Meanwhile, in the real world, Cindy actually was arrested for wearing a t-shirt with a message. Or maybe for unzipping her jacket. It’s a fine legal point. Or maybe she was arrested for being a Democrat, considering that a Republican who did the same thing at the same time in the same place was not arrested.

Y’know, every once in a while you have to pinch yourself and try to remember which are the facts, and which are the allegations.

You have to compare apples to apples. It would be fair to compare Venezuelan formal civil liberties (if all the worst laws were enforced) to U.S. formal civil liberties (if all worst U.S. formal laws were enforced). It would be fair to compare actual U.S. civil liberties to actual Venezuelan civil liberties.

In terms of formal laws: if all the worst Venezuelan laws were enforced you could arrest people for certain things. (Not anything Cindy Sheenan did by the way. Wearing a shirts say “x number dead? how many more?” or some equivalent is general enough not to fit into the slot of “disprecting the President” or “stirring up fear”.

In the U.S. right now under U.S. law, the President could under the law as the Supreme court has upheld it arrest you as an enemy combantant, hold you in solitary for at least six months and probably for several year without access to a lawyer. Legally you could not be tortured, but you would have no access to anyway to enforce that right, so in practice you would have no recourse if they decided to torture you. Bush of course claims greter rights that – to hold you forever under those circumstances, but that issue has not been settled in the courts.

So if you look at what could be done, not what is actually being done, but what the government has the formal right to do, we have less formal civil liberty than Venezuela.

What about in practice? Well you are right that this is not Nazi Germany. Bush has not used all the formal legal powers he has, let alone all the ones he claims. But if you are comparing Venezuela to the U.S. that is true there too. The only members of the opposition Chavez has arrested or sought to arrest have been people who too part in armed rebellion against him, and even most those who supported this are free. Not one peaceful opponent of Chavez is in jail. Not one journalist of any sort is in jail. Every bit of media that existed before Chavez came to power still exists. Not one TV station or Newspaper or whatever that opposed Chavez has been forced to support him. Unless you have evidence that I have not heard of there has not been one case of censorship there. So Venezuela is freer than the U.S. both in terms of formal civil liberties and in terms of civil liberty in practice.

In terms of the “court packing” again I would say that both Roosevelt and Chavez were justified. It is not as self-evident as you seem to think that existing extremely biased judiciary should always be left in place.

Seriously if you are going to argue that Venezuela is less free than the U.S., you need to support your point, and not take for granted.

>FDR and Lincoln were each guilty of trying to pack the courts and lifting the writ of habeus corpus, respectively. They deserve condemnation for that, but they also weathered severe crises during their presidencies that led them to think that it was necessary.

Without agreeing with you on the “court packing” bit, my point exactly – severe crisis.

>We can (and should) look back and disagree, but I would argue that their respective greatness, while severely tarnished, remains intact. Dubya & Chavez have done nothing to earn my respect.

What tarnished Roosevelts reputation (justly) was failing to strongly enough oppose Jim Crow, putting Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants in concentration camps and a number of other thing. Look at the actual history of the time before you conclude the “court packing” was wrong. Again I think you could argue that the U.S. would be a better place today if he had succeeded.

>Nor did Roosevelt, in actual fact, do much for the non-white members of our society. Roosevelt saved the capitalist system, and that, combined with our post-war affluence, seemed pretty good- for a while.

Actually I think Roosevelt deserves a bit more credit than you give him here. When Roosevelt died, people of color showed up for his funeral in large numbers. Though he never did much against Jim Crow, his economic policies made the difference for enough people of color that he was well respected. As for saving the capitalist system – true, but given how weak labor and the left were before Roosevelt came to power it is likely that what he saved it from was an unsuccesful socialist revolution followed by a succesful facist coup. That has always been my theory about why the right hated him so much.

(Rembember, before Roosevelt, labor and the left were militant, but they were not winning much. I don’t remember what percent of the population was unionized the day Roosevelt took office, but it was not high.)

I think it is totally unfair to compare Chavez with Bush. He has been a net good for Venezuela. Civil liberties in Venezuela are strong not weaker than before he took office.

Nor did Roosevelt, in actual fact, do much for the non-white members of our society. Roosevelt saved the capitalist system, and that, combined with our post-war affluence, seemed pretty good- for a while.

