Publius Pundit - Blogging the democratic revolution

Pat Robertson, in his role as Moses for the 21st century, deems the Commandment "Thou Shallt Not Kill..." does not always apply...

Publius Pundit - Blogging the democratic revolution:

PAT ROBERTSON, VIEWED BY VENEZUELA’S BLOGGERS

‘Christian’ televangelist Pat Robertson generated unprecedented headlines about Hugo Chavez in the blogosphere and in the U.S. media Tuesday when he publicly called for the assassination of the Venezuelan dictator.

Technorati listed it as its top search on the blogosphere.

Google listed it as its top story worldwide in all categories and ran it as its first banner story above a fatal Peruvian jetliner crash.

Bloomberg did five updates on this ’stop the presses’ news item before beginning more coverage here.

CNN did a special report.

Wikipedia was flooded with inquiries about who Hugo Chavez is.

It was the biggest single Internet traffic day for Venezuela of the year, in some cases topping even the recent plane crash last week and last year’s recall referendum. The degree of U.S. fascination with the topic was unprecedented. It was almost tabloidy, given that both Robertson and Chavez specialize in lengthy television demagoguery and pop off about various things quite explosively.

But in Venezuela, the reaction was a bit different. Hugo Chavez, speaking from Havana on his way home to Caracas, said he’d never heard of this person, Robertson, and he didn’t seem to want to dignify Robertson’s recommendations with a comment. Venezuela’s newspapers (I monitored them all day) had virtually nothing at all mentioning the Robertson incident until the end of the day, when the flood of news from the states seemed to get their attention.