Venezuela's Good Mary Hunting: When Good People Happen to Bad Governments

The Sixth Republic ^ | Feb. 18, 2005 | Alexandra Beech

[Kitten Festival]

Eventually, the Venezuelan government had to launch an attack on Mary O’Grady, the hard-hitting columnist at the Wall Street Journal who has criticized the Chavez government from the minute it started peeling away at Venezuela’s democracy.

Like no other writer, O’Grady has described in detail the path that led to the government’s consolidation of power.

While O’Grady has criticized other foreign governments, including Ecuador’s and Cuba’s, no other government in the world has an office in Washington with the sole purpose of attacking and discrediting US news media. This has made Mary O’Grady a prime target for the Venezuela Information Office, a cadre of former activists hired by the Venezuelan government to launch e-mail campaigns against editorials, or as in this case, to write articles attempting to discredit journalists or editorial boards.

In this latest “article”, Andrés Mateo Jarrín harks all the way back to Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, searching for proof of the Wall Street Journal’s conservative bend, writing that “over the past century and into the next, the Journal stands for free trade and sound money; against confiscatory taxation and the ukases of kings and other collectivists; and for individual autonomy against dictators, bullies and even the tempers of momentary majorities.” That’s a far-reaching premise for attacking a smart woman who writes for a living, albeit, “for individual autonomy against dictators.”

[Kitten Festival]

Venezuela's Cuba-style propaganda enforcers go on the attack against one of the Wall Street Journal's most respected reporters. I think this is sick and ought to be illegal.