mental poisoning
Gore Vidal wrote a paean to C-SPAN a few weeks ago, honoring the cable station for showing us feeble republicans Question Time in the House of Commons.
"A jarring experience," said Gore, for "anyone foolish enough to believe that America is democratic in anything except furiously imprisoning the innocent and joyously electing the guilty."
Indeed. On comparison, the Brits shock us with legislators who approach legislator-like status, but I'd volunteer that even viewing bills up for vote or floor speeches in, say, the House of Representatives, can be just as jarring an experience - but only in the way that watching high school star athletic heroes and campus studs make out and circle jerk in the locker room would be both jarring and educational.
A fine example was listening to House members speak on the Central American Free Trade Agreement, hours and hours of not-short-enough-speeches about the world's most totally rad economy and the coolest way of life the human animal's ever known - pure gibberish that would've made Hacksaw Jim Duggan turn redder than Nikolai Volkoff's tights.
Of all the gibbery gibberish gibbered that ugly summer night, maybe the most gibbery, called forth from some long-forgotten Cold War Propaganda Pit by no less than three congress people (and contrary to blogosphere speculation, all three did indeed have their heads attached to their bodies), was the dire warning that if CAFTA did not pass, more and more countries of the Southern cone would fall victim to Chavez-style-what-have-youism, a heady mix that includes
...improved literacy rates and more students getting school meals. [In addition,][p]ublic spending has quadrupled on education and tripled on healthcare, and infant mortality has declined. The government is promoting one of the most ambitious land-reform programs seen in Latin America in decades.
Way beyond my feeble satirical skills. Nothing. I got nothing.
Anywho, by way of the very excellent Narco News cometh this Spanish-language AP missive from the land where school kids get breakfast and healthcare:
Venezuelan prosecutors have accused the [U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency] of "illegal operations" in the country, and have announced that changes are coming in what the Venezuelan government will tolerate in terms of DEA activity, and what it will not.
Eddie Haskell libs tend to see international left figures, high and low, as little more than bandits and thugs, preferring to get their valuations of Chavez and others like him filtered through the New York Times (but dollars to donuts Hugo's one president who can probably get his head around the theory of evolution. Fuck that - Subcommandante Marcos one ups us there too). But based on the U.S. response to a Chavista plan to start a television station - a television station - and the ongoing legacy of often violent U.S. interventionism south of the border, is the Venezuelan decision to dump the DEA really sound all that loopy?
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