Hugo Chavez is still dead

[angus]

Damn, Al.  Didn't notice your thread.  Excellent title, by the way.   

I'll miss the fat bastard.  I've never actually met him.  I was withing 40 miles of the Venezuelan border as recently as five weeks ago, and enjoyed a long conversation about bats with a young Venezuelan biologist with very smooth, long, brown legs.  Chavez wasn't among the topics that came up during that conversation, as it turns out.  I have also visited countries which border his, but I can't honestly say that I've ever set foot in Venezuela.   Still, he's an icon.  He gave us the goods, and he did it while making nasty about us.  Stepped up and took the place of the now-defunct USSR and propped up a Cuban dictatorship even though his own people could hardly afford it.  Excellent politician.  RIP.

I'm hoping that his hand-picked successor gets past his hand-picked supreme court and continues to give us the goods.  I don't really want to pay UK prices for automotive fuel, much less have to start calling it Petrol.

¡Viva Chavez!

[angus]

He helped millions of poor people in his country. He was also an autocrat. Those two can and do go together.

Like peanut butter and jelly.  Or hummus and tabouli.  Or, better yet, Lo Mein and chicken. 

And who can forget his steamy bromance with Castro that culminated in Venezuela suppling oil to the energy-strapped Cubans while the Cubans supplied him with physicians and medical instructors to help Chavez staff his Missions.  

Moreover, Venezuelans were paying 9 cents per gallon for automotive fuel under Chavez.

He also did a mean impression of George W. Bush and was a decent song and dance man.

Surely we can overlook the fact that Chavez decimated the middle classes, toppled a 30-year tradition of transparency and democracy in a region where few countries even had those things, and sent many of his best educated people packing.

Still, he was beginning to become a little rancid.  It was time for the God of Man to throw him out of God's refrigerator.  Even He can't keep moldy items in the fridge very much past its expiration date, if for no other reason than to make room for some leftover chinese food.

[angus]

I don't think Hugo is great, but if he were as bad as tyrannical leads went the world would be a lot better.

True tyranny exists in most African nations but it rarely gets proper scrutiny because there's no economic interest.

South America is doing just fine if we leave it alone and accept that politically it's a lot more liberal than any other continent and it elects leaders we would find scary if in charge of the US.

Agree with all except the notion that South America is more liberal.  I find that Hispanics in general, and Hispano-Amerindians in particular, want a much greater role for government than do Lockeans and most gringos.  True, we Yankees like our huge illiberal industrial bailouts at taxpayer expense, but that is a side-effect of crony capitalism.  Overall, I'd say that anglophones are among the most liberal populations, while Asians and South Americans are among the most collectivist, and I think that this probably pre-dates Spanish colonialization.  Look into the organization of the Tahuantinsuyu, for example.  

[angus]

Ok, this whole country can burn in hell with Hugo for all I care

perfect example of the sort of illiberal, collectivist social policy to which I referred above