Hugo Chavez, rest in peace

Reuters photo

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who democratically was elected as his nation’s leader four times in a row, died today of cancer at age 58. (He is pictured above in February 2012.) I fell in love with Chavez some years ago after I watched the excellent documentary “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” which is about the blatantly anti-democratic, treasonous — and, thankfully, short-lived — attempt by fascistic right-wingers in Venezuela to forcibly replace the popularly elected Chavez with an unelected corporatocrat and plutocrat in 2002 — much the way that the fascistic, treasonous right-wingers here at home stole the White House in 2000 against the wishes of the majority of the American voters.

Only plutocrats and fascists have cause to celebrate the death of democratic socialist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, but, unfortunately, most of those in the United States who celebrate his death are poor to middle-class right-wing fucktards who actually would benefit greatly from Chavez-like socioeconomic policies here at home. (No, the corporate-cash-loving-and-corporate-ass-licking U.S. President Barack Obama is no “socialist.”)

Hugo Chavez became widely known as a “dictator” after the unelected Bush regime relentlessly repeatedly called him such even though Chavez repeatedly had been democratically elected by clear majorities of the people of Venezuela (who didn’t vote the way that they were supposed to vote, which is the way that a right-wing American would vote, you see).

Ironically, since George W. Bush never was democratically elected — Al Gore won more than a half-million more votes than Bush did in 2000, and it was the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court, not the majority of the American voters, who put Bush in the White House – Bush was the actual dictator, one who took power without first having earned the majority of the votes of the people.

Hugo Chavez wasn’t perfect — no leader of a nation is — but “dictator” Chavez’s biggest “crime” was that he actually did his job, which was to look out for the interests of the majority of the people of Venezuela and not for the interests of the plutocratic and corporatocratic few — you know, the way that a “good” Latin American leader “should”: sell out his people for whatever it is that the rich and powerful, especially in the U.S., want him or her to (in this case, oil, especially).

Hugo Chavez is dead, but the revolution in Latin America that he has inspired lives on.

The people’s revolution against their – our — anti-democratic, fascistic, treasonous, plutocratic overlords cannot be about one man or woman anyway.

¡Que viva la revolución!

And let’s hope that the Latin American revolution for the people over the plutocratic few spreads north so that we have a truly democratic nation — a nation governed by those who have the interests of the majority of the people at heart, and not the interests of only the comparatively tiny already-super-rich and already-super-powerful minority — here in the U.S. one day.

May Venezuela be the first domino that topples, spreading democratic socialism to even the notoriously anti-democratic, imperialistic United States of America.

P.S. I know that this is the United States of Amnesia, but Chavez-bashers should remind themselves of history: In April 2002, when the democratically elected and very popular Chavez was briefly overthrown by right-wing traitors, the unelected Bush regime at that time immediately recognized the anti-democratic, right-wing usurpers as the legitimate new government of Venezuela — which was not surprising, given that the members of the treasonous Bush regime had had no problem with the fact that Bush wasn’t elected, either. (The members of the right wing support and respect democracy only when elections go their way, and they feel so absolutely correct and superior in their ideology that they are untroubled with stealing office if they can’t win office legitimately, which they often can’t.)

Moreover, the CIA, at the behest of the White House, has had a long history of deposing left-leaning, pro-their-nation’s-own-people, democratically elected leaders in Latin America — and anti-democratically replacing them with unelected, right-wing usurpers who agree to do anything that the power elite of the U.S. ask them to do.

Chile’s Salvador Allende immediately comes to mind; his usurper was the U.S.-backed mass murderer and true dictator Augosto Pinochet, who should have been executed and not allowed to die a natural death. (It was the Nixon White House, natch, that used the CIA to remove Allende from power and install the murderous dictator Pinochet.)

It is likely that the Bush regime similarly had a hand in the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela.

Even if the Bush regime didn’t (but it probably did), the fact that the Bush regime wasted no time in recognizing the illegal and unelected “new” “government” of Venezuela by itself was plenty of reason for Hugo Chavez to feel animosity toward the U.S. government at least throughout Bush’s unelected and thus illegitimate tenure.

