Nearly 75 percent of Venezuelans have lost 19 pounds or more in 2016. “People have become so desperate,” the Miami Herald reported recently, “that they are butchering and eating flamingos.”
While acknowledging the problem, TeleSUR, a television network based in Venezuela and funded by governments including Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, called the Herald’s story “kooky” and suggested taking reports “like alleged flamingo eating with a grain of salt.”
If, in socialist Venezuela, one could find a grain of salt.
In America, salt is necessary, too, when listening to our socialist Hollywood celebs blather about their kooky diets, for which some are blaming President Trump.*
Socialism kills. The deprivations in Venezuela are no joke, for along with economic chaos, Venezuelans are experiencing political repression on a grand scale. A new report from Luis Almagro, secretary general of the Organization of American States (OAS), documents the thousands arrested for protesting or “having posted something against the national government or a public official on Twitter.” The report details the “curtailment of civil, political and electoral freedoms” and “torture” and “censorship.”
Almagro calls for the suspension of Venezuela’s membership in the OAS, which is long overdue. The Human Rights Foundation demanded that nine years ago.
The Obama administration opposed such a move, as the Washington Post editorialized, in order to pursue “a legacy-making détente” with “the Castro regime in Cuba.”
At Townhall,** I urged Trump to support the effort to boot Venezuela out of the OAS, which might provide some assistance toward political change there . . . and Venezuelans eating more.
And perhaps to socialists in Hollywood and elsewhere eating crow . . . but not flamingo.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* I covered this last week, when I compared their Trump Diet nonsense to the “Maduro Diet,” named for Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the socialist dictator presiding over the complete economic collapse of what, prior to socialism, had been South America’s richest country.
** From which this Common Sense is adapted.