I dont know what someone has to do to earn Ben’s respect, but I know Chavez has earned some of mine. Of course, that’s Chavez and the Venezuelan people, who are mature enough to elect someone who isn’t white.

As for that “state-run media”, what’s that all about? Last time I looked we had public broadcasting- does Ben maybe think that most of the media in Venezuela is state-run? If so, he should log on to this thing called the internet and actually learn something about Venezuela.

Folks, a firestorm is sweeping the consciousness of Latin America. While we sit fat and secure in wealth that is obscene in comparison with the economic situation of the vast majority of humanity, our southern neighbors are embarking on a quest for economic and social justice based on new models. They understand what Bushies and many “on the [American] left” do not; injustice inherently pervades strict advanced capitalist endeavors (see Wal-Mart for but one example), and class is a critical issue.

Come on, folks. The charade of our “freedom” is the tool of those who cater to our need for excessive consumption. We need a new paradigm of what it means to be free.

Regardless, restricting civil liberties is bad no matter who does it, right or left, American or Venezuelan (or Cuban). FDR and Lincoln were each guilty of trying to pack the courts and lifting the writ of habeus corpus, respectively. They deserve condemnation for that, but they also weathered severe crises during their presidencies that led them to think that it was necessary. We can (and should) look back and disagree, but I would argue that their respective greatness, while severely tarnished, remains intact. Dubya & Chavez have done nothing to earn my respect, which is not to say that they are alike at all, much less in the area of restricting freedom.

Nevertheless, I can’t agree that Chavez is blameless in his country’s problems. It doesn’t matter if it’s not his fault that the laws are there, or that we in America have a messed up media situation, because that’s not the point. We don’t have a state-run media, no matter how bad Fox & the rest of the media have gotten; we don’t have Sedition Acts (any more); we have freedoms of religion, assembly, press, petition, & speech. (And I realize that Republicans have infringed on all of these, but there is no comparison to other countries, including Venezuela. This is NOT Nazi Germany.)

All this just sounds like excuse-making & political hypocrisy, and I don’t like to criticize my fellow Leftists here.

He is not perfect, but it is in the nature of government to be imperfect, and the nature of people with a great deal of power to take advantage of emergencies to abuse that power to some extent. So you don’t judge the head of a government on the basis,are they saints. You judge the head of government on basis of whether their actions on net are good, while continuting to criticize what they do wrong.

Let’s look at the score:

1) Winning elections – right not wrong.
2) getting a supermajority because the oppostion chose not to participate – not Chavez’s fault. In point of fact, given that the excuse they made was absurd (and internationally recognized as such) it is obvious that the boycott was done by the opposition in hopes that at some point they will be able – with US backing – to overthrow Chavez by force.
3)Revamping the courts so that they no longer overwhelmingly consist of right wing (and often dictator era appointed) judges – not only justified but laudable. Roosevelt failed to something similar, and the U.S. would be a lot betters shape today if he had succeeded.
4)A law restricting freedom of the press – a truly wrong thing, mitigated by the fact that it has not been enforced. Not justified, but certainly provoked and much less than Western nations do in similar circumstances. I would say that in terms of formal freedom of the press, Venezuela has more than the U.K., thanks to the U.K. libel laws, blasphemy laws, official secrets act and various “anti-hate” laws. In terms of actual freedom of the press Venezuela has more than the U.S., since the majority of the press is still controlled by the opposition, and criticizes Chavez freely, and presents facts in opposition to him; Chavez does not get anything like the free ride Bush gets in the U.S. Of course there is also now a pro-Chavez press – so that the left in Venezuela does not have to rely on liberal blogs with a tiny percentage of the population as readership to get it’s point of view across. But neither does any part of the political spectrum. The right and left both have access to the free broadcast spectrum, the right more than the left, but the left substantially. The right overwhelmingly dominates the cable spectrum. All parts of the political spectrum (including left critics of Chavez) have their own newspapers, and thanks to the licensing of low power radio this is true of radio as well (As one example of democracy in Venezuela a number of people who critize Chavez from the left (anarchists mainly) have started such radio stations.

This does not make that law right, but it does mean that in practice Freedom of the Press is in better shape than the U.S. and most places – at least for the moment.

Overall, if you look at what Chavez has done, errors at all, I think an informed democrat (small d) and civil libertarian should be proud to stand with Chavez. By doing so Cindy has I think shown her judgement to be better (on this issue anyway) than much of the liberal blogsphere.