(And there is a big distinction between the U.S. government and the people of the United States; Chavez’s problem was with the members of the Washington establishment who believe that Latin America exists solely to do the U.S.’s bidding. He never attacked the American people as a whole, although the wingnuts [who still call him a "dictator" after he won four presidential elections in a row with international elections observers present] worked hard to paint Chavez as an enemy of every American, and their propaganda campaign worked to an impressive degree on the bleating American sheeple.)

One of Chavez’s most (in)famous acts was in September 2006, when he remarked of George W. Bush, who had appeared at the same podium before the United Nations General Assembly in New York City the day before: “The devil came here yesterday. And it smells of sulfur still today.”

Bush indeed is one of the most evil entities still stalking the planet, a mass-murdering war criminal who still goes wholly unpunished for his crimes against humanity. (Chavez, despite being called a murdering dictator by the wingnuts, wholly unlike Pinochet and other U.S.-backed actual dictators, never had any of his political opponents killed. In fact, I know of not one confirmed murder or even one confirmed case of torture that Chavez as president of Venezuela was responsible for, when Bush was responsible for the confirmed murder and the confirmed torture of thousands and thousands of human beings.)

Chavez said something else at the UN that day in September 2006, something that strikes me as prophetic: “The Soviet Union collapsed. The United States empire is on the way down and it will be finished in the near future, for the good of all mankind.” (Note that he’s criticizing the idea of empire, of one highly militarized nation calling all of the shots for the entire globe. Also during his September 2006 UN appearance, Chavez correctly stated that the UN headquarters should be moved to another nation. It seems to me that for fairness, UN headquarters should move to different nations around the globe, say, once every decade. It’s fucked up for it to permanently be anchored in the U.S.)

You know, if Hugo Chavez had been just flat-out wrong, I think that Americans would have just ignored him. But they haven’t. A good chunk of them have hated his guts intensely, which, to me, is evidence of two things: (1) that right-wing politicians’ relentless pro-plutocratic propaganda (aided and abetted by the corporately owned and controlled media, the bosses of which certainly disagree with Chavez’s business model of nationalizing the media) can be very effective; and (2) that Chavez’s biggest “crime” was being right and being vocal about it, which certainly are two big no-nos here at home, where telling certain awful (but obvious) truths is considered to be a much larger crime than telling even the biggest lies.

Make Moobie’s death wish come true

Associated Press and Reuters photos

Egyptian protesters hang dictator Hosni Mubarak in effigy in Cairo today. To me these don’t look like people who want Mubarak to hang around for another several months.

Embattled Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak proclaims that he’s going to hold on to his post until elections in September, that he isn’t going anywhere, that he’s going to die on Egyptian soil.

While it’s their choice what to do — something that way too many Americans and Israel-firsters don’t or won’t get – I hope that the people of Egypt give Mubarak his wish to die on Eyptian soil sooner rather than later if he makes it necessary.

The Egyptian people have given Mubarak the opportunity — indeed, the mandate – to leave office. If he refuses, then the consequences of his refusal to follow the popular demand are on him. The people have offered him a bloodless solution, so if it comes to pass that there are bloody hands, they can only be Mubarak’s.

The people of Egypt are demanding Mubarak’s immediate departure — they have made their wishes clear. An opportunity for Mubarak to empower his cronies over the next several months to essentially extend his rule even past his eventual departure is not what the people of Egypt want. What they want is a fresh start, a new start — not a continuation of the past three decades of bogus emergency rule. 

And new rule: If you’re a Zionist/Israel-firster, or if you are a politician who takes big bucks from the Zionist/Israel-first lobby, you should shut the fuck up about Egypt because you can’t even begin to be anywhere near impartial where Egypt is concerned, since all the fuck that you care about is Israel, as though Israel were the whole fucking universe. It ain’t. So get the fuck over it.

If the majority of the people of Egypt want an Islamic government, that’s their fucking choice. Once we rid the U.S. government of its so-called Christians and the government of Israel is stripped of its Jews, then perhaps we can make the assertion that Egypt should have only a secular government. Otherwise, we’re just preferring our own religion over another and are being fucking Islamophobes.

Democracy is about the will of the majority of the people — it’s not democracy only when the majority of the people make the choice that we want them to make.

We Americans had better first learn what the fuck freedom and democracy actually are before we ever expect to export them to other nations.

