Demagoguery 101

I know it’s pointless to point out what an utter whack job and hypocrite Pat Robertson is for recently stating that Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez should be assassinated (see, according to Robertson, it would be so much easier and simpler to just go kill him than to start another war, since, well, gosh, he poses a threat to us, doesn’t he?…curious words from a “man of God”). It’s also a bit of a waste of time because Atrios and Media Matters for America have been all over this already in typically expert fashion.

However, in his statement, Robertson recalled one of my pet peeves when he said this:

... This is in our sphere of influence, so we can't let this happen. We have the Monroe Doctrine, we have other doctrines that we have announced. And without question, this is a dangerous enemy to our south, controlling a huge pool of oil, that could hurt us very badly.

This Wikipedia link gives the proper background on what Robertson is referring to.

As you can read from the link, the Doctrine was stated by our fifth President, James Monroe, in a response to further attempted colonization of our new country by European powers. And actually, the idea for the Doctrine didn’t even come from Monroe, but from John Quincy Adams, Monroe’s secretary of state who would succeed Monroe as president. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison wanted Monroe to side with England, but Adams was worried about Russian intervention also (having served as a foreign secretary in that country back then) as well as Mexico, which was a much more powerful country back then. Adams said we should basically just tell everybody to mind their own business, and we would do the same in their affairs, not seeing the sense in making permanent allegiances with anyone (though we were buds, usually, with the British Navy for all the years of their dominance).

To further clarify what Robertson was trying to say (spending WAY too much time trying to make sense of the words of a crazy person, but what are you gonna do?), I should point out that he was, in fact, referring to the Roosevelt Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, which stated that we have “the right to intervene in Latin American affairs.” However, that was reversed by the Clark Memorandum of 1930, which stated that we had no right to use military force against those nations.

Of course (and you can file this under the “law of unintended consequences”), our government has been supporting all manner of interventions in Central America and the Caribbean region for decades "on the sly" to abide by the Clark legal requirement (also noted in the surprisingly up-to-date Wikipedia article, with aiding the Contras in Nicaragua as well as guerillas in El Salvador as some of the most notorious examples).

So, let’s review:

1) By referring to the Monroe Doctrine, Robertson is recalling something from an entirely different context and point in our country’s history when we were trying to establish ourselves and keep other countries from taking us over.
2) He’s really referring to the Roosevelt Corollary, which was invalidated by the Clark Memorandum anyway.
3) He at least could be discrete enough to keep his mouth shut and pay someone in Venezuela to pop Chavez if he wanted to, since the Clark Memorandum never said anything about that (e.g., didn’t foresee all of the CIA antics to get rid of Fidel Castro, who nobody likes anyway, though you can’t just violate a country’s sovereignty whenever you feel like it, a lesson Bushco obviously never learned)

Oh, and one more thing. I seem to recall a great deal of outrage, and rightly so, among most of the somewhat civilized and developed world when the Islamist crazies issued the fatwa on Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses. Well, doesn’t this qualify as a fatwa by Robertson on Chavez?

Cenk Uygur of The Huffington Post apparently agrees with me.