Bent Notes

Now he’s kicking the US ambassador out of Venezuela and calling his ambassador home from Washington.

Russia and Venezuela are going to conduct a joint naval exercise.

He Who Definitely Doesn’t Walk On Water in Oregon, pronouncing on Iran and Venezuela and environmental leadership.

Oh, and on Good Morning America, he tries to  delare his wife untouchable.

Chavez has ordered ten battalions to the Venezuelan-Colombian border.  It seems to be in response to the Uribe administration’s greasing of a top FARC guy.

UPDATE: Venezuela and Ecuador have both closed their Colombian embassies.  Chavez’s beef was with the fact that Colombia crossed the border into Ecuador to get the FARC leader.

Good Morning America’s queen of girly-girl chit-chat, gush and fluff gets all wet in the britches looking back on the career of the Western Hemisphere’s version of Stalin.

 UPDATE: Allison Flexnor - whose exact function at CNN is unknown, but who is in a position to issue guidelines to anchors and reporters - is likewise a tyranny-lover. 

Chavez lost his referendum on constiutional tinkering, and Sudan is pardoning the teddy-bear teacher.

Let us temper our relief with the understanding that Chavez remains president and has already nationalized the steel, oil and broadcasting industries, and that there will be another incident, like this Teddy Bear, like Salman Rushdie’s novel, like Theo Van Gogh’s movie, like the Danish cartoons, like the Pope’s address, that the Islamic world will use as an excuse for outrage and to see how much dhimmitude it can elicit from the West.

Some Bolivians are quite hot about Evo Morales’s attempts to usurp power according to the Chavez playbook.

Ahmadinejad cavorts with his own in Latin America in the afterglow of his dhimmi-schmooze in Manhattan.

Isn’t it interesting that last night’s booing of Miss USA at the Miss World pageant in Mexico City comes at the same time as the illegal-alien debate in this country is reaching fever pitch?

What’s with a significant enough swath of the Mexican public expressing rancor toward its neighbor to make that the newsworthy thing about the night?  What’s their beef?  Are any of them related to any of the twelve-plus million illegal aliens here in the United States?  Surely their problem is not with the bucks being sent back home.

I doubt if all of them are some kind of reconquista / La Raza types, but the odor I get wafting off their antics is of the type that, in concentrated form, manifests itself that way.

Resentment of the Yanqui gringo is one of the great exercises in human childishness over the last century.  If ever a country had everything it needed to be rockin’ the world economically, it’s Mexico.  Natural resources out the wazoo.  A large population.  But between corruption and statism, it’s never revved up its economic engine, and consequently its citizens scramble across the border, laws - and interest in the foundational principles that have made the United States great - be damned.

There’s no doubt that an array of sociocultural forces in the world see the United States as arrogant and rapacious.  It’s not because that’s the case.  It’s because we approach them assuming they’re ready for prime time, up to speed with stuff like political freedom, equality for women, contract law, property rights, and an industrious spirit, and it’s utterly foreign to them.

Seal the borders and make anybody who wants to stay here beyond a vacation-length visit prove they respect the underpinnings of our greatness.

Here’s what the buddy of Jimmy Carter, Cindy Sheehan, Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte is up to.  Bye, bye to Venezuela’s oldest commercial television station (1953).  Hello, state-run TV.

Venezuela’s oil industry is now a completely socialist enterprise.

Chavez extolls Marx in his weekly radio show and tells other South American presidents that capitalism is “the road to perdition.”

Isn’t this the third time in a year that he and Chavez (he of the recent-announcement-of-nationalizing-Venezuela’s-telecommunications-and-electrical-industries) have done some extensive palling-around in one or the other of their countries?  Now Mr. Wipe-Israel-Off-the-Map is in Nicaragua, recently returned to the rule of the Sandinistas, solidifying his friendship with Daniel Ortega.