>>> Check out the next member of OPEC: Brazil!
>>> Preview Latin America’s next insurgent president: Lula.
>>> Meet Central America’s next leftist government: …El Salvador.
>>> Check out the latest victim of independent scrutiny: The Magic Laptop!
So the new Bond movie plotline is out! And the bad guys are…Santa Cruz separatists or something! Check it out:
“… Bond discovers that Greene, conspiring to take total control of one of the world's most important natural resources, is forging a deal with the exiled General Medrano. Using his associates in the organization, and manipulating his powerful contacts within the CIA and the British government, Greene promises to overthrow the existing regime in Bolivia, giving the General control of the country in exchange for a seemingly barren piece of land. Bond and the beautiful Camille who has her own vendetta, team-up to throw a wrench into Greene's machine.”
How are you preparing for the results of the Magic Laptop diagnostic due out later this week? If you are one of the busy beavers in the Bush Administration, you’re probably already ahead of the game by moving an entire fleet of warships into the region, armed with bombs, missiles, and plenty of heart! Agence France Presse tracked down three of Washington’s douchiest commentators for their analysis, but which one is the most contemptible? We investigate, after the jump.
Just two days after we published this, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to drop the terrorist designation for the last guy who got on the wrong side of U.S. Foreign policy. So congratulations, Nelson Mandela! You can finally take the great-grandkids to Disneyland, pending Senate approval.
Ha ha, it turns out that the Bolivian opposition is exactly like the Venezuelan opposition which is why they will fail, hilariously, forever. Emboldened by the recent “autonomy” vote in the country’s richest, whitest state of Santa Cruz, opposition parties yesterday introduced a bill in the national legislature requiring a recall referendum against Superstar President Evo Morales. Although it was probably meant to be a wedge to rally the country’s right wing, the measure passed quickly without much dissent from Evo backers because the president is like really, really popular. So Evo’s all bring it on and the opposition is all hey wait and now there’s going to be a referendum and Evo’s going to be king of the Andes.
Hat Tip: Otto
Well this never gets old: today the Colombians leaked the magic laptop documents to the Wall Street Journal—the same documents they already leaked to the Miami Herald last week and the New York Times the week before that. And once again it’s a Breaking World Exclusive all over again!
Ok there is this funny twist this time though, in that an unnamed “senior U.S. Intelligence Official” said that the intelligence community is in “complete agreement” on the validity of the documents, and implies that they’d been talking to the investigators at Interpol. And then the guy from Interpol calls him a liar. And then a “senior Senate Staffer” who has gone over the documents is like, yeah this all nice but like, "We need to see proof of what is mentioned in the reports." Oh, right, proof. That.
Note: If this link to the story doesn’t work, we’ve excerpted the article after the jump, in its entirety.
Warning! the following has no humor value whatsoever. If you so much as smirk, you are sick, because this is not funny at all, not even a little bit:
"A member of Colombia's Congress had a heart attack while debating a transportation bill and died hours later in a hospital after having to be transported in a private car because no ambulances were available. Sixty-year-old Jose Fernando Castro, a member of conservative President Alvaro Uribe's majority coalition, collapsed mid-debate in a committee room.Hey maybe that transportation bill would have helped with problems like this. What’s weird here is that as of this morning, Uribe still had a Congressional ally who was not in jail on terrorism charges. Who knew?
The gray-haired Castro, his polka-dotted tie loosened from around his neck, spent 20 minutes on the floor of the room before those trying to help him decided to move him without the help of an ambulance, which was called but never arrived."
Weird Quote for the Day:
“Human trafficking -– slavery, by another name –- exists not just in places like Thailand, Kuwait and Venezuela. It is a serious problem here in the United States.”
--Crazy old coot John McCain
Um ok, what? Everybody knows that Thailand is an obligatory stopover in the international perv circuit, and that Kuwait is notorious for kidnapping child slaves not just for camel racing but for, like, “building the U.S. embassy in Iraq,” But Venezuela? Oh wait I know. McCain was probably in Caracas and the ladies were throwing themselves all over him and he just assumed…no wait on second thought sex slavery is the only possible explanation here.
Ok, so…not only is the U.S. harboring one of the world’s most notorious superkiller terrorists, but they’re throwing him a “hi I’m gay” party in Miami.
And then…a plane went down in Venezuela and the guy that owns the Smartmatic voting machines died and the CIA and drugs and Ohio voters and Christ I don’t even begin to get it…
And then…some guy with access to Google has “explosively” connected the dots between Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez and posted it all over at this one place on the internet.
