By Rich Lowry
Friday, March 08, 2013
Let us pause and reflect. The Left’s favorite
self-aggrandizing thug has shed this mortal coil. Hugo Chávez, R.I.P.
All the country’s least reflective and most reflexive
ideologues of the Left immediately issued warm farewells — Sean Penn, Michael
Moore, Oliver Stone, and, of course, the nation’s 39th president, Jimmy Carter.
Carter praised Chávez for his commitment “to bring
profound changes to his country,” which, by installing himself as the effective
president for life, he certainly did. Carter noted his “formidable
communications skills,” a quality that is not unusual in successful populist
demagogues. In the gentle tone of someone who regrets that his good friend
sometimes cheats at bridge, Carter allowed that he did not agree “with all of
the methods followed by his government.”
New York congressman José Serrano rushed to praise
Chávez: “He understood democracy and basic human desires for a dignified life.”
As a technical matter, Serrano is right: Chávez understood democracy
exceedingly well, if by that you mean he understood how to exploit its forms
while hollowing out its institutions to entrench himself in power in
perpetuity.
He displaced a corrupt, conscienceless oligarchy when he
took power in 1999 with his own corrupt, conscienceless rule. In a recent
report, Human Rights Watch detailed how “the accumulation of power in the
executive and the erosion of human rights protections have allowed the Chávez
government to intimidate, censor, and prosecute critics and perceived
opponents.”
Fidel Castro was his mentor, and he propped up the Castro
regime with Venezuela’s ample oil. He praised every heinous dictator around the
planet as a brother-in-arms. He was hell on the plutocrats, and also on the
Jews. “Don’t let yourselves be poisoned by those wandering Jews,” he warned his
countrymen, in a sentiment worthy of the 15th century.
All of this should make Chávez an unsympathetic figure
for everyone in America. Not so, sadly. For some, all is forgiven if you hate
the rich with a white-hot passion and talk the language of populist
redistribution, while wrapping your program in a bow of rancid
anti-Americanism. Then, every allowance will be made for your thuggery.
Everyone will obsess about your colorful and charming personality. And praise
you when you’re gone.
Chávez’s American admirers apparently consider his
program as being SCHIP with teeth. They must envy that while we endlessly
debate ending “tax breaks for oil companies,” Chávez got to run a state-owned
oil company and nationalize other industries besides. They must rue that
someone here in the U.S. who speaks the truth about the noxiousness of American
power merely gets a tenure-track position, while down in Venezuela he gets to
run a country by decree.
During Chávez’s time in office — blessed by high oil
prices — poverty fell in Venezuela. But it fell in other countries in the
region as well, according to The Economist, thanks to a commodity boom. Chavez
left his country crime-ridden, wracked by inflation, and beset by a shortage of
goods.
The night of his death, Rachel Maddow had Washington Post
columnist Eugene Robinson on her program to discuss him. She asked Robinson in
a voice heavy with sarcasm whether Hugo Chávez was really “the monster” he was
made out to be. Robinson explained that Chávez bonded with the poor and had
lots of popular support. Maddow gently prodded Robinson to address criticisms
of Chávez for not advancing freedom.
Unable to muster any of the denunciatory venom he
lavishes on Republicans once or twice a week, Robinson issued forth with a
strangely tortured construction: “He was not what we would call a lover of
democracy as we would like to see it practiced.” Robinson noted that Chávez
gerrymandered electoral districts, but, hey, “that happens elsewhere as well.”
All in all, he was “a man of contradictions.” You know, like Disraeli or
Gladstone.
Goodbye, Hugo Chávez. All your friends who got to admire
your authoritarian savvy and gross economic mismanagement from a safe distance
will miss you very much.
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