As Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez prepares to “win” a new election with Jimmy Carter’s renewed collaboration, suspect “polls” executed with Chavista funding, are preemptively declaring Chavez the runaway winner. That’s funny because Chavez sure isn’t acting like a winner. He’s acting like a dictator who’s running scared. Like Robespierre staring down Danton, fearful of losing power, lashing out and ultimately unleashing terror.

Check out what Gustavo Coronel, writing in Venezuela Today, has to say about this. He says what’s going on is a slow coup d’etat to consolidate total power and it’s happening right now under the Organization of American States’ nose.

Chavez is warning oil workers they’ll either join his ‘revolution’ or get out. Any workers who think different are “enemies of the revolution.” These oil workers aren’t allowed NOT to vote for him. (Scuse me, I thought working for an oil company was a job and what mattered was whether I did the job well!) Because oil itself, mere Marxist matter, not individual human achievement, is now the substance of Chavez’s ‘revolution.’ So total loyalty is all that’s left and all that’s demanded. Nothing else, no excellence, no service, no achievement, no improvement, matters. Just loyalty to Chavismo now.

With this cynical oil strategy waxing, the only thing it underlines for us is the need to totally cut off Venezuelan petroleum, no matter what happens, no matter what it costs. It’s the only thing that can stop Chavez.

Chavez has declared he’s going to consolidate all power and he’s going to get mean. Anyone with eyes to see can see the end of liberties in Venezuela and a regime of Cuban-style repression.

What’s coming is Thermidor, the most vicious point of the French Revolution, the terror.

Meanwhile, throwing the curtain of obscurity on the West is fast and furious effort by the Chavista International based in Miraflores Palace (but run by a foreigner from Canada!) to keep the world spotlight off him as he consolidates power. These dubious, rigged polls are everywhere.

And Chavistas, from the ANSWER coalition in Washington to Madison, Wisconsin to Oakland, California, are expressing their defense of Chavismo, fighting to bring disinformation to the U.S. and the rest of the world to conceal the real state of things. One New York Times stringer acts like a bought man in the service of chavistadom and there are many others who also are willing to do Chavez’s bidding.

This in short is nothing short of a long slow coup d’etat in progress. Read Gustavo Coronel’s powerful piece here.