Only thing stopping a free Egypt is U.S.

Responses to my optimistic post of yesterday on the future of Egypt have been pessimistic.

It is true that real democracy is never assured. It is difficult to attain and perhaps even harder to maintain.

But American pessimism on Egypt’s future seems to stem from at least three things that have nothing to do with the abilities and talents and intelligence and resourcefulness of the Egyptian people.

One of these things is the belief, held even by so-called liberals, that other nations can do nothing without American aid, because Americans are superior and other peoples of the world are inferior. (Indeed, the vast majority of Americans need to be reminded that, in the words of anthropologist Wade Davis, “The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you. They are unique manifestations of the human spirit.”)

The “white man’s burden” began with the British empire, and this chauvinistic mentality was transplanted to the British colonies that became the United States of America.

A corollary of this phenomenon is that the U.S. government, through its military and its Central Intelligence Agency and other thuggish apparatuses, has a long history of making sure that real democracy never takes root in other nations whose leaders look out for the best interests of their nations’ peoples instead of for the best interests of the American capitalist system and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

The U.S. government and the U.S. ruling elites do their very best to cripple certain nations whose leaders refuse to submit to Washington – like Cuba — and then proclaim that these nations are struggling or failing not because of U.S. attempts to make them fail, because of their supposed inherent inferiority.

Leaders of other nations who actually look after their people’s best interests instead of the U.S. government’s and U.S. ruling elites’ best interests are called “dictators.” Like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (whom the CIA tried but failed to overthrow in 2002). Even though Chavez has been democratically elected repeatedly, with international observers (including Jimmy Carter) certifying that the elections were on the up and up, because of the center-right propaganda happily trumpeted by the “free” mass media owned and operated by corporations that allow only pro-corporate speech, most thoroughly corporately brainwashed Americans incorrectly go along with the label of Chavez as a “dictator.”

Actual dictators, on the other hand, like Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who has kept his grip on power for more than three decades, get a free fucking pass as long as they kiss U.S. ass, as Mubarak always has done.

The second source of the pessimistic belief of so many Americans that Egypt can’t get it together democratically stems, I believe, from the fact that Americans can’t get it together democratically, and therefore, they don’t want anyone else to. Call it democratic jealousy.

Americans just sat on their asses while two presidential elections in a row were stolen and bogus wars in the Middle East were launched in their name. Americans have just allowed corporations to render our democratic system meaningless, because decisions in Washington are made not by our elected officials, but by the highest bidders via our bribed elected officials. (And speaking of elections, way too many elections are won by the highest bidder.)

Speaking of our elected officials, “Whose side is Obama on anyway?” asks a piece on Salon.com today, noting:

The Egyptian people are fighting, not only to end the 30-year reign of dictator Mubarak, but for democracy. So far, our government has continued its de facto support for the Mubarak regime by paying lip service to the need for “reform” at the same time that it lauds Mubarak as an ally and source of “stability” in the Middle East.

President Obama and his spokespeople have carefully avoided the fundamental issue. The Egyptian people are not asking their government to reform itself. They are demanding an end to the entire autocratic and kleptocratic regime they have endured for even longer than Mubarak’s rule. They want democracy.

The answer to the question of whose side Obama is on is a fucking no-brainer: Obama is on the side of the Israel-first lobby, which wants Egypt to remain under the thumb of a U.S.-controlled dictator. Israel doesn’t want Egyptians to have self-determination, and because the Israel-first lobbyists’ hands are so far up the asses of the elected officials in Washington, what Israel wants it usually gets from its meat puppets in D.C.

Obama isn’t concerned about democracy in Egypt – or anywhere else. He’s concerned about his political survival (and his hollow slogans, which he very apparently views as his vehicle to continued political success [hey, they worked for him in November 2008!]).

Not that Egypt needs the spineless, slimy, slippery, ethics-free Obama and his regime of Clinton-era leftovers. What Egypt needs for democracy to take root there is for the United States of America to leave Egypt the fuck alone. Only without U.S. interference can true democracy take root anywhere. What’s been happening in Latin America for the past several years — because the gaze of the Eye of Sauron, which sits upon the White House, has been focused upon the Middle East instead of upon Latin America since late 2001 – is proof of that.

