The Titanic sank exactly 100 years ago this week – a disaster exploited over the years by Hollywood and the ideological left. Their narrative bears little resemblance to what in fact happened in the early-morning darkness of April 15, 1912.

The Titanic storyline embraced by left-leaning filmmakers, writers, and university professors is right out of “Das Kapital.” To them, the disaster happened because heartless capitalists put profits ahead of human lives. They falsly claim that this is why the Titanic had too few lifeboats. Above all, leftist ideologues vilify the Titanic’s rich first-class passengers. They falsely claim they got first crack at lifeboats – and as a consequence, passengers in second class and steerage died in large numbers. In this interpretation, the Titanic’s legacy was not about women-and-children first. It was about first-class-passengers first.

This false narrative was embraced by filmmaker James Cameron in his 1997 epic “Titanic” — a view that many impressionable movie goers now take as fact.

The truth was quite the opposite; and in other cases the truth continues to be elusive, the facts ambiguous.

The Hollywood narrative makes for good entertainment. But it ignores the fact that many of the Titanic’s first-class passengers – the “1 percenters” of their day – voluntarily went down abroad the ship so that women and children could get aboard lifeboats.

Consider first-class passenger Benjamin Guggenheim, 46, the scion of the Guggenheim fortune. As ice-cold water flooded through a gash in the ship’s hull, he was overhead to say that he and other social elites had “dressed up in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen.”

He passed along a message to a survivor, stating: “Tell my wife, if it should happen that my secretary and I both go down, tell her I played the game out straight to the end. No woman shall be left aboard this ship because Ben Guggenheim was a coward.”

Among other rich and famous passengers who died: American John Jacob Astor IV; Irish businessman Thomas Andrews (who oversaw the ship’s construction); and American owner of the Macy’s department store, Isidor Straus, and his wife Ida.

Of the Titanic’s approximately 2,223 passengers and crew members, about 1,517 perished – and 706 survived. The ship’s 20 lifeboats could only carry one third of the people on board.

For Titanic aficionados with a leftist agenda, the numbers and percentages of passengers who got to the lifeboats — their sexes and social classes — can be crunched to prove just about whatever one wants.

“The reality of class, selfishness, and altruism in the disaster is more ambiguous,” observes Edward Tenner in his article “Titanic and the 1%” published by the American Enterprise Institute. “As Titanic scholars acknowledge, the survival rate of passengers depended in part on proximity to the boat deck. So it is no wonder that nearly all the women and children in first class were saved. Conversely, complex passageways and language barriers further delayed evacuation of third-class passengers. In all classes, as the literary scholar Stephen Cox has underscored in an essay and an excellent book, moral choices cut across social lines.

“Individual responses aside, there are surprises in the statistics. For example, women in third class were significantly more likely to survive than first-class men: 46 versus 33 percent.”

He adds: “The most surprising and least known statistic is that nearly twice as many third-class as second-class men survived – 16 percent versus 8 percent – despite the greater distance of the former from the boats. Were the second-class men the most dutiful and chivalrous of all, the true unsung heroes of the tragedy? Were the third-class men simply younger and more vigorous? Or were the second-class men the middle managers of the era, either fatally deferential to the upper crust or disfavored, consciously or not, by snobbish stewards? In any case, a larger proportion of the dogs on the Titanic survived, 4 out of 13, than second-class men.”

How come the chivalry of Titanic’s richest passengers failed get proper attention in the “Titanic” movie? Because today no one would believe the truth; so says Cuban-born author and historian Luis E. Aguilar in his essay “The Titanic and The Decline of Western Ethnic.”

Yes, Hugo Chavez really said it: “I am not a socialist!” Not recently, to be sure, but 14 years ago when Chavez – as a cashiered Army paratrooper who’d led a failed military coup in February 1992 — was making a run for Venezuela’s presidency.

“I am not a socialist!” he said during a television interview, wearing a suite and speaking in reasonable tones. This was when he was trying hard to convince voters – especially middle-class and well-off Venezuelans who were leery of him — that he’d definitely cast aside the bullet for the ballot. Chavez, at the time, claimed he was an idealistic moderate who would pursue a “Third Way” between capitalism and socialism. He pledged to reverse wide-spread poverty, clean up endemic corruption, and restore the oil-rich but impoverished South American nation’s national pride – a nation that, during the era of high oil prices, was a beacon of democracy in the region and, many Venezuelans believed, was poised to attain first-world status. Back then, the country was dubbed “Saudi Venezuela.”

“I am not a socialist!” Chavez’s words now figure prominently into a powerful YouTube video – “Yo no soy socialista” – that juxtaposes Chavez’s original campaign pledges against his leftist rhetoric that started soon after he took office in 1999. The video comes as Chavez, 58, is in a close election race against 40-year-old state governor Henrique Capriles.

You don’t need to understand Spanish to understand the video in which El Presidente — who now speaks of creating a paradise of “21st Century Socialism” — extols the virtues of “fatherland, socialism, or death” (“patria, socialismo o muerte”) to an audience. At another point, he declares: “I am a true revolutionary!”

In the mainstream media’s Venezuela coverage, an important piece of context is often omitted regarding Chavez’s rise to power – it’s erroneously suggested that only Venezuela’s poor voted for Chavez, who won the second-largest popular vote ever, 58.4%, in 1998. In fact, many middle-class and well-off Venezuelans voted for Chavez. They didn’t see him as a messiah as did Venezuela’s poor, to be sure. But they did regard him as a sincere reformer — a political outsider not associated with Venezuela’s traditional parties, a man who would be an antidote for Venezuela’s decline.

