9-23-06, 9:54 am
THE reaction of Washington's reactionary po-faced politicians to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's light-hearted reference to George W Bush as the devil showed his remarkable ability to get under their skin.
The global anti-imperialist movement's leading wind-up merchant has the timing of a stand-up comic and knows how to play an audience.
But he would not get the response that he does were it not for the fact that his criticism of US imperialism's domineering and destructive demeanour is recognised and detested the world over.
According to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, President Chavez's remarks were 'not becoming for a head of state.'
How so unlike the eminently becoming remarks of her boss, whose imagination stretches only far enough to describe the whole gamut of his overseas political opponents as reincarnations of Hitler.
Possibly he has forgotten that his family's massive wealth was swollen by his grandfather's lucrative commercial links with nazi Germany.
US ambassador John Bolton was equally snooty, attempting to belittle Mr Chavez by saying that he had left only a 'junior note-taker' at the US table, as is customary 'when governments like that speak.'
In exhibiting such pettiness, he belittled only himself and his war criminal president.
Mr Bolton also suggested - beaming as though he had said something remarkably astute - that Mr Chavez had the right to express his opinion, but it was 'too bad the people of Venezuela don't have free speech.'
The Venezuelan people certainly have problems with freedom of speech, but they are not caused by the government so much as by the anti-Chavez oligarchy that controls 95 per cent of the media and excludes the opinions of the country's pro-Bolivarian-revolution majority.
Mr Bolton trades on the slavish uniformity of the US billionaire media to be confident that most US citizens will be unaware of media reality in Venezuela.
It is the same conformism that ensured a clear run for President Bush in the fraudulent 'war on terror' that he launched after the September 11 2001 atrocities.
Once respected liberal CBS news anchorman Dan Rather admitted later that it ought to have been his patriotic duty to ask tough questions of the president, but, 'in some ways, the fear is that you will be necklaced here. You will have a flaming tyre of lack of patriotism put around your neck.'
The economic and political power of the handful of moguls who dominate the US media, at the behest of their corporate advertisers, strangles independent thought.
And this negation of freedom of information is aggravated by the White House.
It is barely a fortnight since the Miami Herald revealed that some of its own staff were among 10 Florida-based journalists paid secretly by the US government, on top of their own salaries, to broadcast anti-Cuban propaganda.
When it comes to media freedom and journalistic ethics, the Bush administration and those whom it suborns should be the last to point the finger, but how widely will such corruption be publicised in the neutered US mass media?
Morning Star
