“Our government only wants peace,” said President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, who this week had sent 10 tank battalions to Venezuela’s border with Colombia, called Mr. Uribe a mafia boss and threatened to nationalize Colombian companies in Venezuela.
Chavez’ blustering about war with Colombia and whatnot hasn’t apparently impressed Uribe all that much. Colombian troops remain demobilized (or anyway as demobilized as Colombian troops are likely to get). The thing about picking a fight with Colombians, however, is that they don’t back down (Exhibit A: War on Drugs), nor do they fuck around very much.
So while Uribe is playing it cool, he’s also remembering that his army is twice as big as Chavez’, plus they’re battle-hardened. No one realistically expects this to come to blows, unless Chavez has really been hitting the stupid.
But remember that even if it doesn’t, Colombia still isn’t fucking around. Hence, when presented with fightin’ words from Ecuador and Venezuela, Colombia sat back and revealed that Ecuadorean officials have been hanging out with the FARC (confirmed by Ecuador) and Venezuela has funneled $300 million to the FARC.
Ouch. This is bound to get more interesting.
But for now, in the spirit of alleviating tension, I recommend this cartoon of talking Mexican eggs getting drunk.
Two posts in a row about The Nation is a little much, but please indulge me, these are exciting times. The navel-gazers there have finally figured out that, gee, you know what? Chávez might not have good intentions after all!
For more than five years, Chávez has exploited the events of (the) April 11 (2002 coup against him) much the same way Bush has exploited September 11: as a basis for expanding executive power. The coup has provided the main justification for purging the military, packing the Supreme Court, removing RCTV from the public airwaves and, most recently, proposing a constitutional amendment that would empower the president to suspend due process rights indefinitely. Chávez and his supporters have repeatedly condemned presumed coup supporters in the court of public opinion but have shown less interest in trying them in a court of law. In this sense, they have proven themselves to be, like many of their opponents, more concerned with pursuing power than promoting the rule of law.
Coincidentally, they’ve figured this out just in time for Chávez to send troops to the Colombian border. Better late than never, I suppose. Conspicuously missing from The Nation’s 80,000-word Damascus moment, however, is any mention of how everyday life in Venezuela has more or less gone to hell in the last nine years - 20% inflation, food rationing, rampant kidnapping, etc.
It’s understandable. Those details are easy to miss from an office building in Manhattan.
(Full disclosure! I interned at The Nation. And while there, I engaged in so many vein-bulging arguments where I said basically exactly what this guy says in this article, but a year earlier. I just have to take a moment to revel a little bit. Ahhhh. Thanks for reading.)
It’s not so often the editor of The Nation and I agree on something, so mark your calendar. Katrina vanden Heuvel writes in Newsweek (yes, Newsweek still exists) that the recently-deceased William F. Buckley was a damn fine representative of conservatism, even if, in the end, his ideas were kind of repugnant. (For the record, I sort of beat Katrina to the punch on that chestnut by a couple weeks.)
Money ‘graph:
Despite his uncompromising conservative beliefs, Buckley reveled in transpartisan friendships, most notably with the late John Kenneth Galbraith. (One of Galbraith’s favorite phrases—”Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue”—may well have been coined to describe his skiing partner Buckley.) While he could deploy a sometimes vicious wit—which could descend into cruelty—Buckley disdained the kind of partisan shoutfests that too often pass for political debate on our TVs today.
Perhaps the best lesson to be drawn from Buckley’s many “transpartisan” friendships is that the left, like everyone else, has always remained more status-conscious than principled.