But as the YouTube video dramatically shows, Chavez carried out a monstrous bait-and-switch after becoming president. Declaring himself a revolutionary socialist and adopting an anti-American foreign policy, despite Venezuela’s historically close ties with the U.S., Chavez consolidated his power by rewriting the constitution and packing the Supreme Court and other institutions with his supporters. He demonized anybody who disagreed with him. It happened because of Venezuela’s weak checks and balances and the popular wave of support on which Chavez was riding.

As a Caracas-based journalist at the time, I was impressed at the way some prescient Venezuelans, a minority to be sure, avoided group think. They saw Chavez as a wolf-in-sheep’s clothing from the start. Even before Chavez’s landslide election victory, for instance, many upper-level executives in state oil company PDVSA were resigning — making plans for early retirement aboard, with Miami being a popular spot to whether out the storm. Many were among Venezuela’s best and brightest. They had wanted to be part of the solution to Venezuela’s problems. But Chavez, a class warrior instead of a uniter, saw them as part of Venezuela’s problems.

Ultimately, Chavez took three bad ideas from Venezuela’s past – statism, authoritarianism, and bread-and-circuses populism – and took them to new heights. He stoked anti-Americanism like never before, traveling frequently aboard as he made alliances with Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Middle Eastern strongmen. He even praised Venezuelan-born terrorist Carlos the Jackal as a “worthy heir of the greatest [leftist] struggles.”

As for PDVSA, it used to be one of the world’s most respected state oil companies, a vital source of income. Under Chavez, it has become rife with political cronyism. Oil production has declined significantly, according to many observers. It’s thought the Chavez administration’s mismanagement was responsible for a huge refinery explosion last month – whose flames, as shown in the “I-am-not-a-socialist” video, look like scenes from hell. It’s an apt metaphor for what “21st Century socialism” has brought to Venezuela.

In his reelection campaign, Chavez has had a clear advantage. He controls the levers of power and has no qualms about using state resources to aid his campaign, as was underscored on Tuesday with a report from television news channel Globovision: It showed PDVSA vehicles driving around with Chavez campaign stickers.

Capriles is good looking compared to the puffy-faced Chavez who claims to be in remission from cancer; and in Venezuela — home to many beauty queens — looks matter. Capriles has connected with audiences by hammering away at Venezuela’s epic levels of corruption, mismanagement, and Chavez’s willingness to use Venezuela’s oil to support leftist political goals abroad — all while Venezuela has suffered regular electricity outages, food shortages, and one of the world’s highest murder rates.

What will happen when Venezuelans go to the polls this Sunday? It may be ugly. Chavez, after all, sees himself as being on a divine mission, a veritable reincarnation of Venezuelan independence hero Simon Bolivar, his idol. He believes the ends justify the means. Most ominously, Chavez and his senior advisers have asserted that Venezuela will suffer violence and political instability if he’s not reelected. All of which raises fears that the country is poised for a social explosion, with Chavez’s most fanatical supporters and government forces taking to the streets. This would be in response to a Capriles victory – or perhaps in response to a Chavez victory that’s regarded by enraged Capriles’ supporters as being rigged.

“A number of multinational companies with operations in Venezuela (including oil companies) are updating contingency plans to pull their expatriate staff out of the country quickly if there’s a sudden eruption of social and political conflict,” writes blogger Caracas Gringo, a prescient American expat who writes anonymously from Venezuela.

Whoever wins, Venezuela’s sad decline will not be reversed anytime soon.

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It’s a strange omission: liberal pundits like CNN’s Piers Morgan are fulminating over America’s “gun culture” following Newtown’s school massacre — yet they seem blissfully ignorant about what happened after Britain’s draconian handgun ban following a school massacre in Scotland, in 1996, eerily similar to Newtown’s.

After the ban, more than 160,000 law-abiding citizens gave up their handguns. The idea was to stop gun violence. But ironically, crime-related gun violence jumped a whopping 40 percent in the two years after the ban. And since then, gun crime has continued to soar at an alarming rate. Anti-gun liberals may be aghast, but as that old NRA bumper sticker stated: “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” One wonders how long before guns are used in another massacre in the United Kingdom; or perhaps next time it will be done by a madman carrying a can of gasoline.

Piers Morgan, an urbane native of England, surely knows what happened after Britain’s gun ban. But like others anti-gun media elitists and politicians (whose children are defended by armed guards at upscale private schools) Morgan avoids discussions of the complexities and nuances of gun control and their impact on ordinary people — that is, law-abiding gun owners. “You’re an unbelievably stupid man, aren’t you?” Morgan told Larry Pratt, director of Gun Owners of America, during a discussion about gun regulations that included proposed bans on large clips and military-style weapons like the AR-15 used by Newtown, Connecticut’s shooter, Adam Lanza. Now, an online petition demanding that the smug Brit be deported is drawing tens of thousands of signatures.

