Protecting the Chávez legacy

Yesterday we discussed a thoughtful piece by Jack Staples-Butler about the Western apologists for Venezuelan chavismo who helped Hugo Chávez gain (and regain) power – but who, as the thug’s misguided socialist project (now in the hands of his hapless successor, Nicolás Maduro) has led his country further and further into ruin, have run for the hills rather than face up to their share of moral responsibility for this colossal failure.

At the head of Staples-Butler’s list of unapologetic apologists is Owen Jones, who along with Members of Parliament Grahame Morris and Diane Abbott, Guardian columnist Seumas Milne, and the repulsive anti-Semite George Galloway, among others, served as official, and supposedly “independent,” observers of the 2012 election in which Chávez was re-elected. Of course, as Staples-Butler pointed out, “There was nothing remotely ‘independent’ about the observers – all were from the socialist left, all had expressed support for Chávez and most crucially, all were involved in some capacity with the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign.”

In an article written on the occasion of Chávez’s death in 2013, Jones recalled his fierce chavista partisanship and raised the possibility that some observers might consider him a “useful idiot.” Staples-Butler’s comment: no, he and his fellow British chavistas were not “useful idiots”; they were worse. Because they knew more about the reality of chavismo than a lot of Stalin’s “useful idiots” in Britain during the 1930s knew about the reality of Stalin’s USSR. Reporters like this website’s mascot, Walter Duranty of the New York Times, systematically whitewashed the reality of life in the Soviet Union, denying the reality of everything from the Holdomor to the Gulag. By contrast, observes Staples-Butler,

Human Rights Watch and other organisations provided overwhelming and easily-accessible evidence that Venezuela had during the 2000s become a dictatorship, a home to mass murder and political repression sliding towards economic and social collapse. This was or should have been self-evident to any journalist, politician or educated person who visited Venezuela even if they were under the chaperone of a tightly-managed official tour. Direct contact was not even necessary to know what was happening there. Nothing more than an Internet connection and a library card would provide the mountains of information collected on political and social conditions in the country which had not been produced by Venezuelan state media.

And yet they lied. Jones lied. “[W]hen it comes to his relationship with his opposition, Chávez has arguably been pretty lenient,” wrote Jones in 2012. Compared to whom? “The status of human rights deterioration and abuse in Venezuela,” maintains Staples-Butler, “was apparent and visible for the entirety of Chávez’s rule.” He cites reports by Human Rights Watch, which documented this reality year by year throughout the Chávez presidency. Also in 2012, Jones claimed that Venezuela’s “private media enjoys a 90 per cent audience share and routinely pump out vitriolic anti-Chávez propaganda.” Very early in Chávez’s presidency, there was some truth in this; before long, however, journalists were being harassed, newspaper offices attacked, and censorship imposed, with serious penalties put in place for those who dared defame the caudillo. Apropos of Chávez’s alliance with such regimes as that of the Castros in Cuba, Jones pointed to the fact that the U.S. and U.K., too, had cooperative relationships with autocratic governments; the difference Jones failed to acknowledge, however, was that Chávez’s ties to Cuba weren’t just strategic, but founded in his desire “to remake Venezuela in the image” of Cuba and other dictatorships.

At this point, Staples-Butler is an obscure law student. We can only hope that he’ll soon be as widely published, read, and cited as his mendacious, tyranny-loving co-patriot Owen Jones.

Posted on July 6, 2017June 5, 2017 by usefulstooges 1

Selective omission: the world according to Ben Norton

We’ve been acquainting ourselves with Salon’s enfant terrible Ben Norton, a cherubic-looking enemy of America, Israel, and “neoliberalism” and ardent enthusiast for Islam and socialist economics.

One of Norton’s trademark activities is unfairly besmirching those who tell the truth about the darker aspects of Islamic ideology. In March, he smeared Islam expert Frank Gaffney, calling him an “extremist” and “Islamophobe” and mocking him for his throughly legitimate pushback against efforts to impose sharia-based restrictions in the West.

Norton has also gone after Sam Harris, the neuroscientist and bestselling author who has become one of the public faces of secularism (and who is about fifty times smarter than Norton). Accusing Harris of “virulent anti-Muslim bigotry and anti-Arab racism” and labeling him a “fascist,” Norton didn’t bother to serve up anything resembling an argument to support these charges; he simply quoted a series of statements that Harris has made about the disturbing demographic trends in Europe, about the disturbing tenets of Islam, and about the disturbing views about women, gays, and individual liberties held by disturbingly large percentages of Western Muslims. Every single one of the statements made by Harris that Norton quoted was 100% factual; but for Harris to have cited these facts was, in Norton’s eyes, simply unacceptable, and proof positive of prejudice.

