Is This What Fearing Gets?
Remember that awesome day when we discovered that the Monroe Doctrine was finally, officially dead and all the little countries in the Western Hemisphere were freed from their servitude, and then they unzipped their costumes and started dancing all over the place in their underwear? Wait, no, that was The Wiz. Anyhow the point is that we were all sort of naïve and gun-jumpy since we're still saddled with this even crappier "Bush Doctrine," which says that the US can invade any country, regardless of geography, so long as there is at least one halfway plausible written-down-somewhere link to terrorists or Iran or Islam or something.
So anyway the LA Times has just uncovered this shocking story about one anonymous "Western anti-terrorism official," and his "fears" that Hezbollah may be operating in Venezuela! And that's not all, he also "fears" that oil deals between Venezuela and the middle east might even be fronts for terrorisms, somehow! And his terrible fears are summed up nicely in the article's feary headline: "Hezbollah Presence in Venezuela Feared." Yikes, are you afeared now too?
And then it gets even fearier, because the LA Times is part of the Tribune Family of Newspapers, and so the story got reprinted the next day in other newspapers under a new, better headline. This one reads "Hezbollah's Presence in Venezuela Draws Concern." So now we're moved passed our fear that Hezbollah might be operating in Venezuela, and on to concern about all the awful things it's probably doing there, maybe. Same story, no new evidence or anything. Stay scared(er).
And then of course the sounding board kicks in, in the form of weird online think-tanks and their own fearful--what's the word, analysis?--of the situation. The "StrategyPage" is super-double scared that Venezuela's business dealings with Iran might not even be about oil at all, and "maybe" they are nothing more that a front group ...
"for teams of terrorists intent on kidnapping Jewish residents of, or visitors to, Venezuela. The captives would then be smuggled back to Lebanon and used to extract prisoners and other concessions from Israel."Hey, "maybe"! Who the hell knows, right? But the whole idea is one scary toe-curling, ease-on-down-the-road feargasm, which is also the point, "maybe."