Morgan surely knows about Britain’s failed effort to reduce gun violence – and how those efforts backfired. Even the lefty BBC took notice — explaining that the 40 percent surge in gun violence suggested the handgun ban was “targeting legitimate users of firearms rather than criminals.” Specifically, the BBC explained that “The Center for Defense Studies at Kings College in London, which carried out the research, said the number of crimes in which a handgun was reported increased from 2,648 in 1997/98 to 3,685 in 1999/2000.” Moreover, it noted there was “no link between high levels of gun crime and areas where there were still high levels of lawful gun possession; that “of the 20 police areas with the lowest number of legally held firearms, 10 had an above average level of gun crime. And of the 20 police areas with the highest levels of legally held guns only two had armed crime levels above the average.”

Interestingly, the massacre in Dunblane was hardly the case of an upstanding citizen inexplicably exploding into a murderous rage. Thomas Hamilton, the 43-year-old shooter, had been on the radar of law-enforcement authorities and townspeople for some time, just as Newtown shooter Adam Lanza was on the radar (both to school officials and townspeople) for having significant mental health issues.

Yet in each case, nothing was done.

Hamilton was a closet homosexual and serial child abuser. Interestingly, police were aware of his proclivities for young boys. Parents had lodged a number of complaints about Hamilton’s sordid behavior as a Scout leader and in other youth groups. Yet Hamilton, a shopkeeper and registered gun owner, was never brought to justice by legal authorities. It’s an issue that came up repeatedly after his rampage, provoking charges that police engaged in a cover-up regarding Hamilton’s sexual crimes. Suspicions of police negligence were further aroused when records pertaining to the sexual abuse allegations were sealed for 100 years (ostensibly to protect Hamilton’s abuse victims). Although Hamilton escaped legal prosecution for molesting children, he was nevertheless shunned by townspeople. His shop went out of business. And community leaders prohibited him from leading or organizing anymore groups for boys.

On March 13, 1996, Hamilton took his revenge, entering the Dunblane Primary School with four handguns – two 9 mm Browning HP pistols, and two Smith & Wesson M19 .357 Magnum revolvers. All of them were legally held. He carried 743 bullets.

He fired 109 times and killed 16 children, ages 5 and 6, shooting them at close range in a gymnasium. He murdered their teacher as she tried to protect them. He shot up other parts of the school, then returned to the gym where he committed suicide by putting the barrel of a handgun against the roof of his mouth and pulling the trigger. Fifteen others were wounded in his rampage.

Britain, to be sure, has not experienced another massacre. But given the number of handguns still in Britain – now mostly in the hands of bad guys and not good ones – it’s only a matter of time before another massacre happens. After all, when guns are outlawed, only outlaws (and madmen) will have them. And if they can’t get their hands on a gun, they’ll find another means to kill.

Interestingly, some anti-gun elitists who would deprive ordinary law-abiding citizens from owning firearms seem unconcerned about madmen obtaining nukes in Iran and North Korea. They entertain the naive delusion that the United Nation’s Security Council and Human Rights Commission will keep these madmen at bay, just as they naively believe the United Kingdom’s mostly unarmed police officers can keep growing gun crime at bay.

One thing can be safely inferred about Thomas Hamilton’s mental state: He had no reason to fear that an armed policeman might quickly show up: Scotland’s police, like England’s famous bobbies, are mostly unarmed.

Piers Morgan, for his part, says that in the unlikely event he’s deported, he may broadcast from the Caribbean island-nation of Jamaica, part of the British commonwealth. Does Morgan know that Jamaica has one of the world’s highest murder rates? And that obtaining a handgun permit there, especially for non-Jamaicans, often drags on for months and months?

Good luck, Piers.

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Rumors are flying in Venezuela that Hugo Chávez is on his death bed – fighting a respiratory infection in a Havana oncology ward that, according to official statements, developed after his fourth cancer surgery. Now, Fidel Castro is fueling rumors of a death watch with an open letter to Venezuelan Vice President Nicolás Maduro.

It has the tone of a funeral eulogy.

Sent by Castro on New Year’s Day, the 350-word letter also was published in Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party’s Central Committee. Castro, a mentor to Chávez over the years, recalls his first meeting with Venezuela’s strongman in Havana in 1994; this was not long after Chávez, then a cashiered Army paratrooper, was released from prison for leading an aborted military coup in 1992. Castro details his revolutionary struggles with Chávez and – most tellingly – observes that “however painful (Chávez’s) absence, all of you will be capable of continuing his work.” Cuba has been a recipient of Venezuela’s oil and economic largesse; it has many agents in Venezuela helping Chávez’s security services.

The impetus for the letter, as Castro explained at the onset, was to mark the eighth anniversary for the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, currently an eight-member political and economic group that includes countries from Latin America and the Caribbean. An alternative to the Free Trade Area of the Americas, it was put forth by Chávez to counter U.S. dominance in the region.

Recalling the first time he met Chávez, Castro wrote:

I met Hugo Chávez exactly 18 years ago. Someone invited him to Cuba and he accepted the invitation. He told me that he was thinking of asking for an interview with me. I was far from imagining that those soldiers branded as coup plotters by the news agencies, who sowed their ideas with so much discretion for years, were a select group of Bolivarian revolutionaries. I waited for Chávez at the airport, took him to where he was staying and talked with him for hours, exchanging ideas.

The following day, in the University of Havana’s Aula Magna, each one of us expressed our ideas.

(Readers can see Chávez’s speech, here. Although it’s in Spanish, two things surmount language barriers: Chávez’s telegenic presence and his aura of being a True Believer.)

