Having chucked presidential term limits, Venezuela dictator Hugo Chavez recently won re-election to a third six-year term in office. Not surprising.
What is surprising, according to Francisco Toro writing in the New Republic, is that the election was so close.
Toro, writing before election day, wasn’t surprised that the failings of Chavez’s socialistic and repressive policies have been getting harder for the public to evade. But in an “increasingly autocratic petrostate, the advantages of incumbency are so deep, [re-election] really ought to be a walk.”
Toro saw Chavez’s own campaign as awkward and unpersuasive, the challenger’s as smart and effective. Come October 7, though, the former tramped across the finish line with 54 percent, a comfortable if smaller margin than he had enjoyed in previous elections.
Chavez’s advantages included rules for political ads permitting each candidate to advertise only three minutes a day on each broadcast outlet — even as the incumbent ran frequent “institutional” ads promoting the government’s doings that looked an awful lot like campaign ads. During the campaign, his government often claimed emergency to take over the air waves to spout campaign pitches. All this is in the context of years of efforts to increase the number of state-owned media and browbeat private media into uncritical silence.
The more tyrannical a government becomes, the more urgently a citizenry needs term limits in self-protection. Yet the more tyrannical a government becomes, the more easily it can get rid of such safeguards.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
6 replies on “Chavez Shocker”
.… The more tyrannical a government becomes, the more urgently a citizenry needs term limits in self-protection .…
And, We The (Sovereign American) People once believed, what better protection than that provided by a Judeo-Christian-Tenet-guided Constitution.
But that was long before We, The People, discovered that (1) the “Democratic” potty never met a constitution of which it’s not contemptuous and (2) that said party has insidiously infiltrated and asserted its ownership, operation and control over every cog and every gear and every lever of the machinery of every level of American government. And has similarly asserted rule-by-fiat rule of every bench in every court!
England’s Mister George Three is green in his grave.
With envy!
Putin-esque.
Look (no further) then New York City, which voted for term limits then a pliant (Know any other terms? besides spineless) bend to the will of King Michael (Bloomberg) on everything from term limtis to the size of soft drinks.
The people have it within their power to impose term limits. It’s time we stopped looking for others to save us from ourselves. Long before FDR broke with the tradition of a two-term limit for presidents, others had tried to gain a third time and all had failed. They were rejected by their party or by voters. WHy do modern-day Americans not have the discipline to vote against those who promise us ‘free stuff’?
To any American who is dissatisfied with our current government I say: vote against incumbents. None of them are indispensable.
GEE! You think maybe the American people could learn something from this?
Unfortunately, I doubt it.
What’s surprising is that a president of the US would congratulate Chavez for his election theft. Apparently cheating in elections is A‑OK with Obama, as well as socialism, in spite of the suffering of the Venezuelans.