And then…another guy who exposed the role of the Albert Einstein Institute in overthrowing governments all over the world got a hilariously bitchy letter from the director about it so he published that too and now he’s going to die.
And then… “Three years after officials hailed his arrest as a major drug war victory, the U.S. asked a judge Tuesday to dismiss cocaine charges against Colombian rebel leader Ricardo Palmera.”
You probably already knew this, but Bolivian President Evo Morales is an Indian, in a country made up primarily of Indians, and in the 170-year history of Bolivia he is the country’s very first Indian president, which is crazy when you think about it. Anyway the Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl believes that this is a bad and scary development, because it threatens to inject “ethnocentric policies” into Bolivian politics when everything was fair and square before. Hell even the slaves were probably happy.
All of which got me wondering, how would the Washington Post have covered the fall of apartheid if Jackson Diehl sat on the Ed Board in the early 90s? Haha that’s easy to figure out. Just take today’s editorial and substitute “South Africa” for “Bolivia” and “Mandela” for “Morales.” Oh no wait allow me:
South African President Nelson Mandela claims to be ruling his country on behalf of a black majority whose rights have been denied for centuries by an evil "oligarchy." In fact, Mr. Mandela is pursuing a narrow and divisive agenda that, if continued, will split South Africa along geographic as well as ethnic lines, and possibly trigger a civil war.Though demographers disagree, a common estimate is that 65 percent of South Africa’s 43 million people are of African descent, while “Whites,” descendants of Europeans, make up the balance. Ignoring this disparity, Mr. Mandela, a black South African and former guerilla fighter, is trying to impose a new political system on the country that greatly increases his own power and that privileges his own ethnic group at the expense of the rest of the country. Worse, Mr. Mandela is an acolyte of the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev and has adopted his potted and authoritarian version of socialism.
Early returns from a white-separatist referendum held recently in Johannesburg’s better white neighborhoods showed that more than 84 percent voted for the autonomy plan. Though the legality of the vote is questionable, the exercise demonstrated beyond doubt that opposition to Mr. Mandela’s program extends far beyond any "oligarchy." If South Africa is lucky, Mr. Mandela will recognize that most of his country will never accept ethnocentric policies or Soviet-style autocracy, and he will begin to negotiate a compromise that allows more rights for South Africa’s white inhabitants. If he presses ahead with black-majority rule, the result is likely to be bloodshed.
Now that was easy, wasn’t it? Everybody was doing just fine in South Africa until the blacks took over and made it all racist with their racism. The same applies to Bolivia today, so go back to India, stupid Bolivian Indians!
Colombia is now the 4th worst country in the world when it comes to killing journalists and then pretending that it never happened, following close on the heels of notable shitholes “Iraq,” “Sudan,” and “Sierra Leone.” I didn’t check who came in 5th but I’m sure it was probably Jesus.
As you already know, there is nothing that Hugo Chavez won’t do hold on to power, because he is a megalomaniacal crazy jerk who is also fat. This week Reuters explains his latest desperate move to maintain popularity, which primarily involves fixing the country’s problems, and if we don’t intervene quickly he may just succeed in his terrifying scheme.
Where to begin? Over the last few years, dirty, poor Venezuelans slowly began to accumulate some walking around money as the country saw a boom in employment, job training, and cash flow. All of the sudden, people who had been subsisting on rotten food scraps and dirt and dried up dog turds began shopping for products like “eggs” and “milk” and “chicken.” In doing so they literally ripped these products out of the mouths of wealthier Venezuelans, 98% of whom agreed that their lives were better off before.
And then it got worse: decent society had to start eating other kinds of meat and drinking soy milk once in a while and this crisis became the second worst problem the country faced, according to polls. And now, rather than simply putting things back the way they were like a normal human, Chavez found creative ways to address the shortages of milk and chicken and now everyone thinks they are content, but by the time they figure out they are not supposed to be happy it may be too late.
"Jesus Christ was also condemned to death, and I understand that his historical popularity remains intact"--Jose Obdulio Gaviria, adviser to Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, on why Uribe’s domestic popularity ratings remain high even as his ties to death squads come to light.