Regarding Cuba’s close ties with Venezuela, Castro also mentioned Venezuela’s mudslide disaster in 1999 — and how Cuban physicians and medical aid were sent in response. “Our medical cooperation with Venezuela began as a result of the Vargas tragedy in which thousands of people died as a consequence of the abandonment and lack of foresight experienced by the poorest population of this state.”

It’s a fanciful narrative, to be sure, about what happened along the coastline of Vargas State, 20 miles north of Caracas. It ignores the truth: Chávez’s inept leadership and do-or-die political ambitions facilitated the deaths of 30,000 or more Venezuelans in the mudslide disaster. Most of the victims were poor.

Although not widely reported outside of Venezuela, Chávez and his advisers ignored the unusually heavy rains (and possibility of deadly mudslides and flooding), because they were determined to go ahead with a national referendum, on December 15, that was needed to adopt a new constitution. The constitution was a pivotal step in consolidating Chávez’s power – and enabled him to pack the Supreme Court with political cronies.

Despite the menacing rains, Chávez urged Venezuelans to go to the polls. No matter that emergencies were being declared and evacuations undertaken in neighboring states, including by Miranda state Gov. Enrique Mendoza – a Chávez opponent – who had a reputation for good governance.

Writing at the excellent blog Venezuela News and Views, Jorge Arena provides a cogent time line of what in fact happened, explaining:

On December 15, 1999 the referendum process started despite the heavy rains. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez appeared on TV and asked the Venezuelan people to go massively to vote and to vote early. He said that nobody should be prevented to go to vote because of the rains. He reminded Venezuelans of the old sentence by Simon Bolivar “If Nature is against us; we will fight against her and make her obey.” Many centers could not open and many table witnesses could not be present because of the rain situation. Problems were reported in several states. Members of the church with the CNE directory prayed to God for the climate to improve. Evacuations started in the state of Falcon.

On December 16, 1999 the country realized the magnitude of the disaster. Vargas state was completely cut from the rest of the country. Some Constitutional Assembly members celebrated the referendum win but others, like (Aristóbulo) Isturiz, asked for restraint.

Explaining how Chávez put the Vargas disaster to good use, Arena added:

On December 24, 1999 the judges of the new Supreme Court, baptized “Tribunal Supremo de Justicia” (TSJ) were swore in. They were hand-picked by the so-called “Congresillo”, a subset of the Constitutional Assembly that had taken the role of the dissolved Congress. In the turmoil that followed the disaster, very few eyes were paying attention to this very important nomination. The smooth transition that was supposed to take place from the old to the new Constitutional rule did not take place given the state of emergency.

So, by the end of December 1999, Venezuela had a brand new Constitution and a brand new Supreme Court. Chávez had won the first round for the absolute control of the country. There were however tens of thousands deaths, a major economic disaster and entire areas of the country to be rebuilt. If the government had declared the State of emergency sooner, stopped the referendum and evacuated as quick as possible the affected areas thousands of lives could have been saved. They did not do it because they put their political agenda before the well being of the Venezuelan people.

To me, that is criminal negligence.

History will be the judge.

Interestingly, it was during the Vargas disaster that Chávez established his anti-American credentials – turning away U.S. Navy ships that were steaming to Venezuela with military engineers, physicians, and equipment — part of the international aid effort. They’d been invited by a senior military official in Chávez’s government. Ten years later, residents of Vargas still complained bitterly about Venezuela’s inadequate response to the natural disaster. Vargas remained a mess.

Although Chávez turned away the U.S. Navy ships, the U.S. nevertheless played a significant role in helping Venezuela – as Venezuelans clearly saw when U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopters were carrying out rescue flights. Yet Chávez’s officials attempted to minimize the U.S. aid as was noted in a Washington Times article that I wrote as a Caracas-based correspondent.

How long will Chávez live? Venezuela’s government has treated his cancer as a state secret, releasing few details. But the little information that has been released suggests to some cancer specialists that Chávez (in light of four surgeries to the pelvic area, radiation treatment, and chemotherapy) is suffering from a sarcoma. “Patients who suffer from sarcoma tumors that are aggressive and incurable usually live between one to three years. If Mr. Chávez suffered from advanced sarcoma when he was diagnosed, he would be in the middle of that range right now,” the Wall Street Journal recently pointed out in an article,

“Outlook for Chávez darkens, doctors say.”

And in an observation that may surprise Michael Moore, that same article indicated that Chávez’s insistence on being treated in Cuba was a fatal mistake: Havana’s cancer center, after all, “isn’t considered among the elite anticancer or sarcoma centers, a handful of which are located in the U.S. and Europe, doctors say.”

Vice president Nicolás Maduro, a Chávez yes man, was a bus driver-turned union leader before getting into leftist politics. He lacks Chávez’s charisma and connection to Venezuela’s poor majority. Yet some political observers regard him as more pragmatic and flexible than Chávez – perhaps less likely, in other words, to put leftist ideology and anti-American hatred above the welfare of Venezuela’s people who, thanks to Chávez, are enduring record levels of crime, corruption, and food shortages.

If Chávez dies or steps down, presidential elections will be held in 30 days. Even if an opposition candidate wins, Venezuela will not recover anytime soon from 14 years of Hugo Chávez.

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It’s been a heartbreaking scene at 9/11 ceremonies in recent years: children honoring mothers or fathers they can’t remember – yet desperately want to know.