A third reason for pessimism over Egypt’s future, I surmise, is that the relatively few Americans who aren’t drunk on the jingoistic Kool-Aid know all too well how much their own government historically has prevented actual democracy from taking root elsewhere in the world, and they expect this pattern to be repeated in Egypt.

But this pessimism overlooks the fact that fortunately, the American empire is so weak from the military and economic overextension of the reign of the unelected Bush regime (um, yeah, there were actual consequences of the fact that Americans just allowed the Bush regime to steal the White House in late 2000) that its ability to quash democracy elsewhere now is limited.

But most Americans are drunk on the Kool-Aid, and they are so adverse to actual democracy taking root elsewhere on the planet that even while a new Egyptian leader already clearly has emerged in Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning Egyptian opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei, these intoxicated Americans are wringing their hands, wailing, “But whooooo will lead Egypt?”

What the fuck?

ElBaradei appears to be the Egyptian people’s choice, but Americans are largely fucking ignoring that.

Is it that Americans don’t want the Egyptian people to choose their next leader? Are Americans that addicted to their governmental elites choosing the leaders of other nations, especially those in the Middle East, such as the current leaders of Iraq and Afghanistan?

That was a rhetorical question, but I’ll answer it anyway: Yes, they are. They’re that brainwashed, that ethnocentric. To most Americans, all that is important about Egypt is that Egypt continue to serve the wishes of the government in Washington, D.C., and the U.S. government’s pimp, the Israel-first lobby – the Egyptian people be damned.

My hope is that democracy takes root in an Egypt unmolested by the U.S. government and spreads elsewhere in the Middle East. The United States of America never could transplant true democracy to the Middle East or anywhere else on the planet because the USA only ever has its own greedy interests in mind.

My hope is that in my lifetime democracy spreads throughout the world, like a domino effect, to the extent that democracy is established in the United States of America before I die.

Perversely ironically, it seems to me that the United States of America will be the last domino to topple to the spread of actual democracy.

Partial book review: ‘Wingnuts’

This book sucks ass, as does its author. I did my best, but I was able to get only to page 18.

Trying to buck the criticism that those of us on the left never expose ourselves to views on the right (and vice-versa), I recently bought a copy of John Avlon’s Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America.

I like and I often use the term “wingnut” myself, and I bought Avlon’s book even though he (incorrectly) redefines the term “wingnut” to include those on either far side of the political ideology spectrum. (Actually, the commonly accepted meaning of the term “wingnut” is an individual who is to the far right, and the term “moonbat” would be applied to one on the far left.)

Despite the fact that I disagree with Avlon’s retooling of the vernacular to suit his own purposes, and despite the fact that his book puts Keith Olbermann on its cover with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin — a strikingly false equivalency — I bought his book at full cover price.

Can you say “buyer’s remorse”?

After several pages of reading Avlon’s false equivalencies — for instance, he implies that what he calls “Bush Derangement Syndrome” was/is anything like what he calls “Obama Derangement Syndrome,” which we have been witnessing for some time now* – I finally had to literally toss Avlon’s book aside when, on page 18, I read Avlon refer to the democratically elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as “Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.”

I mean, as U.S. Sen. Al Franken has put it, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts.

Hugo Chavez has been elected and re-elected by a strong majority of Venezuela’s voters and he has the support of a strong majority of the people of Venezuela.

Chavez has been clamping down on his right-wing political opposition (who did, after all, illegally and treasonously attempt to overthrow him in 2002),  and Venezuela needs to be monitored for human rights abuses (just as every nation does, and nothing has gone on in Venezuela under Chavez’s watch that has even approached what happened at the Abu Ghraib House of Horrors or at the Guantanamo Bay Concentration Camp during the eight long nightmarish years of rule by the unelected Bush regime).

But Hugo Chavez is far away from having earned the title of “dictator.” To call Chavez a “dictator” isn’t just against my belief that a nation’s government should work for the benefit of the most number of the nation’s people instead of for the benefit of the minority plutocrats and corporatocrats, as Chavez believes, but it is blatantly factually incorrect, and I can’t handle “non-fiction” books containing such glaring factual errors.

