HECK, THEY STILL THINK CASTRO SAVED CUBA:

Predictable path of a red fascist dictatorship (David Burchell, 12/20/10, The Australian)

[H]ere's another ironclad certainty that should surely have revealed itself by now to even the most wilful, blinkered intellect. The decade-long populist autocracy of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela could only have ever taken the course of national calamity, as surely as it is that rivers run downhill or that tree branches bend towards the sun. It was always dolefully predictable that the Chavista regime - the last of the so-called national liberation movements, which in reality have liberated only their acolytes' minds from unwelcome thoughts - would turn, gradually but ineluctably, into a personal dictatorship of the crudest and most familiar kind, sustained by violence, cajolery, prejudice and looting of the public purse.

It was eminently foreseeable, too, that the final steps of this squalid effort in red fascism would be finessed by the limitless credulity of a gaggle of Western celebrities, whose mission on earth will not be complete until they have succeeded in redescribing freedom as unfreedom, and unfreedom as the purest mountain-stream of liberty, according to the topsy-turvy ordering of their tumescent political imaginations.

Thus the credulous cynic Noam Chomsky visits Caracas in royal splendour and maunders on, like an infatuated Westerner in Stalin's Moscow, about how excited he is "to see a better world being created". While John Pilger exercises his Methodist preacher's singsong certainty to peddle a farcical cult of personality according to which Chavez is a hero-teacher of his people, travelling with a bundle of books under his arm - "Orwell, Chomsky, Dickens, Victor Hugo" - to "build ordinary people's confidence in themselves".

And now we have a little cache of WikiLeaks cables from Washington's Caracas embassy to confirm the facts we already knew. Except that, by a black irony, the same airhead celebrities and harebrained scholars who have turned Julian Assange into a global sex symbol will be the least likely to read these WikiLeaks cables seriously, or to draw the appropriate conclusions. Instead, they will pontificate from the courthouse steps about our right to know, all the while protecting themselves from the consequences of this same freedom by their imperishable ignorance.

On the weekend an enabling law was passed by Venezuela's supine National Assembly granting Chavez unfettered authority for at least the next 1 1/2 years: time enough to administer the last rites to the country's remnant opposition media. It also marked the final unravelling of Chavez's toga of respectability, a garment that has been unfurling from his mystic Bolivarian body for some years.