Gaffney and Harris aren’t the only people whose writings about Islam have led to their being maligned as bigots by Norton. He actually marked the first anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo massacre by assailing the magazine’s writers (presumably including the ones who had been savagely slaughtered by Muslims a year earlier) as “racist.”

hebdo — Emergency workers with one of the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre

In an article published shortly before Christmas of last year, Norton explained to Salon readers how “to argue with your racist, Islamophobic uncle at Christmas dinner.” The piece served up the usual dishonest CAIR-style apologetics while neatly avoiding any mention of sharia law – e.g., the death penalty for homosexuality and apostasy – and it concluded with a truly nonsensical statement: “at the end of the day, Americans are much more likely to be killed by cars, suicide, bees, wasps, and even furniture than they are by Muslims.” In another piece that appeared shortly after Christmas, Norton made essentially the same point, writing that “[m]ore Americans were killed in Christmas weekend storms this year than in Islamic extremist attacks since 9/11.”

Amitai-Etzioni-courtesy-sase.org_ — Amitai Etzioni

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) has criticized Norton more than once for the anti-Israeli and pro-Islamic terrorism tilt of his “reporting.” In February, citing an article in which Norton offered an “apparently deliberate” misreading of an op-ed by sociologist Amitai Etzioni, CAMERA accused him of displaying “a dazzling skepticism of information from Israeli sources alongside a great acceptance of unfounded anti-Israel conspiracy theories.” (For instance, Norton expressed doubts that Hezbollah stored weapons in private homes, a practice well documented by Human Rights Watch and other groups.) CAMERA also noted that Norton’s work was riddled with errors – among them dating Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights at 1967 instead of 1981.

In March, CAMERA slammed a Norton article headlined “Israeli airstrikes kill 2 Palestinian children in the besieged Gaza Strip,” complaining that Norton didn’t mention until the fifth paragraph that Israel’s strikes had come “in response to four Palestinian rocket attacks targeting Israel.” The article, CAMERA maintained, was replete with examples of “selective omission” that turned reality upside down, depicting Israel as the aggressor in the Gaza Strip and Hamas as the victims.

We’ll wind up this long march through Norton’s short career tomorrow.

Posted on July 20, 2016July 19, 2016 by usefulstooges 3

A peace prize for…Mugabe?

Zimababwe's President Robert Mugabe chants Zanu PF slogans with supporters gathered at the Harare International Conference Centre in Harare, Wednesday May 3, 2000. Mugabe launched the Zanu PF's election manifesto which bears the slogan "Land is the Economy and the Economy is Land". (AP Photo/Christine Nesbitt) — Robert Mugabe

Human Rights Watch has called his record “abysmal.” He kidnaps and beats journalists, steals foreign-aid money, and tortures and kills political opponents. He demonizes gays and whites. But, as we’ve seenpreviously on this website, Robert Mugabe has his share of admirers in the U.S. Current New York Mayor Bill de Blasio took part in a 2002 reception in his honor – this at a time when Mugabe, in one reporter’s words, “was already well into his campaign of terror and murder in Zimbabwe.” So did current New York State Assemblyman Charles Barron, a former Black Panther who actually organized the 2002 Mugabe tribute and who today still views Mugabe as a “shining example of an African leader.”

Now it’s clear that Mugabe has fans on the other side of the globe, too. In October, he was selected as this year’s winner of Confucius Peace Prize, which was cooked up five years ago as China’s answer to the Nobel Peace Prize after that distinction went to dissident writer Liu Xiaobo. The latter is still in prison in his homeland, being punished for the crime writing a pro-freedom manifesto.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu attends a meeting of indigenous communities in Caracas February 21, 2013. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins (VENEZUELA - Tags: POLITICS SOCIETY) — Rigoberta Menchú

Now, no prize is 100% reliable. The Nobel Peace Prize itself is well known for its highly spotty record. In his admirable history of the prizes, Jay Nordlinger notes that Betty Williams, who won in 1976, is no peacenik when it comes to George W. Bush, whom she’s expressed a desire to kill. Laureates Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Rigoberta Menchú, and Nelson Mandela were all fans of Castro; laureates Emily Greene Balch, Arthur Henderson, Linus Pauling, Séan MacBride, and (again) Mandela all praised the Soviet Union.

But the Confucius Prize, which purportedly exists to “promote world peace from an Eastern perspective,” makes the Norwegian Nobel committee look almost like a pantheon of infallible geniuses.

