Oliver Stone, a politically dim bulb wishing to shine bright with his new idolizing documentary on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, says he has just one complaint about the guy. He’s on TV too much. Ought to cut it out. Not good.
And so finally, after years of unrelieved, deep immersion in loony, leftist ideology, the Hollywood director has a solitary insight. Sadly, he understates it.
According to a press report, Stone said Chavez is “overpowering” with his many hours of almost daily rambles in which he mixes lectures, news and occasional songs.
Others of us might say this verbal strutting is exhibitionist, megalomania in keeping with Chavez’s bizarre imitation of a responsible leader. If it were not likely he would just make things worse, you might advise him to tend instead to an economy rendered one of the world’s worst by an 11-year set of policies Stone refers to as a wonderfully laudable “social transformation.”
Jackson Diehl, a Washington Post editorialist, ably sums up the transformational actuality. The Venezuelan inflation rate of 30 percent is three times higher than anyplace else in Latin America and worse than other economies mistakenly believed as bad as it is possible to be. While Mexico, Argentina and Brazil are growing at 8 percent a year, the gross national product of Venezuela was down in the first quarter by almost 6 percent. Notes Diehl, Greece can’t compete with that collapse.
All this manifests itself in cruel ways, observers report — four-hour-a-day electricity blackouts, ever fewer jobs, woeful wages, rampaging crime and, hey, you are looking for basic foods? Don’t look here, skinny ones.
While drought is a factor, the main reasons given for the debacle are willy-nilly confiscation of private property, arresting business operators for such horrors as raising prices when insolvency was the alternative, scaring foreign investors away by nationalizing their operations, inflation of the currency, sink-the-nation debt, ignoring infrastructure for transient goals and various other progressive policies.
But the poor are being treated more equitably under this socialist Robin Hood, right? Not according to a former economist with the Venezuelan government. In parts of an essay available on the Internet, he said Chavez had done next to nothing in his first eight years to increase that portion of the national budget devoted to programs for the poor, and that meanwhile life had grown harsher for them – a higher percentage of underweight babies and homes with mud floors, for example.
You as a Venezuelan don’t like what’s going on? Shut up, Chavez advises you through a law that will send you to jail for two and a half years if you criticize him.
Unfair? Hey, if you’re a reporter who is “inaccurate,” the sentence is five years.
He has come to control much of the media and has chased political opponents out of the country, had them locked up and has looked the other way when some have disappeared. Don’t worry about the Supreme Court saying stop that stuff. He has already stopped the court. He has taken control of it. It’s his baby.
Human rights violations don’t end there — our own State Department reports unlawful killings by security forces- but here is what you get from Stone and some other Hollywood buddies: Hugo is just as nifty as nifty gets.
Does this flapdoodle matter? Yes, because these clowns lend this tyrant credibility when there are elections coming up this year for the legislature and then the presidency and because a defeated Chavez just might be that much more inclined to resort to military power if emboldened by heil-Hitler reverence. Even stupid ideas can have consequences.
Examiner Columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected].