Nor does Avlon bother to explain why he uses the term “dictator” — he just throws it out there for no other apparent reason than that the members of the Bush regime (and George W. Bush, never having been legitimately elected, having started a bogus war that has cost thousands upon thousands of lives and billions upon billions of dollars, having shit and pissed all over the U.S. Constitution, and having left the nation in much, much worse shape than he got it, certainly comes closer to the dictionary definition of “dictator” than does Chavez ) and their allies at FOX “News” falsely called Chavez a “dictator” for several years. (To the right wing you are a “dictator,” you see, if you refuse to kiss U.S. corporate ass and refuse to surrender your nation’s natural resources and other wealth to U.S. corporations; that you have been democratically elected by your people is irrelevant to the democracy-hating, election-stealing right wing.)

But Avlon already demonstrates, before he calls Hugo Chavez a “dictator,” that he’s no more than a smug pretty boy who is posing as an expert on politics.

About all that he points to, in the 18 pages that I was able to stomach, in order to exemplify the far left or the far right are some examples of some political figure, usually George W. Bush or Barack Obama, being compared to Adolf Hitler. Ooooo! Insightful!

However, while skimming through his book, I noted that apparently anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan is a “wingnut”** for having stood up against the Bush regime’s bogus Vietraq War that killed her son — a war that the majority of Americans now acknowledge, fucking finally, was a bogus war.

Hmmm… A woman’s young son is killed for non-existent weapons of mass destruction, Dick Cheney’s Halliburton profits obscenely in that bogus war (as do the BushCheneyCorp’s other oily subsidiaries), and because she has the gall to protest her son’s pointless death, that makes Sheehan a “wingnut,” according to Avlon, who, I take it, hasn’t had a loved one killed in the Vietraq War or ever even been in harm’s way himself. 

Overall, Avlon reminds me of a lazy, mediocre parent or teacher who witnesses two children fighting, and, because he doesn’t want to bother to try to figure out what they’re fighting about — and whether one child might actually be in the right and the other child might actually be in the wrong — he labels both fighting children as equally guilty. There. Done with it. Why bother to unravel the facts? And why take sides?

Except that the real world is so much more complex than that, and our crumbling democracy didn’t really need another book put out there to tell people that instead of closely examining the facts and taking a principled stand on important issues based upon the facts, they need to just join the mushy middle, because obviously there’s no difference between the impassioned right and the impassioned left (or, as Avlon calls everyone who isn’t a milquetoast, apolitical, apathetic sleepwalker, the “wingnuts”).

To give just one of many possible demonstrations of how Avlon shills a false equivalency between the right and the left, right now, as I type this sentence, a book incredibly titled The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists incredibly is No. 13 — thirteen – on amazon.com’s top 100-selling books list.

When does a moonbat title like that ever get that far on any of the mainstream best-selling books lists?

Further, I know that many of us on the left had at least some fear of possible retribution for our outspokenness against the unelected, mass-murdering Bush regime — the Bush regime was, after all, engaging in the illegal surveillance of American citizens in the name of “national security,” and the Abu Ghraib House of Horrors and the Guantanamo Bay Concentration Camp certainly demonstrated for us where the Bush regime stood on human rights – yet here is a book out calling President Obama a “Manchurian president,” and I don’t sense that the wingnuts (the right-wing kind) have any real fear of retribution from the Obama administration for their publishing, promoting or purchasing a book thus titled.

And that’s because historically, dictators and tyrants — the kind who, unlike Hugo Chavez, actually steal elections, rule against the wishes of the majority of the ruled, and who actually torture and murder their political opponents — predominantly have been right-wingers, not left-wingers. (The right-wing Chilean Augusto Pinochet, for example, was a dictator.)

The wingnuts (my definition of the term, not Avlon’s) attack Obama unreservedly because they know that those on the left only rarely use what I might call, a la Dick Cheney, the “enhanced” tactics used by those on the right against their political opponents. Paradoxically, if Obama truly were the tyrant the wingnuts say he is, they probably wouldn’t be calling him a “tyrant” or a “Manchurian president” or the like — because if he truly were that, he just might retaliate against them.