In 2011, the trophy went to none other than Vladimir Putin. As one observer, an ethnographer, documentary filmmaker, and writer named Jin Ge, noted, this award came along at precisely the moment when massive crowds were gathering in Moscow to protest against Putin. Why was Putin chosen to receive the peace prize? The Chinese explained: they admired his support for Muammar Qaddafi, his criticism of Western intervention in Libya, and his “iron wrist” response to Chechen independence activists.

“You might wonder,” wrote Jin Ge, “how ‘Iron Wrist,’ Putin, Qaddafi, and Peace fit together.” Jin explained: in the view of Communist Chinese officials, “War only happens between countries, violence against your own people does not count. To protect ‘sovereignty,’ killing is justified. Human suffering is a small prize to pay to achieve the goal of harmony, stability and unity.” As for Qaddafi: “Putin, Qaddafi and Confucius are in the same camp because they are perceived as anti-West. Since the West (together with Japan) is conceived as the archenemy of China, anything opposite of what they interpret as Western is good. If the West criticizes Putin and Qaddafi, then these two guys must be good.”

With these kind of criteria, who else has won the Confucius Peace Prize? We’ll get to that on Monday.

Posted on November 30, 2015October 25, 2015 by usefulstooges 2

Venezuela: a new assault on freedom

He studied sociology at Kenyon College and public policy at Harvard; after returning home to Venezuela, he was elected mayor of Chacao, one of the five political subdivisions of the city of Caracas. Twice during his eight-year tenure (2000-2008), Transparency International gave him awards for presiding over an honest and efficient municipal administration in a country otherwise rife with corruption, inefficiency, and lack of transparency. The City Mayors Foundation awarded him third place in its international World Mayors Commendation, calling him “a hands-on mayor as well as a national politician fighting for democratic openness and fairness in Venezuela.” When he completed his two terms as mayor, he had a 92% approval rating.

What stopped Leopoldo López from going on to a third term? Hugo Chávez. In 2008, citing manifestly trumped-up corruption charges, the government denied López and a number of other opposition politicians the right to run for office. Human Rights Watch, the Organization of American States, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) all took López’s side, calling his treatment undemocratic, but the chavistas held firm: they knew a serious threat to their rotten-to-the-core regime when they saw one.

López – young, handsome, passionate, eloquent, charismatic, and sharp as a tack – went on to become not just a leader but a symbol of his country’s democratic opposition. On February 18 of last year, after organizing and participating in a mass protest against the Chávez government, he was arrested on charges of “terrorism, murder, grievous bodily harm, public incitement, arson, damage to property, and conspiracy to commit crimes.” The charges were as patently illegitimate as the charge of corruption that kept him from running for elective office, and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights demanded his immediate release – to no avail.

He has been in prison ever since. During his incarceration, he has been showered with honors. Harvard gave him an award. So did the National Endowment for Democracy. In Spain, he won the Cádiz Cortes Ibero-American Freedom Prize. This June, Foreign Policy – which had already named him one of its “Leading Global Thinkers of 2014” – ran an article hailing him as “Venezuela’s Last Hope” and said he embodied “the change his country needs.” Polls show that in an electoral face-off for the presidency between López and the incumbent, Chávez protégé Nicolás Maduro, the vote would be 72% to 28%.

(Meanwhile The Nation, the flagship weekly of America’s far left and home base for the nation’s most egregious useful stooges, exhibited its usual contempt for freedom by deferentially interviewing a longtime chavista who was allowed to smear López in its pages as an “extreme right-winger,” “fanatical fascist,” and “ultra-super-reactionary.”)

vdheuvel12 — Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher and editor-in-chief of The Nation

The latest outrage came two days ago, on September 10. After a closed-door trial, López was sentenced to thirteen years and nine months in prison. Erika Guevara-Ross, Americas Director at Amnesty International, made her organization’s position clear: López, she said, is being punished for leading “an opposition party….He should have never been arbitrarily arrested or tried in the first place. He is a prisoner of conscience and must be released immediately and unconditionally.” José Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director at Human Rights Watch, called the case “a complete travesty of justice.” The Washington Post noted that in recent months U.S. diplomat Thomas A. Shannon Jr. had met with Maduro and other officials “to convey U.S. concern about the outcome of the López trial,” but obviously to no avail.

Innumerable Americans and Europeans root reflexively for Venezuelan socialism, having been beguiled into thinking that it embodies “liberal” or “progressive” values. If they had any decency, this latest cruel and cynical move against the ruling party’s #1 opponent would awaken them to the truth about Maduro’s monstrous regime. But don’t count on it. As history shows, useful stooges have a remarkable gift for preserving their own self-delusion.

