Venezuela: The Chávez Victory by the Numbers

Now, the mopping up begins... as our first mop, we use the fifty-dollar haircut on the five-dollar head that is Independent of London correspondent Hannah Baldock.

Of course, after publishing a knowingly false, unsourced, uncited claim last night that Chávez had lost the referendum according to so-called "exit polls" that she did not have the journalistic fortitude to identify, she might not be the Independent's correspondent any more...

After Narco Newsman Ron Smith led the charge, and readers flooded the Independent with letters of complaint, the Independent did something unprecedented: It removed an article from its website!

Message to Hannah: There is a way out of hell! You must come clean right now - that means today! - and tell the world who your unnamed sources were for such false (and also illegal, under Venezuelan election law) claims.

By any chance were his initials Eric Ekvall, the disgraced former political consultant to disgraced former president Carlos Andres Peres, who lost his consulting sinecure at the state oil company when Chávez came to power?

Just a hunch!

Come clean Hannah!

Al,

So what is this about the "grosse fraud" I'm hearing from the opposition leaders?  Aleksander Boyd is gonna be on the BBC at 2:30pm Caracas time, maybe he will enlighting us.  Though the interview he had with Pacifica radio wasn't too informative, - a triumphatist claim of 93% victory in London.  When subsequently asked if most of Venezuelan expatriates were disproportionally rich, he denied the existence  of rich and poor in Venezuela.  Right.

It's been a long 24 hours for me.  When's Carter and Gavaria gonna stamp the results with their approval?   I'm a bit concerned by these strong fraud allegations, though I think the opposition is just trying to get attention.

Finally, I second your request to hear from Hannah, come clean plz.  

They never really wanted the referendum in the first place because they knew they didn't have the votes. They just wanted to make noise. Now that the results are in, they want to keep making noise. They will never concede defeat.

It's like those ridiculous exchanges you get into with right wingers when you challenge their facts. They never even acknowledge that you are challenging their facts. They shift ground to some other issue. When you keep trying to get them back to the facts they finally blow up and call you names and then block your email.

Their whole lives are devoted to domination of others in a hierarchy of master-slave relationships. They pay for their right to be the master to those below by being slaves to those above. The only fact involved is power.

If a slave challenges a master, the slave is terminated, whether emotionally (in the case of relatives), financially (relatives and employees) or physically (suppresion by beating, torture, imprisonment or exile, and death).

The model is the old-line Cuban exile. It's interesting to me that for the most part the Mexican Revolution was able to come to an accomodation with the losers. There was a considerable amount of fighting in the post-revolutionary consolidation period, but as far as I know, there was no massive exodus. The losers soon integrated into Mexican society on new terms.

This is obviously a simplification, as there were many abusive incidents on both sides. The fact is, however, that Vicente Fox came to power as a direct descendant of the cristeros and even used their battle cry in his election campaign. The cristeros were defeated in battle, but they didn't leave Mexico and they weren't ejected. They went on to form Acción Nacional and, eventually, to legitimate particpation in the political process.

I've read a lot of descriptions of the PRI as a pseudo-democracy masking a dictatorship that seem reasonable enough on the surface. They do not take into account the cultural substrate of the Mexican political system that goes back to the days before the Conquest. Democracy doesn't work quite the same way in Mexico as it does in political science text books.

This is a too long and complex a thesis to discuss in a comment. Suffice it to say that Mexico values accomodation over confrontation. "A bad settlement is better than a good fight," they say. They have a practical, earthy attitude toward the distribution of power that reminds me very much of Confucianism. Even the very wealthy recognize these limits. Whether or not the PRI or the PAN administers Mexico, the traditional values of Mexican courtesy and hospitality will always come first. People here know when to let something go and move on to something else.

That's the next lesson that the Spoiled Brats have to learn. Unfortunately, the Bush administration is going to continue financing them to never give up. I've read some very unfair and mean statements about Jimmy Carter and John F. Kerry. While it's true that they are both members in good standing of the American power elite, I tend to believe that they have learned the lessons of Castro Cuba and will seek accomodation rather than confrontation with Chávez because they are practical politicians as opposed to religious ideologues expecting to be raptured up as soon as they can get all their slaves in line.