As far as “Obama Derangement Syndrome” is concerned, it’s far more virulent and widespread than “Bush Derangement Syndrome” ever was. Not only did anti-Bush books not sell nearly as well as anti-Obama books sell today, but there was no “tea-party”-like “movement” formed by the left in response to Bush. The closest thing to the left’s “tea party” that I can think of is MoveOn.org, which, compared to the den of vipers that comprise the tea party, is a den of garter snakes.  

And while the minimum that we factually can say about the 2000 presidential election is that George W. Bush was made president in late 2000 under circumstances that were shady at best, and that in November 2000 he captured only 47.9 percent of the popular vote to Democrat Al Gore’s 48.4 percent, and that he was “re”-elected by only 50.7 percent of the popular vote in 2004, Barack Obama won 52.9 percent of the popular vote in November 2008, a better showing at the polls than “President” Bush ever had, yet far more people have questioned Obama’s presidential legitimacy than questioned Bush’s, even though Bush’s presidential legitimacy was much, much more questionable than Obama’s ever has been.

If you are a right-wing white guy from an oily, rich family, you can “win” the White House without having won the most number of votes (by “winning” the pivotal state of which your brother conveniently is governor, with a little help from that state’s top elections official who also sat on that state’s committee to elect you, and with a lot of help from the recount-quashing U.S. Supreme Court). And that kind of shit is perfectly OK.

But if you’re a black guy, you’re considered illegitimate even if you did better in your presidential election than the last white guy did in his two presidential elections. (But nooooo, racism is dead in the United States of Amnesia!)

For Avlon to make the false equivalency between the far left and the far right — to lump everyone who feels strongly about politics together as “wingnuts” — isn’t only grossly inaccurate, but it’s dangerous to our already endangered, dumbed-down democracy.

If you want to read a real book that’s worth your money, read Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason, now available in paperback.

Pay close attention to her chapter on “junk thought” – a term that describes John Avlon’s book to a “T”.

*Avlon defines “Obama Derangement Syndrome” as “Pathological hatred of President Obama, posing as patriotism,” and “Bush Derangement Syndrome” more or less as a visceral aversion to George W. Bush, of which I myself have been afflicted.

**On page 189, Avlon quotes Sheehan as — gasp! — having called George W. Bush a “bigger terrorist than Osama bin Laden.” Actually, it’s a fucking fact that Bush is reponsible for the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of people, including tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians and more than 4,000 of our troops, in his bogus Vietraq War — which is far more people than Osama bin Laden is responsible for having slaughtered on September 11, 2001, which was fewer than 3,000 people. And if we can call bin Laden a terrorist for having masterminded the slaughter of so many innocents, why can’t we call Bush & Co. terrorists for having masterminded the slaughter of so many more innocents? Why the fucking double standard?

Hugo Chavez: ‘Dictator for life’?

Updated Tuesday, February 17, 2009 (see below)

AFP photo

Seeing red: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez celebrates his win at the polls yesterday that will allow him to seek re-election in 2012.

Socialist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez yesterday won a vote that by amending the nation’s constitution scraps term limits for all elected officials in Venezuela.

Anti-Chavistas are saying that Chavez wants to be a “dictator for life.” Some of Chavez’s detractors are recognizing the fact that dictators – like George W. Bush was not elected by a majority of the people in 2000 (and thus could not legitimately have won “re”-election in 2004) – by definition are not actually elected, but that Chavez has been democratically elected fairly and squarely by the long-oppressed and impoverished people of Venezuela time and again, and therefore they are saying, at least a little more correctly, that Chavez wants to be “president for life.”

But since Chavez won yesterday’s vote that scraps term limits, it seems to me that the majority of the Venezuelan people, at least for now, are OK with Chavez being “president for life,” if it comes to that.

That this obvious fact is being overlooked (mostly by the Western corporately owned and controlled media and those who are mind slaves to these media) demonstrates the long-standing problem for Venezuela: Western nations, especially the United States of America, have long ignored the wishes of the people of Venezuela and have seen Venezuela only for what they can get from Venezuela, most notably, of course, oil.

The majority of the people of Venezuela have shown, time and again at the voting booth — under international elections surveillance – that they want Chavez, who has redistributed Venezuela’s wealth from the plutocratic thieves who used to run the nation of Venezuela to the people of Venezuela, to whom the nation’s wealth belongs.

