Dirty war tricks on the internet
or how to use numbers, and most people inability to understand them, to your profit

Day two of a crucial week. Tensions keep rising as judging by comments flying back and forth. But nothing really new.

On the other hand I have been sent yet another link from a chavista web site. It is not a particularly important site but I chose to comment on it because it is really telling of how paranoiac chavismo has become and how some organizations have been demonized to a ridiculous extent.

This site does not even have a proper title besides the URL. It is dedicated to demonstrate how the US is funding the opposition of Chavez. So? Did anyone thought it to be otherwise? Not that I am justifying it, in an ideal world this should not happen. But in an ideal world Chavez would not be using public monies for his political gains either. Fair is fair, and no matter what that site says, Chavez is outspending the US several fold, just with any single "mision" he comes up with.

But it gets better. I started reading the site and did not have to go very far to realize how twisted it was. I quote:

The documents on this site reveal the intimate economic and political relationship between the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the Venezuelan opposition group Sumate. NED approved a grant of $53,400 to Sumate on September 12, 2003, for a one-year duration, under the pretense of promoting "Electoral Education".

The group SUMATE has been reviled by chavismo as organizing everything in the opposition campaign, which is untrue. Sumate role is limited at the technical aspects of the signature collection and accounting. And they have been stupendously efficient at it, contrasting, and consternating, the "Comando Ayacucho" incompetence on the Chavez side. Trying to make Sumate the source of all evils is just a political strategy to create the devil where it is not.

But again, let us assume, for the sake of the argument, that Sumate is really the Devil incarnate. $53 400 is a piddle amount for all that Sumate does or is supposed to do. It probably does not even cover a one week budget. Whoever has written that site does not know pip squeak as to what these things cost.

Of course, the objective of such sites is elsewhere, though I doubt that many people outside Venezuela will be interested in Sumate. That anti Sumate web site is destined to a fringe left that is devoting its time to search anything that is anti US, and Chavez is fashionable there. Expect lengthy articles derived from this site "data" on other web sites using Sumate as evidence of the incoming bombing of Venezuela by some wayward US forces...

Meanwhile, I am still amazed at the anger that Sumate provokes on chavistas. In my mind there is only one reason, Sumate represents all that chavista are not and would like to be. Sumate shows chavismo all what it lacks in human capital, all what it cannot attrack with cheap ideology, all what is fake in itself.