The Colombian House of Representatives has approved a referendum to ask for a constitutional amendment allowing a third presidential candidacy for Colombia’s president Alvaro Uribe. This is a very bad thing, as I’ve written before, but at least they voted, and no one had to be exiled.

Image by the Center for American Progress, used with a Creative Commons license

This one analyzes Obama’s stance on Honduras, not Hillary’s.

Hillary Clinton is considering whether to call the events of June 28 in Honduras a “military coup”. Such a designation would mean automatic denial of US aid. Her reticence in doing so earlier shows just how debatable the situation is. A full two months have come and gone since the events.

A friend of mine sent me a link to an article explaining the US State Department’s coup lexical crisis. It seems the dictionary hasn’t been much help. The article is much clearer than my abortive attempts to explain the situation, and deserves your time, please read it

It’s worth remembering that it was Chávez and Zelaya, on June 25, who used the word “coup” to describe the Honduran Supreme Court and Congress’s decision to call Zelaya’s proposed referendum “unconstitutional” and “illegal”.

There were even full articles and videos (1, 2, 3) with the heading “Honduras coup” two days before Zelaya was removed, on June 25, from Telesur, El Universal (Venezuela) and Venezolana de Television. Hugo Chávez later admitted to have infitrated CNN years ago, and with Krupskaia Alis, an ex-employee of Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista regime as CNN’s Honduran correspondent, it was easy to lie to the world.

Consider this excerpt form Hitler’s Mein Kampf:

“the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.”

I wonder if we’d find a copy of Mein Kampf in Chávez’s library, heavily annotated and stained from being in prison. Hitler and he were both imprisoned from failed attempts of gaining power through a coup. Their shared experience would naturally suggest the book to Chávez.

Consider also this quote, attributed to Lenin, that “A lie, told often enough, becomes the truth.” Chávez is using both these techniques liberally.

We need to extricate the lies from our minds, and expose them to the world. The danger of this is to create so much repetition, that people don’t care anymore. But continual exposure to the truth will set us free.

Image by John Keogh, used with a Creative Commons license