Posted on September 12, 2015September 12, 2015 by usefulstooges 2

No gays, no Jews, no worries: NYU in Abu Dhabi

In a revealing 2008 New York magazine piece about NYU’s sellout to Abu Dhabi, Zvika Krieger quoted dopey NYU president John Sexton‘s blithe admission that students and faculty at NYU-Abu Dhabi would be subject to “the normal laws of that society” – for example, the UAE’s criminization of homosexuality and its ban on Israelis. As one NYU math professor, Sylvain Cappell, noted, “Israelis are gigantic figures in academic life, and if we held conferences in certain disciplines, it would be an embarrassment not to be able to have Israeli participation.” Krieger wondered “how the Jewish members of NYU’s board of trustees engaged the mental gymnastics necessary to process the U.A.E.’s disconcerting tolerance of anti-Semitism.”

Sexton, however, refused to see any problems here: “I would say to any student here that wants to go to the Abu Dhabi campus, ‘Go.’ Gay students, Israeli students, I refuse to think in those categories.” Never mind that the police and courts and prison authorities in the UAE do think in those categories. Mubarak Al Shamesi, Abu Dhabi’s education honcho, told Krieger that “NYU was aware of our local culture and rules and guidelines, and our policies on Israelis or homosexuality were clearly not a concern for them.”

This, as Krieger underscored, from a university that had been named the most gay-friendly in the United States.

Recently, Jim Sleeper, who teaches poli sci at Yale, wrote an article in which he expanded on Shaun Tan’s and Zvika Krieger’s criticism of Sexton. Noting that the campus of NYU-Abu Dhabi “is the product of a kleptocracy,” Sleeper pointed out that the compromises entered into by Sexton & co. “involve not just academic life but the virtual indentured servitude of thousands of laborers from Southeast Asia who have been imported to construct the campus.”

Nasser bin Ghaith, one of the five political activists pardoned by the United Arab Emirates, speaks to Reuters at his home in Dubai November 30, 2011. REUTERS/Nikhil Monteiro — Nasser bin Ghaith

Although NYU-Abu Dhabi is still a relatively new institution, it’s already been the locus of several major compromises. In 2011, Nasser bin Ghaith, who taught at the Sorbonne’s Abu Dhabi branch, was arrested and tried “for supporting democratic elections.” Human Rights Watch urged NYU and other UAE-based Western colleges to come to Bin Ghaith’s defense; but, as Jackson Diehl reported in the Washington Post,

NYU joined with the Sorbonne in throwing Bin Ghaith overboard. A Sorbonne statement said the university had “no authorized means to express an opinion” because the charges against the professor were “external to his academic activities.” NYU also declined to make a statement; a spokesman said it fell outside NYU’s “core mission.”

In 2012, Ursula Lindsey, a reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education, paid a visit to the NYU-Abu Dhabi campus. Among her observations: faculty members “use caution in broaching topics such as AIDS and prostitution; the status of migrant laborers; Israel and the Holocaust; and domestic politics and corruption. Any critical discussion of the Emirates’ ruling families is an obvious no-go zone.” In 2014, Matt J. Duffy, who had taught in the UAE, called NYU-Abu Dhabi’s “pledge of ‘academic freedom’ …essentially worthless because powerful figures [in the Emirates] can make arbitrary employment decisions with absolutely no recourse.”

Sleeper has cited the case of NYU American Studies professor Andrew Ross, who publicly “called attention to the labor abuses” in the UAE and who consequently was banned from Abu Dhabi in March of this year. That’s not all: “In the United States, Ross was followed by a private investigator; and a reporter who had worked with the New York Times on a story about the Abu Dhabi campus said that a representative of the United Arab Emirates had offered him payments to write more positively about the government.” Worst of all, “President Sexton’s handling of reports about those abuses and of NYU’s complicity in them are troubling.” Quelle surprise!

No, NYU isn’t the only university to engage in this kind of whoring. But at least some other whores are honest about what they’re doing. “Sexton,” wrote Krieger,

is unwilling to concede that he is in thrall to petrodollars. But the Sorbonne, which opened a campus in Abu Dhabi in 2006, is quite open about having sold itself to the highest bidder. “It is a pity, but I must say that we are only in Abu Dhabi because Abu Dhabi proposed to pay for all of our expenses,” says Daniel Balland, director-general of the Sorbonne in Abu Dhabi. “If we got the same offer from Doha or Cairo, we probably would have said yes, too.”

