Blogging the democratic revolution
Bolivian government coca-leaf graffiti targeted at dissidents in Santa Cruz Source: AP, via Yahoo! News Argentina’s Cronista Comercial newspaper last week released an Argentine foreign ministry study, whose authors used various corporate-risk business models to forecast a 56% chance of civil war breaking out in Bolivia in the next few months. It’s faster than anyone thinks. Bolivia’s President Evo Morales Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! News At issue is the growing tyranny of Bolivia’s leftwing populist president, Evo Morales. His popularity numbers have dropped, and in Bolivia’s industrious, entrepreneurial, job-creating and mixed-race east, discontent with his Marxist remedies is growing. Morales…
Whoo hoo! Our favorite writer, Alvaro Vargas Llosa, has done the impossible in a new essay – taken on sex in Colombia as a struggle for democracy. A perfect topic for Publius Pundit to link, so go see what he’s written here. In Colombia, young women have told their young men to drop the gangster and gun and drug crap or else they’ll get no sex from them. Apparently, it’s very primal and effective, for a society at its wit’s end. Yep, no sex, those who can’t drop their barbarian activity can be laughed at by their peers as maricones…
The mystery country in the United Nations voter lineup for Security Council seats, Chile, led by a socialist with roots in the Allende era, is apparently fed up to the quick with the government of Hugo Chavez. Chavez’s anti-American diatribes disgusted most nations that had planned to support Venezuela over Guatemala for the Security Council seat, but didn’t bother Chile’s President Michelle Bachelet all that much. More recent Chavista attacks over the weekend, charging her with being rightwing – on the weekend she laid a wreath at the spot where Allende’s foreign minister, Orlando Letelier, was assassinated, was an entirely…
Boz at Bloggings by Boz has a must-read collection of poll numbers, many the last pollings that will be available before elections next week in Brazil and Nicaragua. He has a special item on Brazil here, as well. I love his item on what Guatemalans have on their minds, it’s something that will provoke a knowing nod from people who know what common sense is. And Peru’s opinion poll revelations confirm just what we have been thinking about Alan Garcia. Read Boz’s latest poll numbers here.
I was going to put together a Venezuela blog roundup but Daniel got there before me, putting together a fine collection of Venezuelan blog posts in these fermenty times, and saying all the stuff I wanted to say. It reminds me of Daniel’s and my own simultaneously-made observation that Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit did exactly for Miguel Octavio what Hugo Chavez did for Noam Chomsky – rocketed him up to Number One. For Miguel, Glenn’s link yesterday got Miguel’s blog over 13,000 hits and put him at the very top of the salon.com blog rankings for two days in a…
By popular demand, I post Alvaro Varga Llosa’s awesome essay on Chavez’s appearance at the United Nations and what it really means for Venezuela. For educational purposes, only Ch????vez’s Inferno By ALVARO VARGAS LLOSA September 25, 2006; The Wall Street Journal Page A14 It would have been more appropriate for Hugo Ch????vez to brandish Dante’s “Divine Comedy” than Chomsky’s “Hegemony or Survival” during his sulfuric broadside at the U.N. last week. In the first part of the Italian masterpiece, the author undertakes a journey through the nine concentric circles of the Inferno, each representing a type of evil. Dante’s description…
Alek Boyd has an excellent new photo show of scenes from the Chavista political “base” around Caracas. He shows dilapidated housing and garbage flung all over the place, in pictures that make Tijuana look like Beverly Hills. Check it out, here.
Following the famous United Nations devil speech, this is the singularly best Hugo Chavez cartoon I’ve ever seen, snidely illustrating the realities of the U.S.-Venezuela relationship. I’ve never seen anything so mean. Hugo comes out absolutely pathetic, you’ll never look at him the same way again. See it here.