Emma Kathryn Hunt is one of them. On Tuesday, she attended a 9/11 ceremony at Sherwood Island State Park in Westport, Connecticut — near where hundreds of horrified onlookers gathered 12 years ago and watched smoke billow from the Twin Towers, some 50 miles away.

Emma, a middle-school student, joined her mother, grandparents and hundreds of others at the state park, the site of a 9/11 memorial that includes 154 stone plaques on the manicured grounds. Each bears the name of a 9/11 victim who had ties to Connecticut. One is Emma’s father, William Christopher Hunt. Emma was 15 months old when her dad died with nearly 3,000 others at the World Trade Center. A 32-year-old vice president of Eurobrokers, he had worked on 84th floor of the South Tower.

“What do I remember about my dad? Nothing. Absolutely nothing,” Emma told a reporter covering the event. Even so, Emma said that when she goes to bed at night, she gazes at a photo of her dad and herself taken on her first birthday. “It’s on my bedside table. It’s the last thing I look at night. And I tell him, ‘Good night, daddy. I love you. I love you always.’”

She explained, “Everything I know about my dad I know because someone in my family tells me things about him. Mostly, it’s my grandma. She tells me stories about him when he was a kid. Or how I’m like him. But I don’t really know, because I can’t remember him.”

Emma remained composed during the first part of Tuesday’s ceremony, according to Marian Gail Brown’s article in the Westport News. Emma, Brown wrote, “tucked her bright orange-red hair away from her freckled face” as she listened to each speaker: Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman, and a local minister and rabbi. But “then came the reading of the names of the 161 victims of 9/11 with Connecticut connections in alphabetical order. ‘Laurence Abel’… ‘Allen Patrick Boyle’…’Sandra Campbell’…’Judith Florence Hofmiller’…Emma grabbed her mother by the knee and squeezed. Two more names before the 71st name. Emma leaned into her mom. Her shoulders shook. ‘William Christopher Hunt.’ Her body convulsed. And the tears poured out. Her mom rubbed her back and pulled her adolescent half-girl, half-woman body toward her, whispering to Emma.”

As heartbreaking as that moment was, it wasn’t as heartbreaking as other things that Emma revealed; specifically, that her teachers don’t talk much about 9/11. Emma, however, said she wishes they did discuss the terror attack – even though she worries about what might be said about why her father died.

It’s a troubling revelation. Does she perhaps worry she might be taught the version of 9/11 told by the anti-American left by people like Ward Churchill, the former ethnic studies professor who infamously called people like Emma’s father “little Eichmanns”? That characterization delighted the left, whose members believed that America got what it deserved on 9/11 because of the evils it had visited on foreign lands.

Emma is perhaps too young to learn about the nuances of why they hate us; yet her question goes to the heart of the matter: “I’d like someone to really, really explain why this happened.”

Why hasn’t anybody told her?

Connecticut’s 9/11 ceremony was indeed sad — though not in the way that those who didn’t talk to Emma might have thought.

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Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro has expelled three top U.S. Embassy officials, accusing them on Monday of fomenting economic sabotage, including all-too-frequent power blackouts, in the oil-rich yet impoverished South American nation. Maduro’s remarks were right out of Hugo Chavez’s anti-American playbook. They dashed Washington’s hope that Maduro, a former union leader and bus driver, would be more “pragmatic” than Chávez, the popular firebrand president who died last March. Maudro was apparently unimpressed with President Obama’s desire for a reset in relations with Venezuela.

“Get out of Venezuela! Yankee go home!” Maduro shouted on live television, during a celebration marking the bicentennial of a battle for independence from Spain. ”Enough of abuses against the dignity of a homeland that wants peace.”

The embassy officials were identified as chargé d’affaires Kelly Keiderling; political officer Elizabeth Hoffman; and vice consul David Moo. They have 48 hours to leave the country.

Maduro didn’t say whether the trio had anything to do with the dark side of Venezuela’s so-called “21st Century” socialism: toilet paper and food shortages; an annual inflation rate of more than 45 percent; epic levels of corruption; and Caracas’ status as the world’s murder capital. Power blackouts also have been a problem.

“We have detected a group of officials of the United States Embassy in Caracas, in Venezuela, and we have been tracking them for several months,” Maduro explained. ”These officials spend their time meeting with the Venezuelan extreme right wing, financing them and encouraging them to take actions to sabotage the electrical system, to sabotage the Venezuelan economy.”

Regarding the Obama administration, Maduro said he “doesn’t care” about its response. “We’re not going to allow an imperial government to come and bring money to stop companies operating, (and) to take out the electricity to shut Venezuela down.”

“Señores gringos, imperialists, you have before you men and women of dignity that…will never kneel before your interests and we’re not afraid of you. We’ll confront you on all levels, the political, the diplomatic.”

Maduro’s rant underscores that things can only get  worse in Venezuela. Under Chávez and Maduro, Venezuela’s old pathologies — Statism, bread-and-circus populism, and corruption – have grown to epic levels. But like Chávez, Maduro is clueless about what’s wrong; and so he finds it convenient to promote conspiracy theories and anti-Americanism. But this isn’t merely about political expediency and demagoguery, because Maduro no doubt really believes what’s he saying, as do many Venezuelans.

“Yankee go home!” Sadly, it’s an old story in Latin America and many parts of the world.

