“I can’t wait to read this bullshit” is what I immediately thought before reading the NYT’s editorial on the opposition’s big win in Venezuela’s National Assembly elections. The editorial board has been repeatedly maligning Venezuelan democracy – most recently in a November 18 editorial entitled “Venezuela’s Threatened Elections”. How would they spin the fact that the side they support won in a crucial election without US-approved “observers” whose absence they bitterly decried? This is a newspaper that cheered a briefly successful military coup in Venezuela – in April of 2002 – as a victory for democracy. It would be too much to expect the NYT editors to admit they’ve spent years vilifying a country that is more democratic than their own, but would they at least stop portraying the country as a quasi-dictatorship?

The opposition won 67% of the seats in the National Assembly with 58% of the vote. The vote to seat ratio not only skewed in the opposition’s favor, it also put them over the crucial 2/3 threshold that gave them sweeping powers – enough to convene a constituent assembly to re-write the constitution.

Unsurprisingly, the NYT editors ignored the facts and simply trotted out the same old smears:

“Opposition politicians showed remarkable faith in the country’s democratic process — the turnout was a remarkable 74 percent of eligible voters — even as the government jailed their leaders, kept others off the ballot, and sought to limit press coverage of rival parties…..

Like his predecessor, Mr. Chávez, Mr. Maduro has packed the courts and virtually all other powerful institutions with loyalists.”

There was no “remarkable” faith in the democratic process. The opposition simply followed its cynical practice of relishing their electoral victories while crying fraud whenever they lose. The jailed opposition leaders would never have seen the outside of prison again had they done in the USA what they did at home. Strident opposition voices are constantly heard in the Venezuelan media. And the institutions “packed with Chavista loyalists” produce clean elections that could not be more different from the US-overseen farce in Haiti.

Interestingly, the NYT made no mention of the power the opposition now has to attempt to eradicate “Chavismo” through a constituent assembly. After regurgitating the talking points of the most intransigent and undemocratic segment of the opposition, the NYT editors advised them to avoid excessive confrontation with a president and political movement whose legitimacy they’ve never accepted.