As we noted here, Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez has offered to take questions from the public through the BBC. It’s about what you’d imagine, with readers asking some fairly tough questions, along with plenty of softballs, and Chavez replying glibly and smoothly. If you ask me, it looked coached, due to the suaveness of Chavez’s answers, quite unlike the rougher impromptu ones he gave to Ted Koppel and the Washington Post. Contentwise, it sounds as though Chavez intended to be a crowd-pleaser in the West, because his BBC words not matching his words at home. If that’s so, it’s a propaganda effort rather than a true candid interview. Not only that, Venezuela’s bloggers warn that it’s full of lies. Chavez, after all, is good as a propagandist but has left a long and remembered word-trail elsewhere. He’s good but not that good.

Aleksander Boyd has the transcript of the whole thing here. And Daniel in Yaracuy does an admirable job, in two parts, dissecting all of Chavez’s dissembling. Daniel is sharp and witty and his acerbic essays are well worth a look here and here. Miguel Octavio exposes yet another string of Chavista mendaciousness here.