Note to Hugo Chavez: Don't Let The Door Whack You On The Way Out!

Happily your busy Peasant has miraculously received
a windfall of time today, so we can get together for
a bit before the week concludes after all! And since
a bit of interesting news came to the fore yesterday
I have the time to share it with you along with my
commentary. Hugo Chavez, Venezuelan dictator,
would-have-been oil sheik, champion of Marxist
politics at home and cheerleader for Marxist
revolution in South America, and of course (wouldn't
it figure?) a pal of our President Obama, died
after a lengthy battle with cancer at the age of 58.

Chavez was, in fact, elected to be Venezuela's president
in 1998, quickly laying the groundwork for the type of
government and economy that he wanted to impose
upon his country's people. Along the way Chavez
censored radio and television stations along with
newspapers that were opposed to "Hugo Boss" and
his policies, seizing control over those who would not
sheepishly acquiesce to his demands to not criticize
same. Chavez also nationalized Venezuela's once-
thriving oil industry, its engine of prosperity which
was the backbone of the country's economy, and had
used proceeds from the industry to prop up the sagging
economy of kindred spirit Fidel Castro's Cuba as well
as to benefit other ambitious lefties around the South
American continent, among them the kingpins of Ecuador,
Bolivia, and Nicaragua, the third being the country where
its people inexplicably returned former leader Daniel
Ortega to power, about thirty years after they dumped him
in favor of reformer and free-market advocate Violetta
Chamoro. The Nicaraguans remind me of Santayana's
admonition that those who don't remember history are
condemned to repeat it. And naturally Chavez had made
his reign replete with many political prisoners whom
he had rounded up and locked up for not getting with
his statist program. Standard operating procedure for
dictators of all stripes. Hard-nosed Hugo also altered
Venezuela's constitution in order to have longer terms
as head of state, as well as to make other political
maneuvers in order to ensure his tenure would last into
perpetuity; the latter he had not been able to accomplish
at the time of his demise, but he was voted back to power
in subsequent elections albeit by the thinnest of margins
amid accusations of electoral fraud.

And of course Chavez loved to thumb his nose at the
United States, even after Barack Obama's election to
the presidency. Chavez blamed the U.S. for anything
and everything he could think of during his fourteen
years of decimating Venezuela's economy and its
citizens' freedom. Soon after Chavez drew his final
breath his successor, Vice President Nicolas Maduro
publicly blamed the U.S. for the cancer that took Chavez'
life!

Although Chavez had installed a Marxist regime in
Venezuela near the end of the last century, it was in that
very century that Marxism and its offshoot, communism were
on the wane with the fall of the Soviet bloc in Eastern
Europe, followed by the demise of the Soviet union itself,
as well as communist and Marxist regimes in Africa,
South America, central America, and the Caribbean.
Chavez had for a brief time been able to swim against the
political tide, but the Big C did what the Venezuelan people
tried to do and eventually would have done. Hugo Chavez
was a dinosaur, a creature who outlived his era. May his
tyrannical government soon follow this nasty little man
into the mists of time on the way to the political dung heap.


MEM