I got mail from Andres a little bit back, and I thought I should preface it with a simple statement:
Politicians lie.
I know House says, "Everyone lies," but in the case of 'everyone' they aren't doing it all the time like breathing.
For example, when that
Oreo was submitted to the Supreme Court as a 'black' judge to replace the outgoing
Thurgood Marshall, a law clerk he had once employed and harassed sexually, Anita Hill, brought it to the attention of the public.
A number of fictitious news articles were printed (then retracted) so that a man named David Brock could write '
The REAL Anita Hill' to discredit her.
And we know that Kerry was 'Swift Boated' with lies about his military service. Crap, in this last election we had the bizarre message that Obama is a Muslim.
Now, as long as this situation remains unchanged (as long as people can lie w/o penalty) it's NOT going to stop (not even slow down, IMHO).
So, again, I suggest that we need to make THIS issue the major issue, so that when some bought-off publisher plants a false news story, there are CONSEQUENCES.
It would be nice to get to that point before we actually invade Venezuela.
Actually, it would just be nice if our own government turned
Luis Posada Carriles over to them, as a start (he's a terrorist, but he's OUR terrorist, yano, he blows up *bad guys* like planeloads of Venezuelans).
So, that said, I'm going to post the beginnings of this article that Andres just forwarded me, because it's the SAME shit going down here.
The only 'human rights' being denied in Venezuela is the 'right' to lie. As their lying media come due for renewal, the ones that lied to the public about the coup that our government supported are being denied renewals of their licenses.
And Hugo STILL has well over sixty percent support of the Venezuelans, overall (just not that top 1% that own things like newspapers, radio and TV stations).
In an open letter to the Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch, over 100 experts on Latin America criticized the organization's recent report on Venezuela, A Decade Under Chávez: Political Intolerance and Lost Opportunities for Advancing Human Rights in Venezuela, saying that it "does not meet even the most minimal standards of scholarship, impartiality, accuracy, or credibility." The signers include leading academic specialists from universities in the United States, including Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and a number of state universities, and academic institutions in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, México, the U.K., Venezuela and other countries. The letter cites Jose Miguel Vivanco, lead author of the report, saying "We did the report because we wanted to demonstrate to the world that Venezuela is not a model for anyone..."[1], as evidence of its political agenda. The letter also criticizes the report for making unsubstantiated allegations, and that some of the sources that Human Rights Watch relied on in the report are not credible.
"By publishing such a grossly flawed report, and acknowledging a political motivation in doing so, Mr. Vivanco has undermined the credibility of an important human rights organization," the letter states.
The letter notes that numerous sources cited in the report - including opposition newspapers El Universal and El Nacional, opposition group Súmate, and a mentally unstable opposition blogger - have been known to fabricate information, making it "difficult for most readers to know which parts of the report are true and which aren't." The letter also argues that the Human Rights Watch report makes sweeping allegations based on scant evidence. For example, its allegation of discrimination in government services is based on just one person whose nephew claimed she was denied medicine from a government program.
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