It’s those who think that Venezuela exists only for the benefit of the richer nations and who don’t give a flying fuck about the poverty that their excesses create for others who oppose Chavez, who does care above the poverty of his people, as a president of a nation is supposed to do.

On that note: The number of homeless people whom I see in my neighborhood has increased every single fucking year since I moved into my current apartment in Sacramento in 2001, which was George W. Bush’s first year in office, and I was amused to note that 65 historians recently ranked Abraham Lincoln as the United States’ best president and ranked George W. Bush at No. 36 out of 42 presidents. (I’m surprised that King George II ranked that highly…)

Fuck; I wish that Hugo Chavez were my president. Surely over the past several years I’d have seen a decrease, rather than an increase, in homelessness. And at least Chavez always has been fairly democratically elected and re-elected, whereas although George W. Bush blatantly stole office in late 2000, the members of the Bush regime — master right-wing propagandists — routinely insanely hypocritically referred to Chavez as a “dictator.”

Hugo Chavez has not committed any atrocities such as the Vietraq War, which has resulted in the deaths of thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians; the Abu Ghraib House of Horrors; or even a Guantanamo Bay Concentration Camp.

He has been democratically elected over and over again by the majority of the Venezuelan people.

Yet he is the “dictator.”

No, Hugo Chavez’s only “crime” — aside from refusing to kiss U.S. ass, like a “good” Latin American leader “should” – is fighting the rich, whose riches come at the expense of the common Venezuelan.

It is the rich — and the dupes of the rich, such as those who consume the right-wing propaganda that is financed by the rich — who call the democratically elected Chavez a “dictator” while they support actual mass-murdering dictators, such as George W. Bush.

I hope that Chavez’s revolution one day comes to my nation.

Update (Tuesday, February 17, 2009): This interesting short news article from The Associated Press today speaks volumes:

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration says the referendum that cleared the way for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to run for re-election was democratic. It was rare praise for a U.S. antagonist after years of criticism from the Bush administration.

U.S. State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid noted “troubling reports of intimidation.” But he added [today] that “for the most part this was a process that was fully consistent with democratic process.”

Chavez captured more than 54 percent of the vote, according to preliminary tallies of 94 percent of results. The win allows him to run for a third term.

Asked whether that was a result the United States welcomes, Duguid said the issue “was a matter for the Venezuelan people [to decide].”

What a huge difference a change in White House administration from unelected Repugnican to duly elected Democrat makes, at least in terms of U.S. relations with Venezuela!

Just last month, according to the Bush-occupied White House, Hugo Chavez was a “dictator.”

Today, the White House, now in sane(r) hands that were actually fucking elected, acknowledges the reality that Chavez, who calls himself a democratic socialist, actually is democratic.

“Reports of intimidation” in Venezuela may be accurate or may be right-wing fabrications or a mixture of both. But even if they are accurate, you can’t fairly hold Chavez accountable for the actions of all of his supporters, many if not most of whom are quite passionate about maintaining the populist change that Chavez initiated in Venezuela after years of rule by aristocratic right-wing kleptocrats.

And it’s not like the United States, after the presidential election debacles of 2000 and 2004, is in the moral position to lecture any other nation about up-and-up elections in the first fucking place. The fact alone that in 2000 George W. Bush “won” the pivotal state of Florida while Florida’s chief elections officer, fellow Repugnican Katherine Harris, had sat on the state’s committee to elect Bush, and that in 2004 Bush “won” “re”-election by “winning” the pivotal state of Ohio while Ohio’s chief elections officer, fellow Repugnican Kenneth Blackwell, had sat on the state’s committee to “re”-elect Bush — fuck, if that doesn’t have “banana republic” written all over it, I don’t know what does.

But it’s never “election fraud” or “terrorism” when a stupid white man commits it.

But I digress…

Again, it’s nice to see the White House finally fucking acknowledge that the rule of Venezuela is actually up to the people of Venezuela and not up to the stupid white men (such as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney) who have been trying to run the entire fucking planet for their own benefit at the expense of the majority of the planet’s population — or up to the stupid rich white men’s millions of dumbfuck dupes who actually believe that these stupid rich white men have the common person’s interests at heart.