Weirdness is going down in Bolivia this weekend. If you haven’t been paying attention, the rich white folk in the rich white state of Santa Cruz are holding a referendum on Sunday to declare “autonomy” from the majority redskins. And while the sponsors are a bunch of scary racists, they wrap their arguments up with declarations of economic efficiency and “states rights.” Sound familiar? Anyway today AP runs a story that barely bothers with the niceties. It begins:
The wealthy white governor stood beneath a giant statue of Jesus and promised freedom to the tens of thousands cheering him on — freedom from a llama herder-turned-president who reveres the Indian earth goddess Pachamama.Classy. And then the autonomy people say all kinds of funny crackery shit and then the reporter asks them about 500 years of state-sponsored oppression of the Indians and they reply:
"We in this region are positive about the conquest," said Luis Nunez, the group's vice president. "We do not in any way resent what that history meant for us. It reflects who we are now."Boy, does it. Freakily, IPS today writes about exactly what “who they are now,” means, reporting on “a phenomenon that had remained largely hidden and ignored until now” Namely…you saw this coming…slavery. Apparently hundreds of Indian families are held in states of “forced servitude” by prominent Santa Cruz landowners, which is what they are talking about when they say “autonomy” and “states rights” and I want to go lie down now and weep. Happy Friday!
Everybody investigating "America’s Colombian President" Alvaro Uribe and his family’s ties to death squads now all have a hit on their heads, you'll be happy to know.
Pity Bernardo Alvarez, Venezuela’s Ambassador to the United States. Every time that phone rings he’s got to answer another retarded question. Here’s an example: buried in this year’s State Department’s annual report on How Goes the War on Terror is the charge that Venezuelan airports have no customs or immigration procedures for flights originating in Syria and Iran. They’re not saying that diplomats, statesmen or, hell, pinko terrorists get a pass, just any islamo-yokel who happens to buy a ticket from the Axis of Evil gets to skip the line, according to Condi’s Angels. So the question was more or less “respond to this crazy shit,” and Alvarez was like, look:
“I am the ambassador of Venezuela and when I go to Venezuela, I go before a booth that clears me to come in and to leave.”In other words, “Um, no. We don’t do that because that would be dumb.” Next Question.
I guess it’s no surprise the Washington Post selects primarily the world’s elite and douchey to write for their online PostGlobal project. I mean, the whole point of PostGlobal is to ease the minds of Washington’s elite and douchey with the knowledge that the whole world agrees with us (except for the marginals!) on account of “the end of history” and such. See, they're not so different from us after all.
What does always surprise though is how half-assed some of these guys are in the material they submit. Among the most reliably craptastic is, of course, PostGlobal’s Voice of Venezuela, Ibsen Martinez. (Ibsen! See, even third worldy mothers name their sons after 19th Century Norwegian playwrights. Does he hang out with Thor?) (And yes, actual picture).
Anyway today Ibsen sort of outdoes himself with a piece called “Venezuela’s Pirate Government.” (I know, don’t you just wish? Sadly it’s only about movie copying and illegal music downloads). He starts out talking about a U.S. trade rep’s report on how countries like China and Mexico pose huge problems for Hollywood. And then he goes on to describe a barrio in Caracas where somebody told him they copy movies too. And then in an awesomely unselfconscious twist he makes a mental note:
I shall have to read the US Trade Representative’s report to learn how much money is lost to piracy in Venezuela's major cities.Hey good idea, dingus! Maybe next time you could even read it before you write your stupid article on Media Piracy in Venezuela. No, I take that back, next time I just want to hear from the pirates.
Feel that rumbling in your tummy? That’s because the world is OUT OF FOOD. Thanks to greedy Iowa farmers and some deal between Bush and Brazil, Americans have been putting the last of Earth’s ingestible resources into our gas tanks instead of our mouths and yet we’ve all still managed to invade Iraq for oil and become morbidly obese. Anyway now we’re out of corn and everyone is dying and it’s all the press can talk about.
Obviously experts had seen this global food crisis coming for years now, so we’d been warned, right? Here’s what “Perfect Latin American Idiot” Alvaro Vargas Llosa wrote in the Washington Post last spring:
“Incidentally, ethanol is making Chavez and Castro nervous. One proof is the hysterical article Castro wrote for Granma, Cuba's official newspaper, lashing at those who want ‘to convert food into combustibles’ and accusing them of wanting to condemn to ‘premature death and thirst more than 3 billion people of the world.’”Ha ha, oops! We’ve got a treasury of embarrassingly so-last-year ethanol predictions, after the jump.
>>> As if public humiliation, chickenpocks and an unattractive orangey sheen weren’t enough of a burden, Florida himbo Connie Mack suffered another blow when “ranking Republican” Dick Lugar explained that declaring Venezuela a state sponsor of terror would be a truly stupid idea.