President Evo Morales of Bolivia was the first Bolivian president ever to skip the famous Expocruz, the Santa Cruz cow show. He did so because he considers its denizens capitalists. Out in Bolivia’s Butch-and-Sundance territory, nothing’s more important than this show. Miguel Centellas, in this post here, noted that Morales’ absence from the show worried his Cruceno parents every bit as much as renewed violence in the streets. He writes: But threats by Evo’s supporters to shut down the Feria Expocruz, a small scale regional, industrial “world’s fair” in Santa Cruz has my parents worried (not least, of course, because…
Hugo Chavez addresses the United Nations General Assembly Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! News If Hugo Chavez had wanted to repel the American public, he could not have done a better job than this morning, speaking before the United Nations. Waving a Noam Chomsky book like a late-night K-Tel salesman, he found time to hawk Chomsky tomes, which I am sure was effective – given that people will want to know exactly what he filled his head with after a rant like that. Next, the oily encyclopedia salesman began raving that George Bush was the devil. He yelled about the smell…
Alek Boyd at VCrisis has an interesting item up about his trip to the slums of Caracas. You know, THOSE slums, the pivotal no-man’s-land where no one is safe, but everything hinges on, in December’s coming Venezuelan presidential election. Chavez is a populist and has maintained power on the backs of this poor vote. Alek chats up these Chavista voters over in their icky, scary, horrible red tumbledown cinderblock slums, and has a lot of photos. These conversations are much more interesting firsthand from the Chavistas themselves than filtered through the santized prism of the western Sandalistas, who often claim…
Thai military tanks surrounded the presidential house as Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra made a speech at the United Nations in New York. Source: Reuters, via News.com.au Goodbye, democracy. Thailand’s military has launched a coup to overthrow the government. All the good English language Thai Web sites, like The Bangkok Post and The Nation are down, probably from huge traffic. The U.S. stock market, fearful of what events in Thailand can do to world markets, is falling over this. A well-placed correspondent in Bangkok right now e-mails to me: It’s the army commander, overthrowing Thaksin. Nothing to do with Islamofascists or…
There’s such great blogging going on in Venezuela these days that I almost feel I have been remiss in keeping track of it all. Ahmadinejad of Iran is in Caracas, Chavez is running for reelection, and Venezuela’s economy is falling apart. Here is a brief blog roundup from some of the finest: Daniel, of Venezuela News & Views has a great bloggy mishmash (or since he is in France now, let’s say ragout) of acid comments about Chavismo with several pearls of observation, like this one about current condition of Chavez here: The historian in this blogger has seen too…
Rightwing Swedish babes celebrate their victory over socialism Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! News In a wonderful surprise, Sweden’s center-right bloc has defeated the long-ruling socialist coalition, in Sunday’s parliamentary election, 48%-46.2%. A new government is being formed now. The winners are a four-party bloc who’ve been out of power for 25 years. They have just ousted the ruling 3-party socialist coalition which has held power in its current lineup for a decade. Meanwhile, taking in just 35% of the vote, the socialist party itself had its worst showing since 1914! The center-right, led by 41-year-old Fredrik Reinfeldt of the centrist…
The death of great Italian journalist continues to reverberate, oddly intersecting the entry of the pope into the struggle against Islamofascism, and some great essays have been written about her and her legacy. I’ve been really moved by them and present a small roundup of the best of this writing: Victor Davis Hanson has a collection of resonant thoughts in a short informal essay, describing his sorrow at her death and why it has hit us all more deeply in this age of terror and Islamofascism. This is one I read several times. It can be read on Pajamas Media…
Major mainstream television networks in France and Brazil have both taken aim at the odious regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba. And I don’t mean something small. They’ve put out huge high-advertising long programs out, firing a unusual cannonade at the dictatorship. This has never happened before. These TV programs document Cuba’s long lines, miserable shortages as a way of life, bureaucracy, commissars, vaunted health care that is nothing but a failure, monstrous communist indoctrination that passes for “education,” secret police surveillance, jailing of dissidents, and complete lack of freedom. It’s realistic programming on Cuba that no one in either…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s foreign advisory team, based at the Miraflores presidential palace, are deep into the task of getting him reelected for the third time, something they may succeed at, given Chavez’s manipulation of the electoral system. Yes, you heard right, foreign as in foreigner. Which sounds pretty disgusting. Shouldn’t one be a citizen of a country before one messes around with its campaigns? Not in Chavismo. That’s why the Chavista campaign team has such an unusual obsession with foreign affairs, something that Miguel at Devil’s Excrement notices. But it’s not all that unusual, in my opinion, it’s simply…
