Hugo Chavez Wins Another Term (Surprise!)

You know, I hate the way the word “allegedly” is thrown around to protect news sources from being sued. It ceases to have meaning when certain facts are clear, and should be reserved for those facts which are in dispute or at least weak. For instance, George Zimmerman did not “allegedly” shoot Trayvon Martin, but we hear that even at this late date. What Zimmerman did was “allegedly"
commit murder, manslaughter, or no crime at all.

Allegedly is a weasel-word used to dilute an otherwise interesting headline, and is set up by overly-cautious attorneys. That said, I am about to tell you a news story in which I will ignore the boldness of the press and insert my own “allegedly” wherever I deem it appropriate. Here goes:

Hugo Chavez is set to be president of Venezuela for at least 20 years, after [allegedly] official results in Sunday’s election handed the socialist trouble-maker a third term. Chavez {allegedly] defeated challenger Henrique Capriles by [allegedly] 7.44 million to 6.15 million votes (54.4 to 44.9 percent), according to results released by the country’s National Electoral Council late Sunday. A third-placed candidate, Reina Sequera, took 0.46 percent of the votes in an election marked by am [allegedly] record high turnout of 81 percent of registered voters.

His second term was supposed to expire in 2013 but in 2009 he [allegedly] won a referendum allowing him to change the Venezuelan constitution to end presidential term limits. Chavez, who has been receiving treatment for cancer, is now in line to remain in power until 2019.

Among the highlights of his current campaign were using Venezuelan oil money to grossly outspend his opponent, establishing large-scale government dependency social programs and plain damned giveaways, controlling all the major state media, and downplaying his regular recurrence of cancer. But just as in past elections, partisan violent thuggery was also part of the election formula.

Chavez's [allegedly] 9.5-point margin of victory, the demonstrated diminishing support for the 58 year-old Chavez. When he first won the presidency in late 1998 his winning margin was almost twice as big as it was on Sunday. It was even greater in 2006, when he won re-election by 26 points. But a sure thing is a sure thing. Perhaps Chavez knew a little American history. When John Kennedy went to is father for more campaign money for his big race, Old Joe is [alleged} to have said: “I don't mind paying for a victory, I just don't want to pay for a landslide.”

This current election resulted in an [allegedly] 81% turnout, the highest in recent Venezuelan history. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen R-Fla), who is also the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee had this to say. “Chavez has denied access to international election monitors, employed last minute ballot changes, controlled the judicial system, harassed independent journalists, and consolidated his power to manipulate the vote in his favor.”

Worst ex-president Jimmy Carter had formed a committee to monitor the election, but was only partially successful. Chavez had earlier taken a page out of Barack Obama's executive order playbook, and arbitrarily changed the existing legislative rules to restrict foreign observers. Carter's group was allowed to interview citizens and a limited number of opposition candidates, under the intense gaze of Chavez minions. They were not allowed into the general area of any of the polling places. No doubt, that's good enough for Carter to declare this a free, fair and democratic election.

Taking a somewhat different tack, Ros-Lehtinen said: “Chavez must not be allowed to continue to export his hate and despotism abroad like his fellow dictators in Iran and Cuba through the oppression of the press and violation of human rights.” She added. “The United States and responsible nations must remain steadfast in our defense of democracy and freedom and not bow to Chavez’s tyranny.”

The questions now are--Does Chavez's narrow [alleged] victory indicate that he will be a little less bellicose toward the West in general and the United State in particular? Given the volatility surrounding Iran, will he continue to be Imdinnerjacket's biggest western hemisphere cheerleader for the destruction of Israel, or will he back off a bit and cut back on the weapons exchanges between the two pariah nations. Nothing scares me as much as an aging, unhealthy zealot of a dictator who continues to work on a nuclear missile delivery system, state of the art nukes, and a red button to set it all off. After all, what does he have to lose?

