Caracas Chronicles

Quico says: So we’re all supposed to be sad now that oppo radio-broadcaster Onda la Superestación has canceled Nelson Bocaranda’s long-running political gossip show, “Los Runrunes de Nelson Bocaranda”.

Sorry, but count me out. With Bocaranda’s Freedom of Speech martyrdom, the very worst in the opposition’s victim complex is coming to the fore.

All of a sudden, we’re supposed to overlook the fact that Nelson Bocaranda has made a career out of pissing all over the code of professional ethics that makes up the backbone of journalism as a profession and rush to celebrate him as a brave voice speaking truth to power.

A guy who took a perverse pride in publishing rumor, speculation and innuendo as fact, who never ever made any discernible effort to confirm any of the hundreds of tidbits he put in the air, who ruined any number of reputations over decades of publishing stuff he’d just sort of heard somewhere is, suddenly, elevated to the role of brave, persecuted dissident simply because a few of the hundreds of people he blithely slandered on the air happened to be extremely powerful chavista insiders who made up their minds to silence him once and for all.

Gah. There’s something about this story I can’t beging to stomach.

Something nausea-inducing about the head-on collision between the opposition’s outsized sense of its own virtue and its underlying willingness to tolerate any level of mediocrity so long as it flies under an anti-Chávez banner.

Something about the sheer polarized blindness with which people rush to the defense of our indefensibles in the same knee-jerk fashion as the other side rushes to the defense of their indefensibles…about the sheer malodorous parallelism between their stupidity and ours.

Sorry, but count me out.