Failed Hit

I sometimes think journalists should write more about the stories we wind up not writing. In a slow moment, for example, I thought I'd click over to The Nation to see if they'd published something embarrassing about Castro that I could flag to try to regain my mainstream credibility. Instead, I wound up reading this:

Conversely, if [Hugo] Chávez is such a democrat, why has he embraced Fidel Castro--a full-fledged authoritarian who, for decades, imprisoned his critics and quashed internal dissent--as his mentor and model? Why has he aggressively undermined the independence of the Venezuelan judiciary and concentrated power so heavily in the president's office? And why, most recently, did he use the referendum to seek sweeping powers to suspend due process rights in times of emergency?

What follows is a long and nuanced discussion of the situation in Venezuela that puts the whole thing into much more context than I'd seen previous in a magazine article.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/02/failed-hit/48722/