Venezuela overdrive More and more of what we’ve been told about the failed coup in Venezula doesn’t add up. Gregory Palast asks some tough and highly appropriate questions here. People who automatically dismiss criticism from the left will have little trouble brushing aside Palast with the usual ad hominems. This won’t work on the questions being raised by sharp-eyed centrist Joshua Micah Marshall, who’s been paying close attention to the careful shifts, misdirection, and contradictions in the national papers’ coverage of this story. (Don’t miss his early post on this subject, either, from April 17—it’s further down, but the permalink is broken.)

Matt Welch says that one post-9/11 possibility that’s worried him is “a return to a Cold-War style realpolitik, with its potential bad side-effects; specifically, that the U.S. would, in the name of coalition expedience, begin looking the other way in places like Russia92s Near Abroad…and that it would embrace a cavalier Ollie North attitude toward meddling in the affairs of other countries. […] I sincerely hope the U.S. is not re-developing a taste for engineering elections and coups in Latin America.” Too right. [10:46 AM]