Even Hitchens and the CIA couldn’t topple Chavez

In the flurry of unbalanced media attention given to the death of Hugo Chavez yesterday, Slate.com came out with maybe the biggest of the Empire’s billy clubs, re-publishing  a characteristically florid and hysterical piece by Chris Hitchens to defame the still warm body of the “controversial” Venezuelan president.

How very Slate-ish of them, resurrecting the late, great confusinator to pour scorn on an American enemy; from the man who boozily cheerled the invasion of Iraq while declaring Bush a “dolt.”

And how sad that Hitchens couldn’t favour Venezuela’s popular leader with such nuanced thinking. Not to mention how curious.

In Hitchens' flagrantly hypocritical and reality-challenged piece, written very stylishly in 2008, Chavez is a loon, conspiracy theorist, even a quasi-necrophile with “an idiotic weakness for spells and incantations, as well as many of the symptoms of paranoia and megalomania.”

Here’s mud in your eye, indeed, Hitch.

Happily, there are fairer obituaries out there for a man who—allowing for his faults—kept his promise to restore dignity to Venezuela’s poor.

Hugo Chavez also achieved what too many Latin American leaders, from Arbenz to Allende, couldn’t—he survived a Washington-backed right wing coup attempt, a story told in thrilling detail in the documentary, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

Maybe add a viewing to your slate, as it were.