Point: Chavez apparently respects his constitution.

Anyone willing to overthrow a democratically elected government through military force has an odd way of showing “respect”.

It sounds more like you are implying that Chavez is like Rudi or is Rudi like Chavez? Measuring Bush against either of the two is like trying to measure fresh cow plop with a micrometer.

It is also important to remember that much of what passes for information about Chávez comes to us through the privately owned media of Venezuela, which are uniformly opposed to the Chávez government.

A lot of the information I get about Chavez comes from relatives who live in Venezuela and actually see the effects of Chavez’s so-called “Bolivarian Revolution”. He may talk a good game about helping the poor, but he’s too busy bitching about the United States and consolidating power to actually address the problems he’s promising to solve.

Our involvement in Latin America has been little more than one subversion of democracy after another (usually involving horrible violence carried out directly or by proxy).

Speaking of subversions of democracy, you know your buddy Chavez led a military coup against a democratically elected government, right?

That our corporate media would simplify the proposals to amend the Venezuelan constitution as a Chávez power grab says more about the ideological intent of our media than it does about Chávez and what he represents.

Since when does Human Rights Watch count as “corporate media”? Also, I find it funny that you decry “corporatist” propaganda by linking to a site that’s little more than pro-Chavez propaganda. The “analysis” found on the site’s Bolivarian Project has pro-government spin that would make Fox News blush.

The echoing attempts by our own corporate media to portray Chávez as a dictator betray more than just their laziness. If one understands Latin American history, then one understands that the elite of the U.S. have long believed our southern neighbors to be little more than raw materials to be exploited for our rapacious economic consumption. Our involvement in Latin America has been little more than one subversion of democracy after another (usually involving horrible violence carried out directly or by proxy). That our corporate media would simplify the proposals to amend the Venezuelan constitution as a Chávez power grab says more about the ideological intent of our media than it does about Chávez and what he represents.

(Good summary of the actual proposals– as opposed to the corporatist propaganda– can be found here.)