My grandmother shot me in the face every Christmas

The American Enterprise Institute's Megan McCarthy thinks she has uncovered damning hypocrisy:

It was 25 years ago this week that the International Court of Justice handed down a 12-3 decision condemning U.S. intervention in Nicaraguan affairs. Not surprisingly, the international community is largely silent on Chavez’s ongoing intervention in Nicaragua.

I was just reading about Nicaragua v. The United States of America the other day. It's an interesting one. Basically, the U.S. was found guilty of violating the Nicaragua's sovereignty by planting mines in the latter's harbors and funding a brutal right-wing insurgency that ultimately left 50,000 Nicaraguans dead. The U.S. claimed it was acting in self-defense. On behalf of Honduras. But then, the Reagan administration lawyers didn't have to put much thought into their legal arguments given that the U.S. rejected the International Court of Justice's jurisdiction and then refused to abide its ruling. Nicaragua never got a cent of the money it was awarded in reparations.

Which is a long way of saying that the U.S. intervention mentioned by McCarthy, which entailed killing tens of thousands of people, is in not in any way analogous to Chavez's intervention, the most "egregious case" of which she can provide is the Venezuelan government providing its Nicaraguan counterpart "huge amounts of money" in often "opaque" ways.

Once more: shooting someone in the face -- or paying someone to shoot another in the face and giving them the gun to do it -- is not at all like sending someone an envelope full of cash. Given the charges McCarthy makes about him, Chávez sounds more like your grandmother sending you a card with a $20 in it for your birthday than he does Uncle Sam.