Venezuelan exile Alek Boyd went back to Caracas for a visit after several years living in England, and has asked us to flag his chronicles of his tour there, where he will be covering the campaign of Manuel Rosales. Sounds interesting enough. In his first dispatch, he writes a fair and accurate account of arriving at the airport there, speaking of the monumental Chavista signs, a dictatorship trademark, and the courteous, swift Venezuelan customs officials, something pleasantly surprising. But oh god, Alek’s language! And I don’t mean his command of English, which is fine, but his use of language to…
Oriana Fallaci, freedom fighter Source: Mlle Glass’ photos The great Oriana Fallaci, a clear-eyed journalist and universal freedom fighter for democracy, has died. We all knew she had cancer but this is very sad and affecting news. Her impact on world events cannot be underestimated. The Italian journalist went places no one else would go and saw through everything. No dictator could fool her. She exposed and clarified clowns like Khaddafi and others so that we could see what the real tyrannical enemy was like. At the end of her life, she denounced Islamofascism and extolled the value of civilization,…
Source: AFP, via Getty Images Bolivia is on fire. The fiery democratic revolutionary babes of Santa Cruz are no more. Anti-communist protest turns violent in eastern Bolivia Friday Source: AFP, via Getty Images Now, it’s angry citizens of The Media Luna – four provinces, led by Santa Cruz, fighting to the last man against the brutal expansionary communism of Evo Morales’ Bolivia. This is going well beyond peaceful demonstrations to the first stages of insurgency and maybe war. Revolutionary war. They are fighting tyranny. They’re fighting with axes, fists, and cudgels, in an action that began with a general strike…
Hugo Chavez is so detested by average Venezuelans that he’s reduced to passing out great big bottles of rum at his campaign rallies. Voters quaff these booze bottles full of liquor, pirate-style while they think it over. Evidently Chavez thinks this raises the odds of voters checking off his name on Venezuelan election day, Dec. 3. Naturally, this has attracted street drunks to Chavez rallies and fostered a new social phenomenon – Dancing Drunks for Chavez. Miguel has the must-be-seen-to-be-believed photos in this post here. More seriously, one commentatator on Miguel’s site notes that weird dancing public drunkeness is often…
Deep sea oil rig, Gulf of Mexico Source: National Aeronautics & Space Administration Today, a quiet revolutionary time bomb was presented to Hugo Chavez. He has no idea what it is or what it means. But this gift means it’s all over for the brutal Venezuelan tyrant in the next few years. He won’t be bothering us anymore. He won’t be bothering anyone anymore. He’s finished. Treasure was discovered in America’s Gulf of Mexico waters today, black gold so vast and so deep and so surprising and so recoverable that overnight, America’s energy reserves have just increased as much as…
Miss Indonesia Universe, crowned Aug. 25, 2006 Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! News! Miss Kazakhstan World 2005, Miss Kazakhstan Universe 2006 Source: Missosology Miss England World 2005 Source: Yahoo!, via My Pet Jawa Miss Afghanistan Earth 2003 Source: Wikipedia What do these girls have in common? They’re all Muslim beauty queens, showing off their hair, faces, arms, legs, and much more. Nothing remarkable about that in modern society – everyone’s got to wear a bathing suit sometimes, and no, I don’t mean this – but for perverse, repressed, bitter, dirty-minded Islamofascists, it’s something that’s utterly forbidden. The Age of Democratic Revolution…
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, still refusing to concede the July 2 election Source: Agencia EFE, via Yahoo! Mexico A Spanish newspaper today warned that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who refuses to concede the election he lost last July 2, is gravely abusing not only Mexico’s democracy, but his own political viability and his left cause itself. El Pais writes that Lopez Obrador is doing incalculable damage to Mexico’s institutions, his prospects as a future candidate and that this refusal to budge will likely drag the progressive cause into oblivion. AMLO, the paper writes, is increasingly is “a prisoner of his…
Adam Gadahn Source: AFP, via Yahoo! News Al-Qaida released a video of a local American, Adam Gadahn, inviting us all to ‘convert or die‘ to bin Laden’s perversion of Islam, following an introduction by al-Qaida monster, Dr. Zawahiri, who’s bin Laden’s Number Two. It’s not his first time in a bin-Laden video. He’s recognizable as the U.S. citizen who made a threat to blow up Los Angeles a couple years before. Now he’s hit the big time, a spot on a Zawahiri Internet broadcast. Since he’s a former heavy-metal dude turned Islamofascistist fanatic, his new identity must make him feel…