Posted on August 11, 2015August 11, 2015 by usefulstooges 4

Meet Venezuela’s not-so-very-oppositional “opposition” leader

Over the last few days we’ve been looking at some of Venezuela’s slimier chavistas. But let’s not leave the impression that all the unsavory public figures in that country are members of the ruling party. Not officially, anyway.

Take Henry Lisandro Ramos Allup, a lawyer who is Secretary General of Acción Democrática, Venezuela’s largest opposition party, and who represents Venezuela in the Latin American Parliament. Acción Democrática isn’t a conservative or classical liberal party; like Chávez‘s PSUV, it’s a left-wing party. Indeed, Ramos is currently Vice President of the Socialist International. And although he’s purportedly a leader of the opposition to Maduro’s government, he’s very – shall we say – diplomatic when discussing the ruling party. He believes, he says, not in confrontation but in respectful discussion and debate.

The man he does criticize – and very fiercely, at that – is his fellow opposition leader, Léopoldo López. Founder of the pro-freedom party Voluntad Popular, López is Venezuela’s most admired politician. He’s been in prison since February of last year, having been locked up by Maduro because he loudly and eloquently assailed the regime’s systematic violation of basic freedoms and human rights. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other such groups have called for López‘s immediate release; Ramos, however, has persisted in slamming him even while he’s been in the slammer, condemning his spirited approach as counterproductive and divisive. The irony here, of course, is that Ramos’s cheap, cowardly swipes at López are nothing if not divisive for the Venezuelan opposition. This past February, when leaders from a range of opposition parties took part in a demonstration protesting López‘s continued imprisonment, Ramos stayed away, as did his cronies from Acción Democrática. How could that be interpreted, other than as a tacit endorsement of the chavista practice of putting its real opponents behind bars?

Why is Ramos so hostile to López? One reason is doubtless sheer envy. A 2006 cable, written by U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela William R. Brownfield and later made public by Wikileaks, described Ramos as a “crude” and “abrasive” figure whose “repellent” personality and lack of imagination made him a burden to his own party. López, by contrast, is unusually intelligent, articulate, and attractive – a stirring, courageous figure whose vigorous denunciations of the oppressive and fiscally disastrous Maduro regime have struck a chord among millions of increasingly fed-up Venezuelans.

But another reason for Ramos’s criticism of López, we suspect, is that Ramos, a socialist, isn’t really all that opposed to the ideology of the Maduro regime. On the contrary, there’s ample evidence that Ramos has intimate and profitable links to what one of his critics has called “the revolution’s most unsavory characters.” Welcome, then, to Venezuela, where even the head of the largest opposition party is uncomfortably close to being a chavista stooge himself.

Posted on July 28, 2015July 21, 2015 by usefulstooges 2

Following Lanny Davis’s slime trail

Yesterday we started following the slime trail of lowlife Lanny Davis, whose longtime role as shameless spinmeister to the Clinton family, it turns out, is the less unsavory of his two main jobs. The other: shilling for some of the world’s most nefarious despots.

Among Davis’s clients: Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbsogo, dictator of Equatorial Guinea. In April 2010, Obiang, who has ruled Equatorial Guinea with an iron fist since a 1979 coup, hired him for a million bucks a year (plus expenses) – allegedly to help formulate and introduce human-rights reforms but really, it soon became clear, to help whitewash the Obiang regime in the international media. Justin Elliott, who has done a yeoman’s job of covering – and exposing – Davis in Salon, wrote in January 2011 that Davis had made a “direct promise” to “a reporter” (presumably Elliott himself) “that political prisoners in Equatorial Guinea would be released”; Elliott noted that no such release had yet taken place.

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama pose for a photo during a reception at the Metropolitan Museum in New York with, H.E. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo President of the Republic of Equatorial Guinea and his wife, Mrs. Constancia Mangue de Obiang, Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson) This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, or promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House. — Obiang and wife with the Obamas

What kind of government does Obiang run? Well, according to a 2010 report by the U.S. State Department, Obiang’s regime was guilty of “unlawful killings…torture of detainees and prisoners…life-threatening conditions in prisons…arbitrary arrest, detention and incommunicado detention…restrictions on freedoms of speech, press, assembly…violence and discrimination against women,” among many other offenses.