>>> “When Tom Donohue, President and CEO of the US Chamber of Commerce, said this morning that "Nancy Pelosi is an agent for Chávez", he actually got booed.“
>>> U.S. “Czar on Drugs” John Walters likes to tell reporters that Venezuela’s role in the drug trade is gaining on Colombia’s, but ha ha his own power point tells a different story.
It turns out that the sole cautionary, cassandric voice of journalistic reason in the entire magic laptop discussion is now, officially and forever, inexplicably, The Washington Times. With today’s 900-word treatise on the Colombian government’s distortions of their contents, the wrongest of rightwing rags emerged as a modest and sensible alternative to the lunacy mainstream press coverage of Latin American politics. And then the earth’s magnetic field destabilized and the poles reversed and everyone froze to death and then their bodies caught on fire and then they drowned the end.
>>> Wow! even Miami Herald columnist/dickwad Andres Oppenheimer is disappointed in Alvaro Uribe
>>> Ha ha! NPR said that Hugo Chavez was the president of Colombia today.
>>> Hey! My favorite news source reads this stupid blog.
>>> WTF? The L.A. Times wants the U.S. to leave Ecuador alone.
Hey remember the International Monetary Fund? The evil economic overlords who are the world’s leading experts in bringing countries out of poverty only they’ve never managed to do it once, leading some analysts and thousands of grungy protesters to wonder if they were maybe doing it on purpose because nobody’s that incompetent? The institution that has been humorously flailing ever since every Latin American country decided to refinance their debt with Venezuela, willing to pay double the going interest rate in order to keep what was left of their economies out of the hands of those jerkoffs?
Well they are officially broke. And by “broke” I mean, “running a whopping small-country-size $400-million annual deficit of its own and…being forced into some of the same kinds of ‘structural adjustments’ it used to impose on indebted Third World nations.” And if you found that sentence ridiculously satisfying to read, here’s the link to Mark Weisbrot’s column on the whole epic tragicomedy from Sunday’s LA Times. All of which might explain why IMF officials have been acting strangely… human lately.
It was bound to happen: twenty-one of academia’s leading minds got around to reading those magic laptop documents that totally prove the link between the FARC and Venezuela and realized that oops actually they don’t. Now they’ve written an open letter to the media begging reporters to “exercise a more critical eye in its reporting than has been demonstrated to date” before they get us into another stupid war.
It’s a nice initiative, but longtime readers might spot the fatal flaw in the professors’ strategy. That’s right, the journalists who cover Venezuela are lazy illiterates busy professionals, so good luck getting them to read your three-page footnoted letter, brainiacs! In the spirit of being helpful, I’ve created a diagram that might meet the Lilliputian attention spans rigorous schedules of our intended audience. That would be the magic laptop there at the intersection, any questions?
>>> The witness who linked the Uribe family to terrorists is about to be assassinated in Canada.
>>> The Miami Herald gets leaked new laptop documents implicating Ecuadorian officials, is unable “to independently verify the documents,” publishes them anyway.
>>> U.S. wants to paint Chavez as a terrorist because he won’t commit terrorist acts like they do.
>>> New Mexico governor arrives in Caracas to personally collaborate with the FARC.
>>> Of course Uribe is a terrorist but what does that mean for that stupid trade deal?
Dear dumb Latins. We Americans are super sorry about all the misunderstandings we’ve had throughout the years, particularly all those time where you have misinterpreted our good intentions and thought we might have had a hand in some of those unfortunate armed conflicts in Honduras or Panama or Ecuador or Cuba or Nicaragua or Grenada or the Dominican Republic or Chile or El Salvador or Uruguay or Guatemala or wherever. How stupid of you, right? But hey we’re willing to let bygones be bygones.
Anyhoo as part of our ongoing efforts to “build confidence and trust among nations through collective maritime security efforts that focus on common threats and mutual interests,” we intend to station an entire Naval fleet off the coast of Venezuela, headed up by a nuclear aircraft carrier, forever! Doesn’t that sound collective and confidence building? The whole thing is meant to “send a message to the entire region, not just Venezuela,” so don’t worry. We’re still figuring out the “focus,” of the "mission." but it “will probably be on security.”
This was your heads up so you don’t do anything stupid like invade our mobile sovereign coastal boundaries or kablooey, k?
Your friend,
AMERICA : )
