[link|http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/346jorji.asp|What's not to like?]

Excerpt:

LATE LAST YEAR, 16 U.S. congressmen voiced their approval for Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. Representatives Barney Frank, John Conyers, Chaka Fattah, Jan Schakowsky, Jose Serrano, and others complained in a letter to President Bush that the United States was not adequately protecting Chavez against a groundswell of internal opposition to his increasingly authoritarian rule--an upsurge that might lead to his ouster. Elected to power in 1998, Lt. Col. Chavez has hijacked democracy in Venezuela and is openly moving the country toward totalitarianism. Beyond Venezuela's borders, he celebrates, protects, and does business with terrorists.

A day after the September 11 terrorist attacks, President Chavez declared that "The United States brought the attacks upon itself, for their arrogant imperialist foreign policy." Chavez also described the U.S. military response to bin Laden as "terrorism," claiming that he saw no difference between the invasion of Afghanistan and the September 11 terrorist attacks.

While the United States considers Saddam Hussein a threat to world peace, Chavez has hailed Saddam as his "brother" and business "partner." In the past two years Chavez has continued to cultivate relationships with the governments listed in the State Department's roll of state sponsors of terrorism--he has been particularly vocal in his support for the Iranian regime.

Last December a high-level Venezuelan military defector gave sworn testimony that terrorist links exist between al Qaeda and the Chavez government. The defector, President Chavez's personal pilot, alleges that one operation involved the transfer of close to $1 million in cash to Osama bin Laden.

In January, Judicial Watch, a public-interest legal organization based in Washington, filed a $100 million suit against Hugo Chavez on behalf of a victim and survivor of the September 11th terrorist attacks. The lawsuit alleges that Chavez provided material, financial, and other support and assistance to the al Qaeda terror network.

In February, a Venezuelan Muslim, Hasil Mohammed Rahaham-Alan, was detained in London's Gatwick airport for stashing a grenade in his luggage. He was apprehended after disembarking from a British Airways flight that originated in Caracas. The British Mail reported that al Qaeda operates a training camp on the Venezuelan island of Margarita. The Venezuelan ambassador in London has obtained a "legal stop" preventing the newspaper from commenting on the article.

This is not a stable democracy. It can't survive this sort of thing. This is more like the Weimar Republic. Or maybe Chile.

We managed to survive eight years of a president who could only manage about 44% of the vote. The good old separation of powers contained a lot of things. Some damage was done, but even at that we're no Venezuela - except maybe in some parallel moral-equivalent universe.

The Clinton era strengthened my admittedly weak faith in our government. Not any branch of government. The thing as a whole. After all the things Clinton and friends tried to get away with and couldn't, I find it hard to get overly worried about all that Ashcroft crap. It's just not going to happen. And then there's Lincoln's messing with habeas corpus, and FDR's trying to pack the Supreme Court, and LBJ's lies, and Nixon's lies, and Iran-Contra, and Clinton's lies, and his auctioning our foreign policy, and Waco, and that budget shell game, etc etc. This republic has survived all that. We know for a fact it can't happen here, from past experience. (Hi Ash! Time to trot out Sinclair Lewis again! Fiction trumps history!)

But [link|http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field(DOCID+ve0015)|Venezuela]'s a whole different case.