As Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez continues to crash in the polls, we are seeing a growing campaign of what can be summed up in short as lies and intimidation, explicitly centered around the Venezuelan oil company, Chavez’s own cash-cow.

Over the weekend, Chavez’s energy minister, Rafael Ramirez, explicitly threatened oil workers at the state oil company with firing if they didn’t vote for Hugo Chavez. That’s illegal. But it’s also a sign of desperation. That’s a sign of trouble brewing. But It didn’t stop him.

“We are here supporting Chavez, who is our leader, who is the top leader of this revolution. Anyone who does not feel comfortable with this direction would rather give his position to a Bolivarian person. And that is precisely what we are telling our labor directly.”

In other words, vote for Chavez or we’ll come get you.

Chavez, meanwhile, endorsed those Ramirez remarks and snidely reminded any potential dissidents that they could ‘go to Miami.’

Intimidation is now the order of the day in Venezuela. But so are the lies.

The biggest lie is in the new appearance of push polls. A San Francisco leftist pollster, profiled as a Chavez booster in the San Francisco Chronicle here, called Evans-McDonough, took money from this very PDVSA oil company described above, the oil company of intimidation, the oil company where you vote for Chavez or you lose your job, and published a blatantly pro-Chavez poll of no merit whatsoever, claiming Chavez was 22 points ahead in the polls. Given the other polls out there, that show Rosales gaining on Chavez rapidly, and given this company is working for the Venezuelan government, this poll has no value except as a campaign tool for Chavez justify himself in the event of massive electoral fraud.

It’s absolutely despicable that a pollster allows himself to be used this way. Already, they’ve claimed they are the best pollsters due to their earlier work pre-justifying fraud in Venezuela’s recall referendum of 2004. That’s only claimable if the election results are honest. Doing a phony push poll and then flipping the results to reflect the poll is nothing more than manipulative propaganda.

Chavez is losing this election. He knows it. He’s desperate. That’s why we are seeing a sharp rise in these dirty-pool shenanigans here and it’s imperative that we expose them before Jimmy Carter gets into the act and starts using them as his fig leaf.