Tim Padgett and Pat Robertson

Yesterday, Pat Robertson caused an August-slow-news-month (Its not like the Iraqis are drafting a constitution of anything) storm with his comments about calling for the assassination Venezuelan Dictator, Hugo Chavez. For the record, Pat Robertson is complete tool; a guy, who I am utterly amazed, has anyone that ever listens to him. Yet, his comments about Chavez were about on par for his normal level of understanding of geo-politics. So, big-friggin' woop--its news that Pat Robertson says idiotic things?

Anyway, I found the article describing the event through Google News, not Instapundit or anyone else. So, instead of being led to a Yahoo! or BBC article, my source was TIME magazine. Hold on to your hats as I post what Tim Padgett opined:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has a new best friend this morning: television evangelist Pat Robertson. With his astonishing call for the left-wing leader's assassination last night—"I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it...We have the ability to take him out"—Robertson will have surely made Chavez an even more popular anti-yanqui icon in Venezuela, Latin America and around the world. Like his mentor Fidel Castro, Chavez thrives on threats from the U.S., real or perceived. He has long insisted that his foes are plotting to kill him, and this summer had armed civilians training with the Venezuelan military to prepare for what he says is an imminent U.S. invasion. A public effort to whack him, offered from the right-wing Christian establishment so closely aligned with President Bush, is just what Chavez needs to keep his approval ratings soaring as high as the price of the Venezuelan oil he controls, the largest crude reserves in the hemisphere.

This is a pretty typical Leftist proxy attack against the President. Some right-wing dork says something stupid and, lo-and-behold, Bush is dragged into the fray. Not only that, he managed to drag the whole "Right-wing Christian establishment" into the picture.

Padgett has now set the stage--the actors, or villians if you will, have been identified. Next, he'll lead us into the mess the "villians" have led us to:

But Chavez holds cards that make remarks like Robertson's all the more incendiary on the Latin American street, where language like "U.S. imperialism" suddenly has currency again. One is the past: Latin Americans have too many vivid and bitter memories of U.S. intervention in their countries—operations that sometimes included brazen assassinations —which is why the Bush Administration got burned by accusations it backed a failed coup against Chavez in 2002 (the White House denies the charge). Another is democratic legitimacy: Chavez, for all his authoritarian tendencies, is a democratically elected head of state who last year won a national recall referendum approved by international observers.

Perhaps an even more important factor is populist backing: leftism is on the rise again in Latin America for a reason, namely the burgeoning feeling around the region that a decade of U.S.-backed capitalist reforms has simply widened an already epic gap between rich and poor—and that the Bush Administration is indifferent to it. As Chavez uses his multi-billion-dollar oil revenues to fund the kind of social projects that Venezuela's legions of impoverished never saw from his kleptocratic predecessors—and to subsidize cheaper oil for his cash-strapped Latin neighbors—more people are willing to defend him, as most Latin leaders did last spring when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice toured South America.

Padgett tries to set the trap, but instead has cornered himself. In a typical hyperbolic set-up, he has pulled off the Leftist trifecta: he defended a dictator as legitimate, blamed the U.S. for another country's poverty, and linked it to oil.

Padgett has a long past sympathizing for Leftist causes. I'm not talking about Howard Dean Left, I'm talking about Fidel Castro Left. Here is what Mediaresearch caught Padgett saying about the Cuban-American community during the Elian Gonzalez fiasco:

"ABC at first avoided showing the six-year-old saying he didn't want to go back to his father in Cuba -- a statement that could have been coached. But Armando Gutierrez, the family spokesman and a veteran political operator with a heavy touch of Joe McCarthy in him, angrily accused ABC of reneging on a promise to broadcast that very statement. The next morning, the network aired it. And by week's end another family spokesman said Elian ‘expresses fear about being with his father. He's afraid he will be punished.’ Now, who could have put that idea in his head?"

Padgett added: "It isn't hard to understand the visceral emotions Elian stirs up among many Cuban exiles, especially those who were imprisoned by Castro or had a close relative who, like Elisabeth, drowned in the Florida Straits while rafting toward freedom. ‘We're Elian's true peers,’ says militant exile leader Jose Basulto. ‘We want to save him from the life we had to live in Cuba.’ But the hard-line Cuban-American leadership also wants to preserve the political clout it enjoyed during the cold war."

Padgett "feels the pain" of the Cuban Americans in that it must have been hard on their psyche to be imprisoned or killed while trying to find political freedom. However, his backhanded sympathies are turned into all-out aggression by brazenly calling them "militant" and "hard-line." He even managed to label the family spokesman a McCarthyist, which was probably done to deflect any criticsm of his hit-piece. In all this, not one criticism was directed towards the bearded, cigar-smoking tyrant that caused all this mess in the first place. But I'm sure, as Padget aludes to, calling a spade a spade, or a communist a communist, is pure McCarthyism.

So, in light of his dubious past, I'm not at all shocked to read his editorial denouncing the U.S. in dealing with a man who could very well become the Latin American Saddam Hussein--a meglomaniacal tyrant who uses a convenient, populist ideology (in the Middle East it is Islam, in South America, it is Socialism/Communism) to rally hard-core supporters who will enforce his rule through ruthless force.

Secondly, Padgett, who if you Google him is actually the Miami and Latin American bureau chief for TIME, repeats another falsehood in the TIME article above. Being that I speak a little Spanish, I found this comment to be odd:

Chavez's erratic and often bellicose anti-U.S. rhetoric—he publicly called Bush an "ass____" in Spanish last year—as well as his desire to sell less oil to the U.S. and more to ideological allies like China, are hardly comforting as gas nears $3 per gallon.

I'm not exactly writing novels in Spanish, but its not very common for someone in Spanish to call someone an a-hole. So, what did Chavez really say? Charlie Hardy at Venezuela Analysis did the fact checking for me:

At the end of February 2004, Chávez told thousands of people that President Bush was a “pendejo” if he believed what others were telling him about Venezuela. The word “pendejo” in Venezuela means “a person of whom others are taking advantage.” It is not a compliment, but it is nowhere as insulting as “asshole.” “Asshole” is very strong and Chávez did not use the word.

Charlie writes a long, detailed description about how he found out what "pendejo" meant, but I'll save you the story as I know what it means. "Pendejo" means "stupid idiot" not asshole. Granted, if someone calls you a "pendejo," well, them's fightin' words. But it is much less harsh, and completely false to say that he called Bush an "ass____".

So, in the end, it is really hard to take an opinion piece from a guy who is supposed to be a Latin American expert seriously when he is incapable of translating, or attempting to deliberately mislead, something as simple as an epithet. But this is just another example in a long list of sins the media establishment has committed by trying to find ways to weaken American interests abroad and at home. And more times than not, they have to lie to do so.

Posted by 10 fingers 6 strings at August 24, 2005 08:46 AM | TrackBack