Elliott, citing this litany of transgressions, additionally pointed out that according to Human Rights Watch, Obiang’s son Teodorin had actually “spent more on luxury goods during 2004-2007 than the government’s 2005 budget for education.” In 2012, a World Policy Review article reported that Obiang had “killed or expelled more than one third” of his country’s population; that under him and his immediate predecessor – who was also his uncle, and whom he eventually overthrew and executed – the country “became known as the ‘Auschwitz of Africa,’” in which more people were killed by them, proportionally speaking, than were killed by the Nazis in all of Europe; and that under Obiang’s family of “kleptocrats,” who’ve “devoted three decades to siphoning off Equatorial Guinea’s wealth into their pockets,” the great majority of the nation’s people have not only been terrorized but impoverished.

None of which, apparently, deterred Davis from taking money from this creep to help polish his international image.

Then there’s Laurent Gbagbo, President of Cote D’Ivoire since the year 2000. After losing his bid for re-election in late 2010, the brutally dictatorial Gbagbo refused to leave office; instead, to quote Elliott, he “mount[ed] a campaign of organized violence against the opposition.” Gbagbo did something else, too: he hired Lanny Davis. So while this autocrat’s henchmen were busy murdering some members of the opposition and “disappearing” others (who were presumably dispatched by death squads), Davis got to work “assuring the American press that his client, Gbagbo, opposed violence.” And while the UN was formally accusing Gbagbo of committing “massive” human-rights violations, Davis was on CNN insisting that Gbagbo, innocent as a lamb, was calling on the legitimate winner of the election, Alassane Ouattara, “to join him on [sic] putting the arms down” and holding talks.

Alas for Davis, the Gbagbo gig didn’t last long: his paymaster was soon deposed, arrested, and charged by the International Criminal Court with murder, rape, persecution, and “other inhuman acts.” All told, Davis’s job with Gbagbo lasted only 12 days: he registered as a foreign agent for Ivory Coast on December 17, 2010, and resigned on December 29.

lanny-davis-and-hillary-clinton — Lanny Davis, Hillary Clinton

The lesson, we suppose, being that even the most unprincipled and hardest-working hustler can’t win ’em all. But you’ve got to hand it to Davis: he never allows himself to be discouraged by adversity. Or, for that matter, by shame, or conscience, or remorse. By all indications, these concepts aren’t even on his radar. No, he’s always ready, it seems, to go out there in the media one more time and get to work defending the indefensible.

Well, these days he’s hard at work defending the Clintons. Given the alternative, that’s probably a cause for celebration.

Posted on July 2, 2015June 8, 2015 by usefulstooges 1

The dictators’ D.C. spinmeister

Do you ever get tired of cleaning up after the Clintons?” Fox News host Chris Wallace asked Lanny Davis back in March after the latter – a longtime spinmeister for Bill and Hillary – had spent over nine minutes on Wallace’s show, Fox News Sunday, trying to work his slippery magic on their behalf yet again, this time in regard to the matter of Ms. Clinton’s private e-mail server.

Davis, who worked as a “special counsel” in the Clinton White House, went on afterwards to become a familiar name and face in the media, writing for places like the Huffington Post and appearing frequently as a talking head on the cable news networks. But since the beginning of this year he’s been even more visible than usual, rushing from one TV interview to another to practice his shifty craft. The topic at hand, on each occasion, was supposedly Hillary’s e-mails, but Davis spent the bulk of his camera time skillfully changing the subject, talking out the clock, singing the Clintons’ praises, casting aspersions on his interviewers, and insisting over and over, in direct contravention of the obvious facts, that “you’re not letting me finish.” For all his patently strenuous efforts, he cannot have convinced a single soul: even Salon, a website that tends to be reflexively sympathetic to Democratic politicians, dismissed him a “well-known spinster…whom no one trusts” and who “endear[s] precisely zero people to Hillary Clinton.”

But get a load of this: the shrewd, wily character who went on TV day and night to serve up transparent prevarications on behalf of Ms. Clinton is only one side of Lanny Davis. In point of fact, he’s a highly multifaceted personality; the slimy spinmeister, the Artful Dodger, is only one side of him.

Unfortunately, as it turns out, it’s the more attractive side.

For when he’s not being elusive and duplicitous on behalf of the Juan and Eva Perón of Chappaqua, Davis works as an inside-the-Beltway lobbyist for a list of foreign clients so unsavory that the whole thing reads like some kind of bad joke. In a May 2012 piece in the Atlantic, Jon Lovett called him “a pitchman for warlords” who “carr[ied] the Devil’s water in Washington,” and said that he “represents all that is wrong with politics today.” “The last time we heard from Lanny Davis,” began an August 2013 item in the New Republic by Isaac Chotiner, “he was doing what he does best: representing a dictator.”

Details tomorrow.

