http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=75420Zmag.org (Chuck Kaufman): In the 1980s the Washington Post honed an editorial page style to attack the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua that involved complex and convoluted editorials weaving half truths, total lies, innuendo, and unsupported speculation. These editorials were impossible to respond to with letters to the editor limited to 200 words.
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The Washington Post is now using the “big lie” strategy against the Bolivarian process in Venezuela and its democratically-elected President Hugo Chavez. An editorial on August 17, 2007 is a textbook example of this strategy. It is entitled “Cash-and-Carry Rule” with a sub heading “Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez cements his autocracy with petrodollars and another push for ‘reform.’”
The US-Venezuela Solidarity Network offers this sentence by sentence deconstruction of the Washington Post editorial as a public service to educate serious readers on important issues of US-Venezuela relations and the campaign to derail the process in Venezuela to use its oil wealth for the benefit of its poor majority.
WASHINGTON POST: The Venezuelan businessman told inspectors there was nothing but books and papers in his suitcase. So imagine everyone’s surprise when Argentine customs officers opened the suitcase -- and found $800,000 in cash. The origin and destination of this money, which was being taken to Buenos Aires on August 4, shortly before a state visit by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, is now the hottest mystery in South America.
FACTS: The Washington Post took a single fact -- a Venezuelan-born resident of Key Biscayne, Florida businessman was caught with $790,550 in undeclared cash entering Argentina on August 4 -- and used innuendo to tie it to President Chavez. In the first place this Venezuelan businessman was described in the first stories about the incident as being US-based. In the second place there has been not one shred of evidence presented tying him to Chavez or the Venezuela government. Chavez officially visited Argentina on August 7, as he has on several occasions this year. The Post editorial commits a post hoc, ergo propter hoc logic fallacy, Latin for "after this, therefore because of this." There is nothing which ties the two incidents to each other.