the media’s reporting of them, but also between them and our own politicians. We Canadians, for example, have a reputation for politeness, yet there is more scandalous language and violent gesticulation in our own mostly-white House of Commons during a single Question Period than there ordinarily is in Miraflores Palace in the space of a month. But you’d never know it from the way Chavecito gets covered in the English-language press. The only time anything he says ever makes the whore media up above the Rio Grande is when it’s something that can be spun somehow as outrageous (usually by taking it way out of context), or just outrageously funny, like the time he first caught my attention by poking some badly needed fun at Condi the Shoe Queen–who is, as he says, a woman disastrously out of her depth (and never more so than when writing derivative drivel about the Czechs). And when he called Dubya the devil, I knew he was joking (something the whore media is curiously reluctant to admit), but also that there was an element of truth to it–a truth that the Travis Pantins of this world are overpaid to obscure.

But maybe I’m being too harsh on the WSJ’s new boy? Hmm, you be the judge:

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