[T]he Bush administration did enormous damage to American credibility throughout much of the region when it blessed what turned out to be a failed coup against Mr. Chávez.

Indeed it did.  But what the Times fails to mention, and is apparently eager to erase, is that “the Bush administration” was far from alone in blessing that coup attempt:

The New York Times Editorial Page, April 13, 2002 — one day after the coup:

With yesterday’s resignation of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator. Mr. Chávez, a ruinous demagogue, stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader, Pedro Carmona. . . .

Early yesterday [Chávez] was compelled to resign by military commanders unwilling to order their troops to fire on fellow Venezuelans to keep him in power. He is being held at a military base and may face charges in Thursday’s killings.

New presidential elections should be held this year, perhaps at the same time the new Congress is chosen. Some time is needed for plausible national leaders to emerge and parties to reorganize. But Venezuela urgently needs a leader with a strong democratic mandate to clean up the mess, encourage entrepreneurial freedom and slim down and professionalize the bureaucracy.

That was one of the most Orwellian editorials written in the last decade.  The Times — in the very first line — mimicked the claim of the Bush administration that Chavez “resigned,” even though, several paragraphs later, they expressly acknowledged that Chavez “was compelled to resign by military commanders“ (the definition of a “coup”).  Further mimicking the administration, the Times perversely celebrated the coup as safeguarding ”Venezuelan democracy” (“Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator”), even though the coup deposed someone whom the Times Editorial itself said “was elected president in 1998″ and — again using the Times‘ own language — “handed power to” an unelected, pro-American “respected business leader, Pedro Carmona,” who quickly proceeded to dissolve the democratically elected National Assembly, the Supreme Court and other key institutions.

Worse still, the Times Editorial mindlessly spouted the administration’s claim that “Washington never publicly demonized Mr. Chávez” and “his removal was a purely Venezuelan affair.”  Yet less than a week later, the Times itself was compelled to report that the Bush administration “acknowledged today that a senior administration official [Assistant Secretary of State Otto Reich] was in contact with Mr. Chávez’s successor on the very day he took over”‘ — a disclosure which, as the Times put it with great understatement, “raised questions as to whether Reich or other officials were stage-managing the takeover by Mr. Carmona.”  

Four days after its pro-coup Editorial, the Times — once Chavez was returned to power in the wake of Carmona’s anti-democratic moves — returned to the topic of Venezuela, once again echoing the official line from Bush officials, who took to condemning the now-failed coup attempt.  The Times, while justifying pro-coup sentiments as understandable, proceeded to denounce that reaction without really apologizing for its own role in endorsing it:

In his three years in office, Mr. Chávez has been such a divisive and demagogic leader that his forced departure last week drew applause at home and in Washington. That reaction, which we shared, overlooked the undemocratic manner in which he was removed. Forcibly unseating a democratically elected leader, no matter how badly he has performed, is never something to cheer.

Despite that, the Times still expressed optimism about the coup, righteously intoning in the first paragraph:  ”we hope Mr. Chávez will act as a more responsible and moderate leader now that he seems to realize the anger he stirred.”

And the Times was hardly alone.  As FAIR documented that week — in a reported entitled ”U.S. Papers Hail Venezuelan Coup as Pro-Democracy Move” — “the editorial boards of several major U.S. newspapers followed the U.S. government’s lead and greeted the news with enthusiasm.”

* * * * *

It’s nice that the Times — with a disgraced George Bush on his way out the door — has come to view the Venezuelan military coup as the destructive, anti-democratic event which, by definition, it was.  And it’s also nice that the Times is now willing to assign blame for anti-U.S. sentiments in Latin America at least partially to the actions of the U.S. Government itself.  But it’s important that the Times not be allowed to delete its own involvement in those events.  Just as was true for Joe Klein’s very similar self-serving revisionism on Wednesday, the point here goes far beyond merely illustrating the dishonesty that lies at the heart of this re-writing of history.  

The Times‘ propagandistic cheer-leading for the military coup in Venezuela is an important illustrative event which should be regretted, but not erased.  There are vital lessons from the last eight years that get obscured when influential outlets such as the Times Editorial Page try to erase their own responsibility for events and heap all blame on “the Bush administration” — which was able to do what it did only because it enjoyed the acquiescence, complicity and often blind support from so many of our leading political and media institutions.