Leftist Chic

Venezuela is the latest hotbed of leftist chic. All the big names of the Left are going to Venezuela to pay homage to the dictator de jour, Hugo Chavez.

The actor Danny Glover has come. Harry Belafonte has also been here. So has the antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan, the prominent African-American writer Cornel West and Bolivia's new president, Evo Morales.

A student from an American university photographed residents of a Caracas neighborhood during a visit to Venezuela, a new leftist mecca.

But most visitors are like Cameron Durnsford, a 24-year-old student from Australia who decided to study at a new government-financed university in Caracas. Mr. Durnsford was, admittedly, put off some by the cult of celebrity around President Hugo Chávez, which he says "seems a little bit Maoist." But Venezuela's revolution, he quickly added, was not to be missed.

"You've got a nation and a leader trying to prove an alternative to neo-liberalism and the policies that have ravaged Latin America for 20 years," he said. "That's why people are coming here. There's a sense that it's a moment in history."

Mr. Chávez is decidedly unpopular with the Bush administration, which he has branded a terrorist regime out to get him. That antagonism, coupled with Mr. Chávez's huge oil-generated outlays for social spending, is drawing a following from all over and turning Caracas into the new leftist mecca.

Evoking other cities transformed by revolutionary leaders, like Managua, Nicaragua, in 1979, or Havana 20 years before that, Caracas is attracting students and celebrities, academics and activists, grandmothers and 1970's-era hippies — a new generation of Sandalistas, as some call them.

What kind of pablum is Durnsford talking about? Chavez is pushing the very policies that doomed Latin America for the past 20 years - socialism and a cult of personality. Chavez may have come in riding the mythos of a savior, but he's turned out to be nothing of the sort.

And leftists in the US are lapping this kind of stuff up.

You've seen it.

The Che Guevera t-shirts and berets.

And the rampant anti-Americanism that happens to be tinged with anti-Semitism to boot.

Chavez rigged the last election so that he could win, and it got rubber stamped by Carter, despite the overwhelming evidence that there was widespread fraud and vote rigging. And Chavez has learned from Fidel Castro on how to use Americans who have anti-American and Leftist policies to his own advantage (all while destroying the economy and social fabric of the country). That's how and why folks like Sheehan, Belafonte, and others get honored with personal meetings, lavish dinners, and other benefits. Because his cult of personality trumps everything else.

These same people who go down to Venezuela are not doing the Venezuelans any good; they're only benefitting Chavez, who exploits the situation to his own personal benefit. VCrisis has more on the political situation in Caracas:

The Caracas government, as such, is simply an extortion racket for protection schemes. Those who do not pay to play in Caracas are either dead or hounded out or selling Hugo Chavez look-alike dolls on the street corner.

Hugo Chavez is a demagogue. A demagogue is defined as, “a person who tries to stir up the people by appeals to emotion, prejudice, etc., in order to win them over quickly and so gain power.” Chavez is a demagogue and that is not the only thing he is up to. Every time Chavez lets lose his now standard demagogic vitriol, he is trying to control and manipulate events. This communist caudillo habitually takes over Venezuelan air waves each week-end, commanding center stage, to rant and rave like a manipulative, scolding, aggravating wife.

Hugo Chavez is trying to manipulate, among several agenda items, global oil prices to pad his personal wallet and increase his political buying capital. Each and every time Chavez opens his long-winded vitriol against the U.S., oil prices spike and Chavez and his cronies make profit. Every time Chavez’s paid protesters blow up a gas or oil pipeline, oil and gas prices spike as well, as increase costly repairs and police-military expenditures. Of course, Chavez’s paid propaganda agents remind us to not complain when the Chavez agents of doom and harm come their way. Silence is required of these minions. Any who speak out or question the wisdom of Chavez’s Bolivarian take-over profiteering plan is silenced or forced in to serving as a complicit enabler of the regime. These habitual dyspeptic, and at times racist and misogynistic, screeches of the harpy Chavez-as-desperate-housewife are more than some lithium-induced hysteria by Chavez, although that could be a factor as well. We suspect this is more about control.