rice on chavez

last week, during coverage of the pat robertson story, one tv station—i think it must've been cnn, but i confess i'm not certain—played a short clip of condi rice talking about hugo chavez, which seemed about as relevant to the robertson story as a cherry pie recipe would be in a biography of george washington.

rice was shown describing venezuela under chavez as undemocratic.

huh? i thought she was supposed to be so brilliant. chavez was elected twice and survived a recall referendum. what could be more democratic?

to be fair, after chavez' first election a constituent assembly rewrote the constitution and replaced the elected congress with an assembly of chavez allies.

that makes the government more than a little autocratic and gives chavez' a lot of power, but "undemocratic" isn't the word for it: the people subsequently reelected chavez and defeated the recall attempted by his enemies. that's democratic.

it might be argued that the people support him only because he, in effect, bought their votes by promising to share the country's oil profits with the poor.

maybe there's something to that, but no more than if he'd promised to give back the government surplus thru tax cuts.

besides, almost the only enemies chavez has inside venezuela are those rich folk that want the poor to stay poor.