Take That Chuck Goolsbee!

Looks like you got bitch slapped by Mike over at Alojamiento Chile.

Me too, I guess. Looks like Mike really came in swinging. Chuck'd be blind if he didn't see that one coming but for my part, sadly, it seems that yet again someone has mistaken my neutral, impartial reporting for a personal attack. Some people are just really sensitive I think. I'll step back, as I always do, and deconstruct Mike's rebuttal of Chuck Goolsbee's argument from the standpoint of a disinterested observer.

Before doing so, though, I gotta say Mike's regurgitation and assumption of the already-cliché rags-to-riches myth of the blogosphere is totally out of line:

But as things change and I have been read by more than just my closest friends and colleagues, I find that the vision is expanding...

Hey buddy, don't be so cavalier about your "friends and colleagues" as if everyone was lucky like you and had friends. Before this rag-tag group of expat bloggers in Chile I had nothing. And if you ask most of them I still have nothing. So remember how you got to where you are today!

Anyway, Mike says I don't always get the details right and fair enough. Bachelet dropped her clump of flowers on a wall, not a statue. Can't judge you, I've devoted more than 87 words to less important details, I'll give you a "C" for Concise, but a "D" for your own Details. More than 1.5 million Iraqis killed? I'll raise that to a "C" if you can provide a Citation. Or was it just an approximation? Walls are more important than dead Iraqis?

Why are we talking about dead Iraqis? Well, Chuck Goolsbee, not a Chile blogger but who lives the Chile blogging dream through his son who went to Chile and took some pictures of Chileans, hopped on here and said Mike hasn't read his history books if he thinks Pinochet's power was minor in comparison to Bush.

Let's not ask the obvious question of whether this even matters. I'm just here to observe.

So Chuck's been "now reading" Pam Constable's book A Nation of Enemies, Chile Under Pinochet, for quite some time. Sounds like a page-turner. Sure I might pick it up, but not before noting both Marc Cooper's and Tim Frasca's nauseated responses to Constable's elegiac testament to the General's good intentions corrupted by power. What hogwash. She rounds that piece out by using everyone and his perrito's argument, that Bachelet is (or was) a shining beacon of hope for Chile because she was tortured.

Two words, Miss: Stockholm Syndrome. That's right. According to the tour guide at Villa Grimaldi, there are torture victims living in Santiago today, married to their torturers.

Bachelet isn't married. But you're gonna need a lot more than "she was tortured" to convince me of her sincere willingness or ability to effect any substantive reversal of the damage done to Chile, by Pinochet.

But that's not what we're debating. Pinochet's power was minor compared to Bush/Cheney. Chuck's saying that's a "way off" statement, Mike's says "no way", I say, "fight!"

Okay, I'll break the rules by straining to understand. I think Chuck was saying that Pinochet's power was greater than Bush's within their respective countries, while his argument was misinterpreted as "global power" and in that sense Bush has probably done a lot more damage, in numbers, than Pinochet. Clear as a buzzkill.

But before changing the channel, I think the "global" argument is interesting as well. Pinochet didn't kill as many Iraqis, but he did head up something pretty huge if you're into Operation Condor. And if you're into Naomi Klein you'll draw a pretty neat Chile-Iraq connection, or Chile-any of the dozens of economies that got fucked over following the Chilean economic piloto milagro. Don't hold me to any of this, Klein's on my "now reading" list.