Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez calls it just spreadin’ revolution.

The rest of the hemisphere has a plainer word for what he’s up to: Meddling.

And ohhh, he’s been out meddling! Nobody in the history of the Americas, including the U.S., has been ever accused of meddling so often from so many places as he has. In so short a period of time!

Just look at today’s morning edition of El Universal, the main newspaper in Caracas, which has a string of meddlings described.

Baduel: Military bases are for Bolivian troops
Salvadorian Gov’t to investigate Venezuela’s meddling into internal affairs
Ch????vez could help to commit an electoral offense in Nicaragua, says candidate
Venezuela denies meddling in Ecuadorian electoral campaign
Guyana calls for an explanation on border occurrence

And this boxed quote:

Bolivia????????s announced plans to build military bases on its border with Peru would involve ???????a shift in our situation, a demonstration of distrust and, therefore, an unfriendly gesture,??????? towards Peru. ???????From Venezuela, we can expect anything under the present circumstances.???????
-Peruvian President Alan Garc????a

But that’s just one paper with one day’s worth of news. Prensa Latina, a Cuban government propaganda organ that purports to be news, adds one more item on the same topic from Chile:

Bachelet against Wall over Venezuela

Meanwhile, look who’s asleep at the switch on some obvious additional meddling:

US Energy Department to accept discounted fuel from Citgo

Colossal idiot. Sam Bodman doesn’t see a thing, and Chavez’s ‘devil’ speech thundered from the pulpit of the United Nations didn’t seem to give him the hint.

Fortunately, the U.S. also has simple humble boondock unsophisticates who don’t get invited to Beltway white-wine parties seeing things differently:

Alaska Villages Reject Venezuelan Oil

In short, it’s as if Hugo Chavez’s Masterplan for the takeover of the Americas is going full bore.

Which is odd, given that he’s in big danger of losing the presidential election in his own country in December. Polls seem to be telling him he’s got a problem. That’s why he’s done a 360 on his image, putting on a blue shirt and blowing kisses to voters, cynically telling them, in a real treacly way, that he does it all for love. It’s like the putrid revolutionary love poetry of the guerrillas in the mountains of the 1960s. You know, the maudlin Che warrior-poet thing: ‘The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love and the more I make love the more I want to make revolution,’ as Che put it. Spread the revolution, spread the love.

This creepy YouTube, showing Chavez’s face all full of weird tics as he expresses ‘love,’ and tries unsuccessfully to show his softer side, is particularly instructive – and repulsive. It’s kind of like a Tim Conway skit.

So Chavez’s ambitiously trying to take over the hemisphere, mostly through electoral apparatuses, yet may lose it all come December unless he can get away with fraud, which I am really starting to wonder about – Venezuelans are poised to catch him cheating and are watching his stacked electoral board’s every move like hawks. This I learned from a string of phone calls to Caracas this week. Venezuelans aren’t relying on a scumbag like Jimmy Carter, or an incompetent liar like Jennifer McCoy, or any of the other minions of the Carter Center, which openly endorsed fraud rather than adhere to methodology and stand up for truth. Venezuelans are wise to them and are now taking things into their own hands and they’re no longer afraid.

Will Venezuelans crush Chavez before he can destroy the rest of Latin America? The Venezuelans and the rest of Latin America are on one page about this:

Hugo Chavez must go.