Posted on July 1, 2015June 16, 2015 by usefulstooges 3

Tyrant Mugabe’s American buddies

Yesterday, we looked at hedge funder Daniel Och‘s “intimate, mutually profitable, and utterly unconscionable transactions with some of the most brutal tyrants of our time” – among them Zimbabwean strongman Robert Mugabe. Now 91 years old, Mugabe is the longest-lasting head of state in Africa, and arguably the worst. Banned from traveling to the U.S. and EU, he has a human-rights record that Human Rights Watch has called “abysmal.” Under his regime, journalists are routinely kidnapped and beaten, and aid money is stolen in massive amounts. During the 2008 election campaign, Mugabe’s hirelings killed at least 200 opposition supporters and tortured around 5,000 of them. Mugabe routinely demonizes gay people, whom he’s threatened to punish with beheading, and may well be the most openly racist current leader of any nation on earth, depriving his country’s white citizens of property and due process for no other reason than their skin color. Every international human-rights group agrees: this man is a menace, a monster.

A man holds up d 200 million and 500 million Zimbabwe dollar notes in the capital Harare December 12, 2008. REUTERS/Philimon Bulawayo — Zimbabwean banknotes for 200 million and 500 million dollars, now worth less than one U.S. cent.

And he’s an abominable steward of his country’s economy, too: a couple of weeks ago his government discarded its “virtually worthless” currency and allowed citizens to exchange every 250 trillion Zimbabwean dollars they held for one U.S. dollar.

As we’ve seen, these inconvenient truths haven’t kept Daniel Och from doing (shady) business with Mugabe. And Och, as it turns out, is far from the only friend, fan, or enabler that Mugabe has in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Recently, the San Francisco Bay View, which identifies itself as a “National Black Newspaper,” published a fulsome tribute to Mugabe by one Obi Egbuna Jr., who identifies himself as a U.S.-based journalist and as a member of something called the Zimbabwe-Cuba Friendship Association. “Mugabe’s pan-Africanist and internationalist vision,” Egbuna wrote, “makes him connect with Africans at home and abroad.” Describing Mugabe as a hero of “freedom-loving people” who “has spent a lifetime fighting for the empowerment of the African woman,” Egbuna gushed that the president’s “best attributes” include “his loyalty to the poor and dispossessed in not only Zimbabwe but among Africans everywhere.”

It’s not only relatively obscure characters like Egbuna who have given Mugabe props. Take Bill de Blasio, the current mayor of New York City, who, back in 2002, while serving in New York’s City Council, attended a reception welcoming the tyrant to City Hall and was present when the man delivered a speech in the council’s chamber – an honor that no legislative body in a democratic nation should ever have accorded to such a thug. After all, as New York Times reporter Clyde Haberman later observed, Mugabe, by 2002, was already “a certified human rights disaster.” Another journalist, Joel B. Pollak, has put it this way: “By the time Robert Mugabe visited New York’s City Hall in 2002, he was already well into his campaign of terror and murder in Zimbabwe. His regime was torturing its opponents brutally…and cracking down on the media as it pushed white farmers off their land, destroying the country’s economy and plunging it into hyperinflation and starvation.” But de Blasio celebrated him.

More about this unconscionable act tomorrow.

Posted on June 24, 2015June 12, 2015 by usefulstooges 2

Shilling for Maduro

Today the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion.” That’s Sean Penn, Oscar-winning actor, political activist, and ex-spouse of Madonna, upon hearing the news of Hugo Chávez’s death. “I lost a friend I was blessed to have,” Penn lamented, adding that “Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of vice president Maduro.”

£¨·¨ÐÂ£©£¨1£©²éÎ¤Ë¹Óë¼ÍÂ¼Æ¬µ¼ÑÝÄ¦¶û¼ûÃæ — Hugo Chávez, Michael Moore

On the same occasion, Michael Moore tweeted: “Hugo Chávez declared the oil belonged 2 the ppl. He used the oil $ 2 eliminate 75% of extreme poverty, provide free health & education 4 all. That made him dangerous. US approved of a coup to overthrow him even though he was a democratically-elected president.”

We’ve already surveyed Oliver Stone‘s tributes to Chávez, which included not only any number of embarrassingly fulsome press releases but two classic examples of film agitprop. But in addition to this trio of ill-informed Hollywood stooges (whose equally deplorable Fidel fandom we’ve previously covered), the putatively humble-yet-heroic Hugo – and his less colorful but equally vile successor, Nicolás Maduro – have also accumulated praise from people who actually should know better.

