viva

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And, while we're on the subject, have you watched the travesty of a Frontline piece on Chavez yet? I just did.

What a bummer. It was too biased and did not give a good enough accounting of a lot of the information sources. Still, I can believe the stuff about the cooperatives he helped form just sitting there waiting for work that doesn't come. I can also understand how the US-backed coup and the history with Fidel would leave him in a state many would call "paranoid", wanting to pay more attention to personal and national defense issues... and leaving the population still too heavily in the mindset of the oppressed, unwilling to think of the common good when they can find a way to turn a fast buck.

I also understand why he wants to serve as many terms as he can be elected for, or even why he'd just stay in until he died or was forced out. It obviously takes a lot of time to shift an oligarchy into a new kind of socialism, but, truly, he needs to be making the changes that will bear fruit while he's letting the plutocrats dis the living snot out of him as merely a narcissist dictator who humiliates his friends and won't listen to reason, and one cannot tell from this that any of that is happening.

I don't want to be a starry-eyed supporter of an ineffectual bozo, but I also find it is impossible to rely on Frontline for good information anymore. They have been effectively the mouthpiece for the * administration for years now, and I don't see how this piece is any different.