Headline Howler: The Lede catches Teh Stoopid

Quick, everyone, tell me what this is a picture of:

If you said “two leading Cuban revolutionaries proving that golf isn’t as bourgeois as Hugo Chávez says it is”, go straight to the corner and put on your dunce cap. And while you’re at it, say hi to the dunce who’s already there–a poor soul who blogged this for the NY Whore Times, thinking he could make a fool of Chavecito with a slice of Cold War trivia. His name is Robert Mackey, and he ended up having to correct himself a little over an hour ago, hilariously:

…So we have Mr. Castro’s word that the round was staged for the cameras for the purpose of mocking the American President who refused to meet with Mr. Castro when he visited Washington in 1959, soon after taking power. On that occasion, President Eisenhower refused to meet with Mr. Castro — who had to settle for a chat with his Vice President, Richard Nixon, instead. According to several versions of the story, Mr. Castro was unhappy to learn that the important business that kept President Eisenhower from meeting him was a round of golf. So that would seem to explain the subsequent photo-op mockery of the game back in Cuba.

Meanwhile, if you want to know what prompted this little quiz-bang (and the trainwreck that followed), here ya go. Turns out that it’s not so much the “bourgeois” nature of the world’s most unathletic sport that pisses off Chavecito–it’s that the slums of Caracas are growing out of control, on unstable ground; the city sits in the bottom of an Andean mountain valley. Meanwhile, what have the rich turned the stable ground in the heart of the city into? Fucking golf courses. Chavecito aims to change that by legally nullifying all those land-grabbers’ claims, and building affordable public housing there, instead of letting manicured turf go on stinking the place up with Monsanto chemicals. All this so that poor folks won’t have to go on constructing shacks with scavenged material on hillsides that are likely to wash away with the next heavy rain, as they did early on in Chavecito’s tenure as president.

Funny how the facts just totally change the picture, eh Robert?

(Memo to Simon Romero: No Cuban cigar for you, either.)