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Hillary Educates The Imams

In 2012, the US State Department spent $117.2 million addressing gender-based violence worldwide. For 2013 it is asking for $147.1 million. A hefty portion of those funds are spent on a favorite Hillary Clinton project: ”educating” imams (Muslim religious leaders) about mistreatment of females throughout the Middle East and Africa. They teach “proper” sharia law and the Koran to “experts” on the subject. The focus is on the “compatibility of women's rights and Islam."

Isn't that a little like trying to teach good table manners to a pig?

Clinton and her State Department are delusional. Women's rights according to Clinton's version have existed for a long time in some Islamic countries and she believes her program is helping to expand that view. Perhaps she's thinking of Egypt, where women did indeed share nearly equal rights with men. But perhaps she has also failed to notice that there has been a revolution in Egypt which has placed the Muslim Brotherhood in charge. The revolution had many causes, but largest among them was the secularism of the nation which the Brotherhood declares a violation of the words of both the Koran and sharia. The Brotherhood has every intention of enforcing its own version of sharia law and to abandon the secular “mistake” of treating women as equals to men.

Prior to the revolution in Iran, Iranian women were among the freest and most influential females in the world. So much for that. Nobody with an ounce of brains thinks that as the Arab Spring progresses women are going to be better off. Muslim, but non-Arabic Iran will remain in the caves of yesteryear on women's rights pending a second great revolution. There's no "he said, she said" in sharia. If a woman says she was raped, she must produce four male witnesses to substantiate the charge. Most often those necessary witnesses would be the rapists themselves. If she makes the charge, and doesn't produce the witnesses, she will be convicted of adultery and stoned to death.

Never daunted, Secretary Clinton has cited “evidence” of her program's success. She tells us that one Afghan imam now asks the bride how old she is when he performs a wedding, and whether she consents. Other imams have said that after the training, they have tried to see that widows get a fair share of their husband's estate upon his death. Some imams have come to believe that women might even be entitled to an education like their male counterparts. Unfortunately for Hillary, as the slimy government leader Hamid Karzai continues to play footsy with the Taliban, fewer and fewer of these anecdotal tales emerge from Afghanistan.

Karzai has already approved a code of conduct proposed by the imams which allows husbands to beat their wives, reinstates segregation of the sexes, requires women to travel with a male guardian, and not to mingle with males outside their family. In order to put an exclamation point on it, when asked by an AP reporter if he personally agreed with the policy, Karzai replied “It is the Shariah law of all Muslims and all Afghans.”

Blithely ignoring that little gem, Secretary Clinton has said: “All over the world we see living proof that Islam and women's rights are compatible.” She then continued to report “news” from the last decade or before: “Muslim communities from Egypt to Jordan to Senegal are beginning to take on entrenched practices like child marriage, honor killings, and female genital mutilation.” She neglected to mention Nigeria, where the Islamist war has barely begun.

The State Department defines violence against women as “physical, sexual, and psychological abuse; threats, coercion, arbitrary confinement, and economic deprivation.” Clinton could have added stoning to death for being the victim of rape, but I guess that's just too horrible for Hillary to contemplate. Clinton has open support in her efforts from her boss, Barack Hussein Obama. Like his distorted view of Christianity, Obama also lives in a dreamworld about Islam.

Obama truly believes that a secular, feminist view of women can be imposed on barbarians whose central tenet is hatred and jihad on all those who disagree with them. Oh, well, at least Hillary may have saved a nine year-old girl or two from being married off to an old man as his third of fourth wife, this week. But there's always next week and the entire future.

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State Department Still Can’t Find The Enemy

Amid this week’s Congressional hearings on terrorism, the State Department again demonstrated why America remains in mortal danger from terrorists. You can’t destroy the enemy if you can’t identify the enemy. A war on terror or on terrorism may make a nice slogan, but then everybody gets to come up with his own definition of terrorism. Remember the slogan of the left: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

This kind of moral equivalence and philosophical musing is going to get us all killed. For now, it’s just getting a lot of people killed in foreign lands while America either fights battles with one hand tied behind its back or stays completely out of the fray. The current example is Nigeria. Our bumbling State Department stubbornly refuses to recognize the mass murder group Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist organization. And why? Because it would require admitting who the real enemy is—Islamism.

