[Cincinatus' Wife]

OPEC Secretary General Declines Offer As PdVSA Head - Official *** LONDON -(Dow Jones)- The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries' Secretary General Ali Rodriguez has declined an offer to be the next President of Venezuela 's state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA (E.PVZ), an OPEC official said Wednesday.

According to the official, Ali Rodriguez was "offered the job last night," by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez but declined because of his commitments to OPEC.

Rodriguez has extended his stay in Venezuela by another week, OPEC's official said, a move which one OPEC source said could suggest that he is reconsidering the offer.***

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Victory Hugo: A post-mortem on Venezuela***This assumes too much. It is essential to remember that Chavez brought this coup upon himself, through his own autocratic actions, just as the state department said he did in an announcement last week. Chavez may have been elected, but that does not make Venezuelan democracy "remarkably robust." Quite the contrary. Civil society there has been in decline for quite a while, and it recently took a nosedive thanks to the misrule of Chavez. The coup occurred precisely because Venezuelan democracy is anything but healthy. (And it may be less healthy throughout South America than Krugman would have us believe; one of the reasons so many regional leaders condemned the coup is because they wanted to send a message about insubordination to their own militaries.)

This is not to say the coup was a necessary course of action, even from the standpoint of those who think Chavez must go. As Stephen Johnson of the Heritage Foundation points out, there were efforts already underway to remove Chavez from office through the devices of Venezuela's own constitution. It is possible to believe that his days were numbered without have to resort to extra-legal methods.

The coup went so badly that it's hard not to wonder whether Chavez didn't have a hand in it. He moves from a weakened position to a strengthened one. Let's be clear, however, in labeling this conspiracy theory as totally speculative. The enemies of the Bush administration won't be nearly so generous. Wednesday's New York Times, for instance, reports that Otto Reich urged Carmona not to dissolve the National Assembly, a claim the Times darkly interprets as "rais[ing] questions as to whether Mr. Reich or other officials were stage-managing the takeover by Mr. Carmona."

Except that Carmona apparently wasn't letting himself be stage-managed. But that doesn't matter. The Left now will make a determined effort to see the hand of Otto Reich behind it all - as if wishing would make it so.***