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Hugo Chávez must be rolling over in his grave — convulsed with laughter. Bread-and-circuses socialism has hit new heights in Venezuela as Chávez’s hand-picked successor Nicolás Maduro ordered the military occupation of electronic chain stores – and forced them to offer “fair prices.” Prices had been rising, but not anymore.

Under President Chávez, bread-and-circuses populism also was the rage: nationwide stores were set up to sell food at below-market prices – an effort that, ironically, led to food shortages. Now, Maduro is taking Venezuela’s entitlement culture a step further — putting government-set prices on things like plasma television sets, refrigerators, and washing machines.

Venezuelans are overjoyed.

Since Saturday, thousands have been mobbing electronic stores to get a bargain. Prices are so low that even anti-government opponents have joined the mob that’s enjoying the temporary fruits of Chávez so-called “21st Century socialism.” A number of store managers and owners have been arrested, accused by Maduro of illegal price gouging, speculating, and unfair lending. “We’re doing this for the good of the nation,” said Maduro. “Let nothing remain in stock …We’re going to comb the whole nation in the next few days. This robbery of the people has to stop.”

Critics called it “state sponsored looting.” Store shelves were cleaned out. But Maduro, who faces make-or-break municipal elections in a month amid a deteriorating economy, vented his fury at Venezuela’s allegedly unscrupulous retailers – the “parasitic bourgeoisie” as he called them, and lumped them together with Yankee imperialists and his political opposition.

It was right out of Chavez playbook, but taken to new heights – or lows. Bread-and-circuses populism, to be sure, has existed in Venezuela long before Hugo Chavez, along with ample amounts of authoritarianism, statism, and corruption.

The chaos among bargain hunters – caught on the YouTube clip below — continued through Monday; and so the government sent out thousands of members of its security forces and civilian militia to ensure crowd control at electronics shops – those not already cleaned out or, in some cases, looted by shoppers who didn’t want to pay even the government’s dirt-cheap prices. Next on Maduro’s hit list are clothing stores and automobile dealerships.

Venezuela is an oil-rich yet impoverished country. But it wasn’t always poor. During the 1970s, it was dubbed “Saudi Venezuela” as oil prices soared and petro-dollars trickled down to most everybody. Those days are long gone – yet many Venezuelans persist in their belief that oil wealth ought to make them rich; and so they’re quick to accept Maduro’s conspiracy theories about why consumer goods are unaffordable. To them, dirt-cheap electronics and appliances are part of their birthright by virtue of their oil wealth.

Venezuela’s rising prices and food shortages reflect the economic realities of Venezuela’s command-and-control economy – a 54 percent inflation rate and shortages of dollars caused by draconian currency exchange controls.

Dollars, of course, are needed to import goods, but they’re hard to come by. On the currency black market, a greenback sells for nearly 10 times the official rate. Mismanagement and currency controls are blamed for the shortages of basic goods, including toilet paper and cooking oil.

Venezuela’s slide into mob rule has been brewing for years. Earlier into President Chávez’s first term, 14 years ago, he had suggested that people who rob could be excused; they were only hungry and poor, after all. And then there were a number of instances of squatters occupying empty apartment buildings, with tacit government approval. The concept of private property, the cornerstone of a vibrant economy, was whittled way little by little – from squatters taking over apartment complexes to Chávez’s nationalizations of large swaths of the economy, after declaring himself a socialist.

With Venezuela’s economy in a tail spin, the government has become increasingly paranoid, as underscored by the recent detention of Miami Herald Jim Wyss whom the National Guard and military intelligence held for three days. His crime: asking questions about chronic food shortages and upcoming municipal elections. He was released on Saturday as Venezuela drifted into mob rule.

What’s next for Venezuela? Cuba at one point had an answer on how to rev up its cash-strapped economy: drug trafficking. Those days appear to be over thanks to the Reagan administration’s vigilance; but drug trafficking has also been a source of revenue for Venezuela, enriching Venezuelan narco-generals, high-ranking officials, and in particular Lebanese-born businessman Walid Makled, who ultimately had a falling out with the Chávez administration and is now in a Venezuelan prison.

Venezuela’s government has never demonstrated a great interest in stopping drug trafficking within its border; and so the recent destruction of 13 civilian airplanes, allegedly for drug smuggling, suggest that corrupt Venezuelan military men and officials may be waging a turf war for control of Venezuela’s drug trade; the country is a transshipment point for Colombian cocaine. Reports vary as to whether the planes were shot down on destroyed on the ground after being forced down; and that includes the fate of a Mexican business jet whose recent destruction has drawn protests from Mexico’s government. Venezuela claimed the Hawker 25 was loaded with cocaine.

In the go-go days of high oil prices, Venezuela was considered a beacon of democracy for the region. Caracas was a charming place — the “city of red roofs.” Venezuela’s long decline has accelerated under socialism and anti-Americanism. The worst is yet to come; or as Venezuelan economist Jose Guerra said in a tweet: “Food today, hunger tomorrow.”

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It’s an infuriating example of political correctness: Most of New York City’s media outlets have sanitized the nature of a spate of unprovoked attacks upon hapless pedestrians — all recent victims of the so-called “knockout game.” There have been injuries and several deaths among men, women, and youngsters, as they suffered walloping “sucker punches” by roving black youths in New York City and elsewhere.

The knockout game involves an unmentionable subject for most in the mainstream media: black-on-white violence. To a lesser extent, Asians and Hispanics have been targeted as well. They’re white enough, it seems, for black youths playing the knockout game.

