Regardless of what we think of Hugo Chavez it shouldn’t be hard to agree that sending US dollars to mess with elections in Venezuela has about the same moral measurement as Venezuela, or say China, sending moeny to mess with US elections. Can you IMAGINE! the GOP squeals if Libyan money was found to have been used in democracy building efforts in Florida?

Tuesday, the [Venezuelan] attorney general is scheduled to take a get-out-the-vote group called Súmate to court on conspiracy charges for accepting $31,120 from the US-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED)…

Despite the attention the case has garnered, Súmate’s NED money is small change compared with the millions of dollars given to Venezuelan groups by a little-known branch of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) called the Office for Transition Initiatives (OTI).

Democracy’s ’special forces’ face heat | csmonitor.com