Venezuela rejects Chavez, "for now"

From The New York Times:

CARACAS, Venezuela, Monday, Dec. 3 — Voters in this country narrowly defeated a proposed overhaul to the constitution in a contentious referendum over granting President Hugo Chávez sweeping new powers, the Election Commission announced early Monday.

It was the first major electoral defeat in the nine years of his presidency. Voters rejected the 69 proposed amendments 51 to 49 percent.

The political opposition erupted into celebration, shooting fireworks into the air and honking car horns, when electoral officials announced the results at 1:20 a.m. The nation had remained on edge since polls closed Sunday afternoon and the wait for results began.

The outcome is a stunning development in a country where Mr. Chávez and his supporters control nearly all of the levers of power. Almost immediately after the results were broadcast on state television, Mr. Chávez conceded defeat, describing the results as a “photo finish.”

“I congratulate my adversaries for this victory,” he said. “For now, we could not do it.”

FOR NOW.

Given that he had been saying that only "traitors" would vote no on his "make me dictator for life" package of amendments I am surprised that Venezuela isn't currently under martial law while the soldiers and police round up the "traitors".

What this likely means is that Oo-go has given up on even the pretence of democracy and will soon implement his "reforms" at gun point.

He really won't have much choice. The oil fields are falling into disrepair because he has chased away their competent management and refuses to reinvest any of the oil revenue into maintenance. Oil production is consequently falling along with oil revenue and wealthy Venezuelans (you know the people who actually know how to run businesses and make an economy work) are moving their assets, and themselves, out of the country.

Very soon the little thug won't have the cash to fund the various socialist giveaways that are currently buying the loyalty of the illiterate peasants who are his base of support.

Can't we just wax the little bastard and be done with it?

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Tuesday said Spain's King Juan Carlos showed a streak of "arrogance" when he told him to "shut up" during a presidential summit last week, as both governments strove to put the spat behind them.
"I don't want to harm relations with Spain, but we don't like to be pointed at and bite our tongue. Venezuela and its head of state must be respected," Chavez told a news conference.

At the Ibero-American summit in Santiago, Chile, Chavez on Friday branded Spain's former prime minister Jose Maria Aznar a "fascist" for allegedly having backed a 2002 coup attempt against him.

Current Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, 47, called on Chavez to show more respect, but the next day the Venezuelan leader repeated the attack, prompting an irate King Juan Carlos to step in and demand of Chavez: "Why don't you just shut up?"

Chavez, 53, on Tuesday lambasted the monarch, saying he personified Spain's former centuries-long colonial rule in Latin America. "Irate? The king was lucky I didn't hear him ... it's been more than 500 years of arrogance."

The Venezuelan president also criticized Zapatero for defending Aznar and demanding that he be shown respect as a former elected prime minister of Spain (1996-2000).

"Hitler was elected by the Germans, does that mean that nobody can attack Hitler? That's so absurd, and that's the absurdity Zapatero came up with," Chavez said.


Do you begin to see now why the law barring the CIA from conducting political assassinations was stupid?

What a fraking cretin

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) - The king of Spain told Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to "shut up" Saturday during a heated exchange at a summit of leaders from Latin America, Spain and Portugal.

Chavez, who called President Bush the "devil" on the floor of the United Nations last year, triggered the exchange by repeatedly referring to former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar as a "fascist."

Aznar, a conservative who was an ally of Bush as prime minister, "is a fascist," Chavez said in a speech at the Ibero-American summit in Santiago, Chile. "Fascists are not human. A snake is more human."

Spain's current socialist prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, responded during his own allotted time by urging Chavez to be more diplomatic in his words and respect other leaders despite political differences.

"Former President Aznar was democratically elected by the Spanish people and was a legitimate representative of the Spanish people," he said, eliciting applause from the gathered heads of state.

Chavez repeatedly tried to interrupt, but his microphone was off.

Spanish King Juan Carlos, seated next to Zapatero, angrily turned to Chavez and said, "Why don't you shut up?"

The Venezuelan leader did not immediately respond, but later used time ceded to him by his close ally Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega to answer Zapatero's speech.

"I do not offend by telling the truth," he said. "The Venezuelan government reserves the right to respond to any aggression, anywhere, in any space and in any manner."


Three cheers for the King of Spain.

A tough one for the Left

From The New York Times:

CARACAS, Venezuela, Nov. 9 — Finding Yon Goicoechea, a leader of the nascent student movement protesting the expanding power of President Hugo Chávez, is not easy. He changes cellphones every few days. After receiving dozens of death threats, he moves among the apartments of friends here each day in search of a safe place to sleep.