Boko Haram has managed to kill thousands of Nigerian citizens using typical insurgent tactics and asymmetrical warfare. It murders innocent civilians, has no governmental authority, wears uniforms only for show but rarely during an attack, and recognizes no rules of civilized warfare. That makes it a terrorist organization by any sane person’s definition. But to say it is a terrorist organization requires one to ask what their goal is. And that would reveal the real enemy’s goal—total domination of Islam over the entire world.

The human side of this horror is that Boko Haram almost exclusively targets Christians and Christian sites. The picture accompanying this article was taken last week after another devastating bombing of a Christian church during Sunday services. The organization scarcely shows its head in the Muslim parts of the country, except to parade its successes in the shrinking Christian enclaves. The practical danger of this ongoing jihad is that Nigeria was a relatively stable state with alternating Muslim and Christian chief executives. It is becoming very unstable, and worst of all, it has been a major non-Middle East provider of petroleum to the West.

Our sophisticated and nuanced State Department is doing essentially nothing about the rapidly-growing problem. It has declared certain members of Boko Haram to be terrorists, but won’t even come close to declaring the entire organization terrorist. It’s a bit like declaring Hitler, Himmler and Goering to be international criminals, but leaving the Nazis pretty much alone. And likewise, it ignores the underlying beliefs which trigger the criminal/terrorist acts. Nazism in Germany, Islamism in Nigeria.

Instead of recognizing clear facts and an evolving catastrophe in a friendly nation, the State Department engages in sophistry. When cornered by questions from committee members, State Department spokesman Johnnie Carson (no, I didn’t make that up) rambled: “Before we prescribe actions, it is important that we understand what Boko Haram is and what it is not. The truth is that our understanding is limited at best. Boko Haram is composed of at least two organizations, a larger organization which is focused primarily on discrediting the Nigerian government, and a small more dangerous group that is increasingly sophisticated and increasingly leftist.” Aw, baloney.

To return to the Nazi analogy, that’s like failing to oppose Nazism because the SS and the SA didn’t share the exact same beliefs. If it looks like a skunk, and smells like a skunk, and is seen it the company of skunks—it’s a skunk. Every platoon of Boko Haram shares a common goal, if not a common belief in how to attain that goal. That goal is the destruction of Western civilization, and in Nigeria itself anything that isn’t fundamentalist Islam. Some groups may blow up Christian churches while others assassinate political rivals, but the goal remains the same. The triumph of Islam at any cost.

Boko Haram wants to replace constitutional government and Western-style governance in Nigeria with sharia law. They do so by terrorist means, but Boko Haram and sharia have one common parent—Islamism. Our cowardly and inept State Department refuses to use either term for these murderous thugs. When they start blowing up mosques and killing imams, I might be willing to call the bloodshed a civil war. But that isn’t going to happen. This is just another attempt to take over a diverse population and control a moderate nation in the name of Allah.

In my lifetime, civilization has faced the threat of Nazism and communism. But our nation rallied behind patriotic governments, Democrat and Republican which knew who the enemy was. Now, late in my life, we face an enemy that our State Department can’t identify and won’t fight. It waffles over whom to support as Islamism takes over the entire Middle East and Africa., arguing over whether the Muslim Brotherhood or Al Shabaab is preferable.

In Nigeria, there’s no such lack of easily-discernible opponents. It is militant Islam versus civilization, and the State Department isn’t sure who should win. During the committee hearing, the State Department spokesman rigidly refused to admit that the State Department should declare Boko Haram a terrorist organization, then proceeded on three separate occasions to refer to it as a terrorist organization. With clarity of thought like that, can there be any question who will ultimately rule Nigeria?

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