Comrade Hugo's "Fairness Doctrine"

The good people of Venezuela appear to understand quite clearly that their country has become a Castroite dungeon, even if American liberals will not.

Even some human rights activists (those who still take the term seriously) recognize the falling of the chalupa curtain:

In the last five years we've noted that Venezuela has shown the greatest decline in press freedom of any country in our survey in terms of our numerical score. [President Chavez] started out by trying to control the press with a lot of legal restrictions and now he's turning his attention toward just eliminating privately-owned media with diverse opinions.

Somewhere, late in the Capitol night, Dennis Kucinich is furiously taking notes, and planning his next junket for "south of the border".

See if this next morsel doesn't sound similarly familiar:

Here's a link to a report on a careful study by two Venezuelan statisticians demonstrating that it is almost certain that Hugo Chavez manipulated the 2004 referendum that allowed him to run for a second term, in violation of Venezuela's deep tradition of single-term presidential rule.

Florida 2000? The Gore uprising?

This Cato study painstakingly details the corruption and financial fraud of Chavez's rule.

Echoes of Clinton administrations, past and future.

No wonder American lefties love Uncle Hugo so much. He sounds like them, and he's actually living out their crypto-Marxist fantasies. He's their role model even more than Castro, because Castro isn't sitting on an ocean of petrowealth, and because Chavez attained absolute power the new-fangled way: he cheated his way into it.

One can just picture the photo-op of "Presidents" Rodham and Chavez in one of his palaces in Carracas in the spring of 2009, hands clasped, all smiles, pledging to re-forge the US-Venezuelan "special relationship" to bring "peace" and "justice" back to Latin America.

Maybe they'll invite "President" Ahmadinejad along to make it a, er, threesome. And maybe we'll be able to publicly utter and post phrases like "birds of a feather....", depending upon how quickly the Pelosi/Reid axis, also hands clasped and all smiles, passes its own Enabling Act.

You think I'm joking, don't you? Something tells me Pat Toomey wouldn't.

Smart man.

[h/t: Frumblog]