More obfuscations?

Bush, who as a candidate for president proclaimed:

"If we're an arrogant nation they'll resent us. If we're a humble nation but strong they'll welcome us. Our nation stands alone in the world right now in terms of power. That's why we've got to be humble and yet project strength in a way that promotes freedom."

What will other nations do if we have a hypocritical, multi-tiered foreign policy?

From all appearances, that is what indeed the chosen path of the Bush White House.

Democracy Now! has taken the lead in covering the apparent ouster of Haitian President Jean-Bertand Aristide. It is becoming increasingly clear that both the U.S. and French governments had more than a small hand in fomenting the Haitian coup d'etat.' MSNBC has a bit more.

Today comes news via the Freedom of Information Act(FOIA) that the U.S. has been funding opponents of democratically elected Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez.

From the above article:

Jeremy Bigwood, a Washington-based freelance journalist who obtained the documents, yesterday told The Independent: "This repeats a pattern started in Nicaragua in the election of 1990 when [the US] spent $20 per voter to get rid of [the Sandinista President Daniel] Ortega. It's done in the name of democracy but it's rather hypocritical. Venezuela does have a democratically elected President who won the popular vote which is not the case with the US."

The funding has been made by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) a non-profit agency financed entirely by Congress. It distributes $40m (?22m) a year to various groups in what it says is an effort to strengthen democracy.

But critics of the NED say the organisation routinely meddles in other countries' affairs to support groups that believe in free enterprise, minimal government intervention in the economy and opposition to socialism in any form. In recent years, the NED has channelled funds to the political opponents of the recently ousted Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide at the same time that Washington was blocking loans to his government.

"It the sort of stuff that used to be done by the CIA," said Mr Bigwood. "I am not particularly interested in Mr Chavez - I am interested in what Washington is doing." In Venezuela, the NED channelled the money to three of its four main operational "wings": the international arms of the Republican and Democratic parties - the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs respectively - and the foreign policy wing of the AFL-CIO union, the American Centre for International Labour Solidarity.

As is typical for The Independent, there is much more color at the above link.

Democracy is only rubber-stamped if it happens to be U.S. 'interests' friendly.

These issues can't be cloaked in national defense issues -- save for our dependence on Venezuela's oil reserves -- and if the U.S. still has a functioning democracy, we will get much more color about Aristide's and Chavez's situations. I'm not going to hold my breath, but I am still hopeful.