Pat Robertson And (Sigh) Media Double-Standards

The Corner's Stephen Spruiell:

Your World Today is covering Pat Robertson's comment that the U.S. should assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as if Dick Cheney had said it. CNN just aired a segment live from Havana and is promising more to come this hour. ... I'm not trying to defend Pat Robertson, but there's a totally different standard for conservatives who say crazy things than liberals -- especially anti-war liberals -- who do.

True.

And to be honest, this just feels like ginned-up slow-news-month August outrage to me-- and conservative bloggers, trying to show they're respectable, are falling over themselves to condemn Robertson.

I have no use for Robertson myself. But last time I checked, asssassination was something we as a country were not necessarily adverse to in an extreme situation. We certainly wouldn't shy away from knocking off Kim Jong Il if we had a shot (and thought it was likely to produce a change in that regime's behavior, for the better).

Hugo Chavez is an anti-American, terrorist-supporting thug who continues to rule against the public's wishes, but intimidating the opposition and engaging in wholesale election fraud. He is a tyrant who cannot simply be voted out of office; he will not permit that.

I think Robertson was engaging a little too freely in irresponsible tough-guy talk which ultimately gives this paranoid princeling more reason to be paranoid, but there's few Americans, even in the State Department, who would weep if the Venezuelans themselves took this bastard out of office forcibly, or even lethally.

Should we be involved? Almost certainly not. He's not that much of a threat to us that we should take the great risk of engaging in or assisting in the assassination of the "leader" of a South American state, especially with our history of meddling their (and South Americans understandable suspicious about our use of power).

But the media and the left are trumping this fairly minor off-the-cuff bit of James Bond fantasization into some major story exposing the right as crackpots.

Meanwhile, Saint Cindy, Our Lady of Perpetual Publicity, speaks at a Lynne Stewart rally which asks the question "Should we support the Iraqi resistance?" and that information is virtually embargoed.

posted by Ace at 10:45 AM

| Access Comments