Thousands of Venezuelans rallied against Venezuela’s dictator today, protesting the anniversary of the awful day in 1992 when then-Colonel Hugo Chavez tried to seize power through military means. But Hugo Chavez had a surprise of them – a demonstration of his own to insist that this attempted military coup, I kid you not, was a good thing.

Yes, the thuggish dictator who continuously forces every visitor and shill, from Jimmy Carter to Jesse Jackson to the LA Times editorial board to Cindy Sheehan to declare Chavez ‘democratically elected’ no matter what he does at the ballot box nevertheless wants all Venezuela to celebrate his effort to launch a military coup.

What makes this interesting is that it’s an aping of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s July 26 effort to launch a putsch from the Isles of Pines back in the 1950s, and speaking of failed putsches, well, the thinking of Donald Rumsfeld springs to mind.

In short, Chavez is trying to create a fake revolutionary myth around himself and force it to live on in history.

But Venezuelans damn well aren’t going to let him.

In their thousands they marched today, with little notice and little accommodation from the authorities.

Meanwhile, on the Chavista front, a Chavista countermarch was orchestrated, with every participant warned he’d lose his government check if he didn’t show up. Chavez, after all, IS the government now, so to him it’s perfectly logical. He’s not only the government, he’s (as one poster I saw in Caracas informed me) ‘the people’ too.

Chavez addressed the ‘rally’ with threats to shut down U.S. Citgo refineries and drive oil prices sky high for the U.S. if the U.S. “breaks” relations with Venezuela, something it hasn’t said it wanted to do. How ironic that this is happening just as Americans are beginning to boycott Citgo! I wonder if his mullings of a refinery shutdown signals that the boycott is hitting hard?

Chavez’s anti-U.S. tirade underlines the desperation of the dictator that he must continually whip up anti-American sentiment among his loyalists to stay politically afloat. Not that you will ever hear this in the mainstream media.

As Chavez’s popularity drops precipitously, the Washington Post has an ignorant rube reporter shilling for him in this report here. She dutifully wrote out the one-sided Chavista party line, beginning with the unwittingly patronizing lede: “the shantys came tumbling down,” (how quaint!) and neglecting to notify us that Vargas state is still full of shantys coming down on Chavez’s watch and no one rebuilding them, using this romantic picture to assure us how wonderful Chavez’s handouts are, a story stale as day old bread, straight from the Chavista block committees. And by the way, not true. She was taking everything they said at face value with no consciousness of the coercion involved, as the much-savvier Venezuelan bloggers describe. She was apparently so starry-eyed about getting “access” (like this is hard) to a romantic, dreamy, oooh, hunky, primal Chavista … ooooh, wheee, squeal, squeal, that she was unable to ask any serious journalistic questions about coercion, about day-long waits in line for government checks, about rationing, about the block committees, about the armed men in every poor barrio preserving the party line. Truly a lousy naive reporter, and up until she came along, her paper’s work had generally been good.

Fortunately there are blogs, with authentic Venezuelan eyewitnesses, so we don’t have to buy what this obviously pro-Chavez Washington Post shill is hawking.

Miguel Octavio went to the demonstration himself instead of swallowed the Chavista party line, and took a truly spectacular collection of photos. In a marvelous historic record, he snapped 88 pictures of buses full of Chavistas who were bused in in order to participate, every one of them forced to do it. Or else.

It’s a breathtaking collection of photos indeed. And Daniel in Yaracuy has even more eyewitness reports of what really happened as Chavez tried to paint a propagandistically Castroite and rosy picture of himself. His friend was forced to the Chavista rally, something he didn’t want to do.

Read the whole thing here and here.

UPDATE: And Elephants in Academia has more choice thoughts here.