In the 1980s the Washington Post honed an editorial page style to attack the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua that involved complex and convoluted editorials weaving half truths, total lies, innuendo, and unsupported speculation. These editorials were impossible to respond to with letters to the editor limited to 200 words. The “big lie” strategy is effective because to respond with the truth takes even more words than the original lie.
The Washington Post is now using the “big lie” strategy against the Bolivarian process in Venezuela and its democratically elected president Hugo Chavez. An editorial on August 17, 2007 is a textbook example of this strategy. It is entitled “Cash-and-Carry Rule” with a sub heading “Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez cements his autocracy with petrodollars and another push for ‘reform.’”
The US Venezuela Solidarity Network offers this sentence by sentence deconstruction of the Washington Post editorial as a public service to educate serious readers on important issues of US-Venezuela relations and the campaign to derail the process in Venezuela to use its oil wealth for the benefit of its poor majority.
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