In an interview this week in a back room at one such residence, a villa in a leafy district in this city, Mr. Goicoechea described the movement that has supplanted traditional political parties in recent weeks as the most cohesive and respected challenger to Mr. Chávez’s government.

“We believe in exhausting the democratic options available to us through peaceful action,” said Mr. Goicoechea, 23, who studies law at Andrés Bello Catholic University here, referring to the students’ opposition to a constitutional overhaul. In the polarized world of Venezuelan political debate, such parsed and polished statements are rare.

But what about the claims, from Mr. Chávez and his loyalists, that the students ultimately want to oust him from office? “We want social transformation, not a coup,” Mr. Goicoechea said. “The real coup d’état is coming from Chávez, who wants to perpetuate himself in power.”

Indeed, the students first burst onto the scene over the summer with protests against Mr. Chávez’s move to push RCTV, a critical television network, off public airwaves. But the president’s proposed charter, which would abolish his term limits, has led to much larger protests here and in other large cities this month.

About 80,000 students flooded main avenues here on Wednesday in a march to the Supreme Court to ask it to suspend the referendum on 69 constitutional amendments scheduled for Dec. 2. Students returning from that march were attacked by gunmen at the campus of the Central University of Venezuela; nine were injured. The violence continued Friday in Mérida in western Venezuela, where four police officers and a bystander were shot and wounded while trying to break up clashes between opposing student groups, Reuters reported.

This is going to cause some difficulties for the political left in the US. As a low-rent communist thug moving to make himself president-for-life and consolidate totalitarian power the Left loves Chávez. After all they won't have Castro around much longer so they are in desperate need of another murdering Latin tyrant to idolize.

However his opposition is coming from STUDENTS and in the pocket universe inhabited by the Left students can do no wrong. Especially when they are protesting and "speaking truth to power".

This could cause heads to explode on university campuses all across the nation.

Good.

Moonbats in love

CARACAS, Venezuela Sep 28, 2007 (AP) - The leaders of Iran and Venezuela cemented an alliance aimed at countering the United States while the Iranian president reached out to a new ally in Bolivia and declared that together, "no one can defeat us."

After being vilified during his U.N. visit this week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad traveled on to friendlier territory Thursday, first stopping in Bolivia where he pledged $1 billion in investment and then visiting Venezuela to meet President Hugo Chavez.

"Together we are surely growing stronger, and in truth no one can defeat us," the Iranian leader said through an interpreter. Apparently referring to the U.S., he said, "Imperialism has no other option: Respect the peoples (of the world) or accept defeat."

Chavez greeted the Iranian leader warmly on a red carpet in front of the presidential palace, where they both stood before microphones and let loose with rhetoric challenging Washington.

Oh Ooo-go give me your hot revolutionary man-love!

Passing the torch to a new generation of evil

The dying will begin soon

From The New York Times:

URACHICHE, Venezuela — The squatters arrive before dawn with machetes and rifles, surround the well-ordered rows of sugar cane and threaten to kill anyone who interferes. Then they light a match to the crops and declare the land their own.

For centuries, much of Venezuela’s rich farmland has been in the hands of a small elite. After coming to power in 1998, and especially after his re-election in December, President Hugo Chávez vowed to end that inequality, and has been keeping his promise in a process that is both brutal and legal.

Mr. Chávez is carrying out what may become the largest forced land redistribution in Venezuela’s history, building utopian farming villages for squatters, lavishing money on new cooperatives and sending army commando units to supervise seized estates in six states.

"Brutal and legal". Those two words describe both Stalin's seizure of the entire harvest of Ukraine, causing a massive famine in which millions died, and Hitler's attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish race. Both men came to power legally under the laws of their respective nations and both men were only exercising powers granted to them by their governments.

Collective farms did not work in the USSR, they did not work in China and they did not work in Israel. The Kibbutzim still exist but they are no longer Utopian experiments in communal living. Today they are simply for-profit corporate farms. The forced land redistribution in Rhodesia (I refuse to call it Zimbabwe, the Zimbabwe crowd had their chance and turned it into a hell on earth - as any person with an IQ in the double digits knew they would) is nothing more than state sponsored murder and robbery.

Venezuela is being set up to starve and since they elected Chavez I can't feel very sorry for them. It is good that people who support leftist should starve or freeze or die of some easily treated disease of condition because the waiting line for the socialized hospital is too long. This might teach them, or their survivors, a lesson. Too bad there isn't some way we could inflict these things on people who vote Democrat in America without disturbing the portion of the population which still retains their sanity and votes Republican.