For those unfamiliar with the knockout game, it’s how some black youths amuse themselves, especially in urban settings. The goal: use a single devastating punch to knock a victim unconscious. And when they succeed, they invariably react with merriment and laughter, as videos capturing the mayhem have revealed. Could racism be motivating these black youths? Nobody in the mainstream media dares suggest that this might be fueling the black mob violence in what President Obama said would be a post-racial era.

The knockout game, to be sure, has been around a few years. It has been mostly ignored by the mainstream media, which generally airbrushes out the black-on-white nature of the mayhem. The knockout game, however, was the subject of a lengthy American Thinker article by John T. Bennett way back on July 14, 2011. Now, in light of the spate of recent attacks in New York City and nearby cities, some media outlets are belatedly acknowledging that the knockout game is indeed a growing trend – though they still tiptoe around the fact that the attackers are black.

In Brooklyn, some recent victims of the knockout game were Jews, which is finally prompting New York City police officials to state that “hate crimes” may have occurred.

Hate crimes? That must have shocked some at the New York Daily News, which on Monday ran an article that failed to note the generally black-on-white nature of the knockout game. Reporter Michael Walsh merely wrote that, “This disturbing game is a hit with goons” and is an “emerging trend among unhinged teens.”

And on Fox’s “The Real Story” on Tuesday, two “experts” opined during a panel discussion that the black youths playing the knockout game were possibly influenced by violent video games or raised in troubled homes. “This is about parenting at the core,” chimed in blond-haired moderator Gretchen Carlson.

All about parenting, huh? Fair enough. But that also raises the question of just what some black parents are teaching their little darlings, given that they prefer to attack mostly whites. It’s safe to say that the media would readily cry “racism” if the knockout game involved roving gangs of white youths attacking blacks and to a lesser extent Asians and Hispanics.

Fox’s Greta Van Susteren, for her part, gets it, unlike some of her colleagues at Fox News, which is the news channel that I usually watch. In her “On the Record” segment, Susteren raised alarm bells about the knockout game.

“Take a close look,” she said, referring to a video clip showing black youths playing the knockout game. “Do you know what is going on? That is young African-American teenagers viciously and gratuitously attacking a random victim, a teacher, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.”

“This knockout game crime is a trend,” she added. “We’ve had two incidents in the last few days right here in D.C. I know this is a very touchy topic because the game is regrettably popular amongst unsupervised African-American teens. No one wants to get near the topic of race. We also can’t run from this one.”

She concluded: “I beg of Reverend Jesse Jackson, Reverend Al Sharpton and even President Obama to step up right now and speak out. Your silence will speak volumes, but your voice could make a big difference. Don’t wait. Be leaders, they need you. We need you.”

Unfortunately, it would be out of character for these black leaders to speak out against the knockout game. They prefer to shame whites — not blacks — in order to achieve their left-leaning visions of social justice and score political points.

To its credit, the New York Post did run a piece on Tuesday exposing the unpleasant truths about the knockout game — and how the recent incidents in New York City and elsewhere underscore the pathologies of black thug culture. But that no-holds-barred article (“Thugs Target Jews in Sick Knockout Game”) wasn’t written by a New York Post reporter but by Thomas Sowell, an African-American and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the conservative think tank.

It would be interesting to know if the knockout game is being played in cities and states with high numbers of concealed carry permits. But the answer to that might not square with the mainstream media’s anti-gun agenda.

As New York’s newspapers and online sites tiptoe around race in their coverage of the knockout game, news channels are presenting a more honest picture of what’s happening due to the visual nature of their medium – as is underscored by this segment from a New York news channel.

*

Don’t miss Jamie Glazov’s video interview with Colin Flaherty on the epidemic of black mob violence — and the media’s cover-up:

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President Obama gave the Castro brothers a when shaking hands with counterpart Raul at Nelson Mandela’s funeral. But that propaganda victory for the communist tyranny meant little to six ordinary Cubans who, on Christmas Eve, were declared lost at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard.

The Cubans — three men and three women — were no doubt aware of the handshake brouhaha when they departed the Dominican Republic on December 17 on an illegal boat trip to Puerto Rico, after alerting relatives in the United States about their estimated arrival date. To them, Obama’s handshake wasn’t a gesture likely to improve their dead-end lives — not in a country designated by the United States as a state sponsor of terrorism and regularly condemned by human rights groups.

Relatives of the Cubans alerted the Coast Guard when their boat failed to arrive in the U.S. territory, thus setting off a four-day air search as two aircraft flew a total of 22 hours over 22,000 square nautical miles, but on Tuesday evening the search was called off. “While the fate of (these) people may never be known…our thoughts and prayers are with their families and loved ones during this difficult time,” said Coast Guard Capt. Drew Pearson in a on Christmas Day.

The Cubans, whose names were not released, join untold others who have died at sea to fulfill their dreams of coming to America, a country that to them remains a beacon of freedom — even as President Obama bows to foreign leaders, shakes hands with tyrants, and apologizes for America’s supposed sins. The Castro regime has all but stamped out Christmas in Cuba, so it is especially tragic and sad that the Cubans who perished never saw Christmas in Puerto Rico, a holiday that would have been similar to what Cubans enjoyed before Castro’s communist revolution.

