Poor Simon Romero. You just have to feel sorry for the guy. He doesn’t ever get out of the rich-folks’ ghetto of eastern Caracas, does he? Seems he’s found himself a new crushboy. And boy oh boy, are the results ever pathetic…
HUGO CHÁVEZ, president of Venezuela, has made Simón Bolívar, the 19th-century aristocrat who liberated much of South America from Spain, the central figure in a “Bolivarian” state ideology, invoking his spirit, exhuming his sarcophagus, even starting the construction of a new mausoleum resembling a ship for his hero this year.
But in a turn in the contact sport that is Venezuelan politics, one of the strongest challengers in the quest to unseat Mr. Chávez in a presidential election next year is an activist with actual Bolívar blood in his veins: Leopoldo López, an aristocratic, Harvard-educated economist who is a descendant of the liberator’s sister, Juana.
Bwahahahahaha. Did Rosemary really just do that? Position this crooked little tin-pot oligarch, who never worked an honest day in his life, as a new Libertador, just on the basis of his “noble” ancestry, not his actual deeds? That’s friggin’ hilarious.
It goes on in a boring vein for a couple of paragraphs about the recent Inter-American Kangaroo Court ruling that poor beleaguered Leo should be allowed to run for president, even though he flagrantly broke campaign financing laws by getting his own mother to embezzle money from the state oil firm, PDVSA, for him. Never mind that shit. Here’s more of the hilarity:
Mr. López, 40, is no stranger to operating within the gray areas of politics in Venezuela, a country where elections are held and public criticism is leveled at Mr. Chávez, but also where bureaucrats hound opposition leaders with legal threats and regulators fine independent news organizations, evidenced by a $2 million penalty imposed this week against the television network Globovisión for reporting on deadly prison riots.
“The state seeks to disqualify those seeking an alternative with relentless character assassination,” Mr. López said in an interview. “They are afraid of me because I can win.”
Well, now we know where Leo gets that glassy-eyed fanatical look he always wears, even when sitting perfectly still doing nothing at all. He’s crazy. He’s really fucking delusional. He really thinks Chavecito is afraid of him, and that he “can win”. Pardon me while I pick myself up off the floor…
Okay. Now, did you notice how early in the paragraph, Rosemary was forced to allude ever so briefly to Leo’s crookedness, before conveniently sweeping it under the rug and going back to the usual tired tropes about state censorship that doesn’t actually exist in Venezuela? This is a country where blatant putschists put out assassination calls on the public airwaves 24/7/365, and we’re supposed to believe that this is “free speech” and that fines levied against the putschist channels that broadcast this shit constitute “censorship”. Oh Rosemary, you probably snort your coke through the same straws as the oligarchs who run those channels, don’t you?
But wait, it gets funnier. Rosemary takes Leo at his word when he claims to be “centre-left” and whines that the government is painting him unfairly as a right-wing putschist who gets fat cheques from Washington under the rubric of “democracy promotion”. Actually, the Venezuelan government’s picture of him and his gringo bosses is accurate, and what’s unfair is Rosemary’s fawning portrayal of him as some kind of new Bolívar up against a tyrant.
And, if you’re going to talk about descendants of revolutionaries, Rosemary, it would behoove you to remember that Chavecito is himself one. And, unlike Leo, a DIRECT one…he is the great grandson of Pedro Pérez Delgado, better known as Maisanta, who took up the lance and joined the guerrillas to finish the job that Simón Bolívar had left uncompleted, namely overthrowing the oligarchy represented today by Leopoldo López, among others. Unlike Leo, Chavecito’s revolutionary ancestry hasn’t been rendered meaningless by hanging out among the inbred aristocracy of the capital.
But this is getting too serious. Let’s get back to Rosemary and his hilarities, shall we?
MR. LÓPEZ, a product of Venezuela’s Americanized elite, graduated from Kenyon College in Ohio and earned a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University. Married to Lilian Tintori, a former television host and kite-surfing champion, his privileged background stands in sharp contrast with that of Mr. Chávez, a former army officer who rose from poverty to forge a political movement chafing at American influence in Latin America.
But Mr. López also seems to have picked up some strategies from Mr. Chávez, who cobbled together a grass-roots political movement in the 1990s after he oversaw a failed 1992 coup. Mr. López has traveled far and wide outside the capital, Caracas, assembling a national movement called Voluntad Popular, or Popular Will, which has congealed into a centrist political party.
LOL. There’s that word, “centrist”. I do not think it means what YOU think it means, Rosemary. The only things in the middle of the road in Venezuela are yellow lines and dead armadillos. The country has no centrist parties, only the PSUV, the PCV, and a slew of dishonest right-wing parties all squabbling for what little is left of the vote, like drunks over an empty bottle.
And a small rich municipality in eastern Caracas is not a basis for a “national movement”, either. Just ask Irene Sáez, the former Miss Universe who tried to make the jump from mayor of Chacao to president of Venezuela in 1998. She was deemed a popular front-runner by the press in those days, too. And she started out roaring, only to get her pretty little ass soundly clobbered by an upstart from the provincial backwater of Barinas who had a REAL national movement, instead of a one-member party called, originally enough, IRENE. You might know him, he’s still president today.
His name is Hugo Chávez Frías.
And come next year, he is gonna whip Leo’s little candy ass, too. But don’t look for any such admissions from Rosemary, whose duty it is to tout the putschist flavor-of-the-month, no matter how badly that boner comes back to haunt him later on.