Still, just as pro-Israel  propaganda is so ubiquitous that the majority of Americans (who are blindly pro-Israel) don’t even realize that they’ve been brainwashed, anti-Chavez propaganda is so ubiquitous within the U.S. that even the members of the press, who are supposed to remain neutral, use such loaded terms as “a U.S. antagonist” to describe Chavez. (“Firebrand,” with its implications of insanity and/or anger-control problems, is another loaded term that I’ve seen the mainstream media use to describe Chavez.)

Hugo Chavez is the democratically elected president of Venezuela. That is his role in the world. But, as is typical for an apparently American news writer, the writer can see Chavez only though the lens of U.S. interests, so Chavez becomes “a U.S. antagonist,” as though the only way to describe or define Chavez (or any other nation’s leader) would be as “pro-” or “anti-” U.S. (Wasn’t it George W. Bush who used to scoff imperialistically: “You are with us or you are against us”?)

We Americans have this blind, knee-jerk imperialist tendency to see other nations only in terms of whether they kiss our ass and do what we say or whether they actually — gasp! – stand up for their sovereignty, as Hugo Chavez has had the gall to do for his people and for which he has been falsely branded a “dictator.” (And plenty of Americans still believe the “dictator Chavez” lie, just as they still believe the other lie propagated by the treasonous Bush regime, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 – and thus, the Vietraq War.)

And then we fat, lazy and ignorant Americans scratch our heads and ask ourselves why they hate us.

I’ll miss the first Stepford lady — NOT

AFP photo

Stepford wife Laura Bush (shown above in September) was in a tizz that her husband had to duck a pair of shoes, but has no apparent problem whatsofuckingever that her unelected husband is responsible for the wholly unnecessary deaths of at least tens of thousands of people, including more than 4,200 members of the U.S. military in Vietraq.

Laura Bush today stated that the throwing of a pair of shoes at her mass-murdering dictator of a husband at a press conference in Baghdad earlier this month constitutes an act of assault.

Well, she’s right, of course; legally speaking, throwing an object at someone, especially an object that could harm its target should it make contact with its target, constitutes assault. (It would have been battery had one of the two shoes thrown at him by the righteously enraged Iraqi actually hit the “president.”)

So yes, it was an assault.

But an infinitely worse assault was the assault on the entire fucking American democracy when her husband stole office in late 2000 despite having lost not only the popular vote to Al Gore by more than a half-million votes, but also despite having lost the pivotal state of Florida, which “President” Bush “won” by fewer than 550 votes but whose recount the Repugnican-dominated U.S. Supreme Court halted.

It was, in fact, the largest assault on the American democracy of my lifetime.

Then there was the infinitely worse assault on the Iraqi people, whom the unelected Bush regime made pay for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, although 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, the ruling class of which the Bush crime family is buddy-buddy, and not a single of the 9/11 hijackers was from Iraq, and to this day there is not a shred of evidence that Iraq nor a single Iraqi had had anything whatsofuckingever to do with 9/11. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died in the Bush regime’s illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust Vietraq War.

Because you know, the best way to prevent another terrorist attack upon the United States by angry Arabs is to slaughter tens of thousands of completely innocent Arabs! Yes, the Bush regime’s “war on terror” guarantees that we’ll have terror to combat for generations to come! (Not that that is treason or anything!) 

And there has been the infinitely worse assault on the more than 4,200 members of the U.S. military who have died pointlessly in Iraq. They didn’t die protecting their country because Iraq never posed a threat to their country. They died for nothing. No, wait — they did die for the billions of dollars that were stolen from the U.S. treasury and handed over to Dick Cheney’s Halliburton and the other war-profiteering subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp via the bogus war in Vietraq.

But Laura Bush is really pissed off that her poor, poor husband had to duck a pair of shoes.

Can you imagine what it must be like to be Laura Bush? (If you’re not a wingnut or a Repugnican, I mean?)

To be able to ignore the fact that your husband is a mass-murdering dictator but to be able to have a tizzy about the fact that your mass-murdering dictator of a husband had to duck a pair of shoes?

Laura Bush might miss the White House, but after she finally dies, she can become the first lady of hell. Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven anyway, right?