What's In The Kool-Aid?

Roger Noriega has a good conservative pedigree.

He was ambassador to the OAS from 2001-2003, and then worked as an Asssistant Seccretary of State in the State Department from 2003-2005. Now he's a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and managing director of Vision America LLC, a lobbying firm. As a lobbyist, he has to place press op-ed opinion pieces for clients from time to time. I have to assume his latest on Fox News is placement for a client, because if he believes it, he should have his beverage of choice analyzed for hallucinogens.

Noriega's piece posits a secret meeting in mid-May between Porfirio Lobo Sosa and Ariel Vargas, representing Hugo Chavez, at Lobo Sosa's suburban home in Tegucigalpa.

The purpose of the meeting? Noriega claims that sources within the Venezuelan government told him Lobo Sosa did his best to convince Chavez's representative that he was still a "fervent revolutionary", and sought to enlist Chavez's patience and help with neutralizing the National Party and the Catholic Church so that he could bring in sweeping constitutional changes "that will allow the people to sweep out the old order."

Kind of reminds me of the whisper campaign against Lobo Sosa in the fall 2009 elections, reminding us he went to college in the former Soviet Union.

Ariel Vargas was the chargé d'affaires for the Venezuelan embassy in Honduras during the 2009 coup and defied Micheletti's expulsion order remaining locked in the embassy.

Noriega goes on to say that Chavez is now pouring millions of dollars into the FNRP to help it become a political party, bypassing Lobo Sosa and the Honduran military, which he would have us believe is the only institution in Honduras backing Lobo Sosa.

So why is Chavez doing this?

Noriega claims that Chavez is using Honduras to place drugs into Mexico and the US, as part of a plan to destabilize the US and Mexico. There are serious studies of drug circulation from South America through Honduras: this is not a contribution to that research.

And what conspiracy would be complete without an allegation that terrorists in Venezuela-- specifically, Hezbollah-- have been seeking information about sneaking across the US border undetected, a goal that somehow will be advanced if Honduras goes all 21st century socialist again under Lobo Sosa.

Noriega's article would be ludicrous, if it didn't echo the tone-- if not the specifics-- of right wing elements in Honduras displeased that Lobo Sosa negotiated with Manuel Zelaya at all. But only in a right wing fantasy-- that is, nightmare-- can Porfirio Lobo Sosa be recast as avid revolutionary.