heh, I hit a nerve. Look I don’t care for any kind of extremism whether it’s coming from the left or right. It’s simply not productive to the cause. Her valuing a dictator who does nothing but slam the US happens to be a turn-off for me, in my humble opinion.
Chavez is a typical populist left-leaning Latin American demagogue, in the mold of folks like Peron and Vargas. The often talk a lot about helping the downtrodden, but in the end they often end up turning into authoritarians who do little for “the people.”
But whether or not that’s the case with Chavez, the fact is that he was elected—on more than one occasion—in a process generally described by international election monitoring groups as fair and accurate. And we’re not talking a Bush-sized margin here; Chavez got almost 60% of the vote in 2004.
Not only that, he is an elected leader who has survived an attempt at violent overthrow, of which United States officials had prior knowledge and may even have aided with intelligence and other support. And the US has been funneling money to Chavez’s opponents during the whole of his tenure.
Can you imagine the outrage in the US if it were discovered, for example, that the British government was funneling money to the Democrats and doing everything it could to destabilize American politics? I’d say that, no matter what his other policies and strategies, Chavez’s slamming of the United States is completely deserved.
Well, all I can say that if MoveOn and Moore were funding Camp Casey and Peace House, they’re cheap bastards.
The IT area consisted of a piece of plastic stretched out behind the kitchen with one lone guy running it on his laptop, all the food, water and ice were donated or paid for by individuals, Peace House was actually in the process of having the phones turned off for lack of money and the ‘staff’ were all volunteers.
Folks reached into their own pockets to rent vans, the cleanup crews, the parking lot people and the peacekeepers gave freely of their time as did the musicians that performed.
In fact, I think one of the things that pissed the right wing pundits off was that CC and Peace House were fueled by grassroots contributions.