Opposition lunatics threaten VHeadline.com staffers with BS propaganda

www.vheadline.com Posted: Sunday, February 09, 2003 - 1:22:38 PM By: Roy S. Carson

As if it were not enough for them to SPAM major media outlets in North America and around the world with a barrage of propagandistic distortions of what's really happening in Venezuela, opposition lunatics have turned their troubled minds on attacking VHeadline.com as the Internet's leading English-language source of independent news & views about Venezuela.

Responding to a reasonable request from VHeadline.com to stop peddling obvious untruths in a flurry of emails, we received an indignant response from self-styled "Venezuelan citizen and writer"  Marianella Febres-Cordero, using an appropriately illustrative handle lunaticaa@cantv.net expressing her venom over our use of the word 'bullshit' ... a fair and accurate description of the untruths that she and her cohorts are attempting top foist on the outside world.

Asserting (untruthfully) that we had blocked her "friend", Febres-Cordero says the original letter-writer had sent us a "cry of help for Venezuela:

"...her answer is that this bullshit has the color of the oil you consume. She is a very brave woman, who like many women in Venezuela, wants to live in a country that has the freedoms that you enjoy and has fought this 'regime' with fierce determination. This is a very tiring fight against a tyrant who poses as a democratic President but is no more than a hoodlum who has broken and raped every law in the democratic book. I certainly did not vote for him but millions of people that did have repented because he was a deception (for them, I always knew what he was). If he should happen in your country and believe: anything is possible! you would do anything to try to oust him like we are trying very hard to do. This cry for help is legitimate. It comes from the bottom of our hearts and souls because we are horrified of our future. We love our country, we want to live here with our children and the children of our children. I hope Sir or Ms. that you never have to go through what we are going through at the moment in Venezuela and I hope that if you cry out for help people out there don't call you a bullshitter."

Let's examine the background of what has happened:

VHeadline.com is bombarded on a daily if not hourly basis with a plethora of messages from all sides of Venezuela's political panorama ... and this on top of a constant flow of hackers' attempts to introduce computer viruses into our system to do untold damage.  Thankfully our firewall has prevented all sabotage attempts to date.  Behind the scenes this weekend, organizations such as Resistencia Miami (where else?) are exhorting their deluded fanatics to deluge us with more of their BS propaganda.

A fairly large percentage of the letters we receive can immediately be binned as coming from sorry souls whose capacity to string something meaningful into words devolves into hatred and bigotry worthy of a member of the Klu Klux Klan in the deep deep South or an Ulster Protestant hardliner on a visit to the Vatican.

• The delete button works overtime but we do get occasional pearls representing both sides, which invariably find their way into electronic print in our Letters section.

This last weekend, however, the opposition propagandists went into overdrive stringing their hype onto a very fragile thread of a municipal inspector who happened to pass by a building where suspicious activities were going on.  The fact that the lady official was a close relative to the Executive Vice President bears little or no relation to the subject but was the cherry on the cake for Globovision reporters bristling to get out of the starting gate on yet another opportunity to slam the government.

Imagine the same situation in downtown Parishville.  Let's say a St. Lawrence County dog catcher noticed something suspicious going on inside a building late at night when most folks would be safely tucked up in bed, or perhaps watching a late night TV show.  Let's say he sees a lot of luxury automobiles parked close by and hears the sounds of ribaldry from within ... an illegal gambling den, perhaps.  Who knows?  Perhaps with excessive zeal, he goes into the building and is met by a burly bouncer.  He shows his ID as the county dog catcher and asks what's going on.  The bouncer does his business and bounces the dog catcher right back out on the street, hurling voice words of abuse in an easily identifiable rejection of the proper inquiry.

Let's take it a stage further:  What would/should the county dog catcher do after he's picked himself up from the sidewalk and readjusted his collar and the seat of his pants?  My immediate thought is that he would get on his cellular phone to report the incident to law enforcement officers who would come to the rescue?  The cops would come, the bouncer might try the same 'attitude' with them, but he would swiftly find himself and any of his supporters behind bars waiting for an appearance before the night judge or an overnight in the cells with a court appearance and a fine to follow.

But that's where reality ends. 

We're not talking about Parishville in New York State.  The allusion was to Sucre County in Miranda State, Caracas - Venezuela.  Our 'dog catcher' translates as municipal officer Maria Francia Rojas and she suddenly finds herself in an opposition wheelspin worthy of a high-speed 4WD on a dirt track.  Talk about hype.  Calling for law enforcement back-up, Rojas set in motion an opposition propaganda dream-scenario with three car-loads of police officers arriving to "rescue the damsel in distress."

But woops, the incident scene was quickly identified as where the opposition was hiding voting papers collected last Sunday and since, purporting to be a democratic referendum on President Hugo Chavez Frias' continued rule.

Credit Globovision's rapid response ENG team with speed as they sped to the action-camera location with live video footage of an 'international incident' vying for the airwaves with headline importance of an already begun Iraq War bombardment.

And rightly so, the story fizzled out as it became patently clear that the bouncer should properly have told the municipal 'dog catcher' what was indeed going on.  It could have ended without a mention given such circumstances, but...

We have to remember that this is Caracas in the year 2003.  Little incidents can be blown out of all proportion ... and they were!

Within hours we were bombarded with email messages claiming that President Hugo Chavez Frias had himself ordered a raid on the opposition voting list HQ, that Chavez-controlled police had attempted to seize the documents and that they had only been saved through the prompt reaction of 'neighbors' ... a.k.a. opposition thugs.  The emails were peppered with obvious lies and distortions as though we at VHeadline.com had not been aware of what was going on, with our own reporters covering the breaking story and evaluating its newsworthiness.

The incident in itself was NOT newsworthy, but the opposition distortion of events that followed IS news.

It's the reality of what's happening in Venezuela each and every day as the opposition continues to follow the path of anti-constitutionalism in a complete and utter rejection of anything and everything that has to do with Democracy as it is known to the outside, civilized world.

Sad, sad, sad!