March 10, 2013
Hugo Chavez
We don”t care that in 2012, the World Economic Forum rated your country near the bottom when it comes to economic competitiveness. Neither do we care that in 2013, the Wall Street Journal and The Heritage Foundation rated Venezuela 174th out of 177 countries on their Index of Economic Freedom. We don”t care that of 130 national economies studied in the 2012 International Property Rights Index, Venezuela scored 115th.
We don”t care that you”ve gleefully seized land and resources from private citizens on a scale rivaling the infamous Scottish Highland Clearances or the Soviet Union’s brutal, murderous, and genocidal purging of the kulaks. Leftist wisdom teaches us that it is only the marginally powerful who stand in the way of the extremely powerful and the extremely impoverished forging a new friendship and becoming Best Friends Forever. It doesn”t matter whether you uplifted your country’s poor at the expense of those wretched entrepreneurs and middle-class creeps who are neither extremely rich nor extremely poor. Here in America we are undergoing a similar process of demonizing and expunging the middle class, so we see you as a brother in arms.
We don”t care that you shut down dozens of media outlets for criticizing you, nor that you”ve imprisoned journalists who”ve spoken ill of you on the pretense that they were inciting “hatred” against the government. None of this confirms our long-held suspicion that all this endless railing against “hate speech” was a clever ruse to ultimately criminalize all criticism of the almighty and incorruptible centralized state. Even though we never shut the hell up about “human rights,” we don”t care that in 2008, you forcibly detained and expelled members of Human Rights Watch for daring to criticize your record on human rights.
We don”t care that in 2010 and 2011 Transparency International deemed Venezuela the Western Hemisphere’s most corrupt nation, because in 2012 you conceded the bottom spot to Haiti.
We don”t even care that due in part to your policies, the price of gasoline in America nearly quadrupled since you assumed office. We can afford the gas, we don”t care if the middle class can”t, and poor people don”t own cars, anyway.
We love you because you hated America as much as we do, even though we for some odd reason refuse to leave America and live in Venezuela. When America finally collapses and starts resembling Venezuela we”ll probably regret it, although we”d never admit it. This movie inside our heads that we call “the revolution” must continue, no matter how simplistic, delusional, and ultimately destructive it is.