One of them is ex-Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II – JFK’s nephew; Bobby and Ethel’s oldest son – who today runs a green-oriented nonprofit called Citizens Energy. In February 2014, under the headline “A Kennedy Shills for Maduro,” Sohrab Ahmari reported in the Wall Street Journal that TV ads for Citizens Energy were praising Maduro for providing free heating fuel to underprivileged Bay Staters. Calling the commercials “an almost-perfect exercise in demagoguery,” Ahmari described one of them as follows:

“The cold can overwhelm even the toughest amongst us,” Mr. Kennedy says, as a sad piano tune plays and images of children with cancer fill the screen. “The heating bills just keep piling on,” Mr. Kennedy goes on, and we see him hugging a young cancer survivor, who smiles but also seems slightly uncomfortable. Then, following a burst of upbeat music, Mr. Kennedy says: “The people of Venezuela and President Maduro are once again . . . the only country to answer our call to provide heating assistance to the poor.”

As Ahmari noted, the ads didn’t mention such “other hallmarks of the Maduro regime” as outrageous corruption, soaring crime, shortages of food and medicine, and the arrest of opposition leader Leopoldo López. “Given the situation at home,” Ahmari summed up, “Maduro must be thrilled that he can count on useful idiots like Joe Kennedy to sing his praises to the world.”

Then there’s Belén Fernández, who in February 2014 published an article at the Al Jazeera website that was one long sneer at the “absurd hysterics that typify the Venezuelan opposition,” a.k.a. the “doom-and-gloom squawking of the elite.” Fernández’s case in point: a Caracas blogger, Emiliana Duarte, who’d written about having to visit ten different supermarkets in order to find all the ingredients she needed to bake a cake.

Duarte’s account nicely illustrated the impact of chronic shortages on everyday Venezuelan life; but for Fernández, it was nothing but an “elite right-wing…sob story” and a “less than persuasive evidence of the supposedly brutal tyranny under which Duarte and her socioeconomic cohorts are forced to reside.” Of course, the story wasn’t intended to provide evidence of brutal tyranny but of economic mismanagement; in any event, Fernández had nothing to counter it with but mockery. For her, plainly, any criticism of any aspect of chavismo is nothing but elitist treason, motivated by a longing for (as she put it) “the deliverance of Venezuela into the imperial [American] embrace.”

Or take “social-justice” activist Dan Kovalik, who has called Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution “the most benevolent revolution in history.” In a piece that ran at Huffington Post on February 20, 2014, Kovalik spun chavismo this way: it’s benefited “the very poor and those of darker skin tone,” so if the U.S. government and media smear Venezuela as a “basket case” and condemn its “alleged lack of democracy,” it’s because they’re racists who “openly side with the white, wealthy elite – such as Kenyon and Harvard trained right wing leader Leopoldo López.”

Kovalik’s mention of López was, alas, not well-timed: two days before Kovalik’s article appeared, López was put under arrest; he’s been behind bars ever since, and both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch consider him a political prisoner. (HRW described his detention as exemplary of “the classic tactics of an authoritarian regime.”)

venezuela_food_line — Venezuelans waiting in line outside a supermarket

As for the Venezuelan economy, Kovalik called “claims of ‘economic collapse’…quite exaggerated,” citing as evidence import and export figures that proved nothing. (The shortages went unmentioned.) And the country’s high level of violence? Kovalik attributed it – with a straight face – to opposition agitators, and even maintained that “the Venezuelan government has exercised great restraint” in its response to that violence.

venezuela_supermarket_empty_shelves — Empty shelves in a Venezuelan supermarket

Sheer fiction. Kovalik’s piece made one thing clear. For him, as for Fernández, any criticism of chavismo, however legitimate, should be recognized as part of a perfidious effort to “reverse” Venezuela’s “liberation” from U.S. domination – and, consequently, even the most deceitful response to such criticism is justifiable as a blow for the glorious revolution.

Oh, and by the way: in April, 2015, the Fusion website reported that some hotels in Venezuela were now asking foreign tourists to bring their own toilet paper and other basic supplies. “For over a year,” lamented one hotelier, “we haven’t had toilet paper, soap, any kind of milk, coffee or sugar. So we have to tell our guests to come prepared.” Another hotel owner admitted that in all good conscience, she couldn’t advise visitors from abroad to come to Venezuela: “As soon as they get off the plane they will encounter risks.”

Welcome to “liberation,” chavista style.

venezuela-food-lines — More Venezuelans queuing up to buy groceries

Posted on May 26, 2015May 20, 2015 by usefulstooges 8

Useful Stooges