In an Op-Ed in The Washington Times, Republican Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen

“Shaking Raul Castro’s hand, while dismissed by some as only a handshake, not only emboldens the regime, but will not stop the atrocious acts against the Cuban people. Mr. Obama extended his hand to Raul Castro, even though the Castro brothers are unwilling to unclench their fist over the Cuban people.”

Those words are certainly not news to ordinary Cubans  — even if they fall on deaf ears in the Obama administration.

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Guns & Ammo magazine has fallen into the liberal cross-hairs of The New York Times – the target of a bogus scandal the Gray Lady dished up as part of its anti-gun crusade.

“Banished for Questioning the Gospel of Guns.” So read the front-page headline calculated to shock the naïve and gullible. The article’s shocking revelation: Guns & Ammo has chummy relationships with advertisers and panders to its readers. That, of course, is how things work at all those specialty magazines that are chock-full of ads. Yet as the newspaper that helped elect Barack Obama sees things, there’s a nefarious conspiracy going on involving Guns & Ammo parent company InterMedia Outdoors and malevolent gun manufacturers — all of whom supposedly abhor free speech and will go to appalling lengths to advance an absolutist pro-gun agenda.

What sent The Times into its hand-waving frenzy was Guns & Ammo’s recent firing of long-time columnist Dick Metcalf, who had outraged advertisers and readers with a column titled “Let’s Talk Limits.” It argued that Second Amendment rights were not absolute. “The fact is, all constitutional rights are regulated, always have been, and need to be,” Metcalf wrote. “Freedom of speech is regulated. You cannot falsely and deliberately shout, “Fire!” in a crowded theater.”

Personally, I find nothing over the top about this statement, and many readers here would probably agree. But that’s not how Guns & Ammo’s advertisers saw things. They wanted Metcalf out, as did many of Guns & Ammo’s 400,000 readers who “threatened to cancel their subscriptions” and even sent the magazine death threats, according to The Times’ article by reporter Ravi Somaiya. Political fallout over the controversy also caused Guns & Ammo’s editor, Jim Bequette, to announce that he’d speed up his retirement plans and bring his successor on board ahead of schedule.

Yes, it’s all very sad when talented and well-intentioned people lose their jobs due to politics – and one silly mistake. But there’s also nothing to prevent Metcalf and Bequette from going to work for another magazine, one that would perhaps be a better fit for them. Perhaps they could start up their own publication.

Yet as The Times sees things, the shake-up at Guns & Ammo suggests dark forces are thwarting reasonable discussions at gun magazines about Second Amendment issues and, more specifically, that Metcalf’s departure “sheds light on the close-knit world of gun journalism, where editors and reporters say there is little room for nuance in the debate over gun laws. Moderate voices that might broaden the discussion from within are silenced.” But wait a minute: Couldn’t you say something similar about the dearth of people with conservative political opinions in The Times’ newsroom? How many of its reporters and editors are Republicans? Inquiring minds want to know.

Guns & Ammo, of course, operates just like other specialty magazines that depend on advertising dollars. “We take care of those who take care of us,” a publisher at one of the country’s most widely read aviation magazines used to tell his staff, according to a former boss of mine who, earlier in his career, had been one of that magazine’s senior editors. He recalled how the editor-in-chief at the time, a well-known aviation journalist and author, used to write scathing inter-office memos about new airplanes he’d flown, and hated — yet none of those negative critiques ever made it into his published articles, because this would risk losing advertising dollars. I heard these revelations while working as an associate editor at a “Consumer Reports”-type aviation for light-plane pilots: No ads allowed! And without ads, we were free to say whatever passed muster with the magazine’s libel lawyer. The Times, incidentally, described Metcalf, a former history teacher at Yale and Cornell, as ”one of the country’s pre-eminent gun journalists.” Yet one example of a gun review by Metcalf on InterMedia Outdoors’ television show has the feel of an informercial; certainly not the type of journalism that would past muster at The Times; and yet The Times essentially puts a halo over Metcalf’s head to support its anti-gun agenda.

None of this is to suggest, to be sure, that magazines like Guns & Ammo write dishonest product reviews; but those reviews will definitely not read quite the same way as they would if done by gun magazines with a no-advertising policy; and nor would Guns & Ammo and other well-managed publications do anything to antagonize readers. By the same token, The Times would be a far different newspaper, and perhaps a more profitable one, if it wasn’t an echo chamber for liberal reporters and editors.

That the agenda-driven Times singles out and vilifies Guns & Ammo for doing what other specialty magazine do is no surprise. Perhaps the Gray Lady’s editors need to ponder their own biases — and to recall a truism from A. J. Liebling, the legendary writer at The New Yorker who observed: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

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Beauty queens are revered in Venezuela, none more so than those crowned “Miss Venezuela.” So when a beloved former “Miss” named Mónica Spear and her ex-husband were murdered by highway bandits, the crime sparked national outrage — touching off street protests, non-stop media coverage, and an ongoing national conversation about the socialist government’s failure to stop a runaway murder epidemic.

Now, outrage over the murders is prompting many Venezuelans to confront the contradictions of Venezuela-style socialism. One of the biggest ironies: violent crime has exploded since President Hugo Chávez, a firebrand leftist, took office 15 years ago. This has happened, moreover, as capitalism has increasingly been dismantled – supposedly replaced by more economic equality and “social justice” in the oil-rich yet impoverished South American nation.

Chávez, who died last March of cancer, coined the term “21^st Century socialism.” He contended it would reverse corruption-riddled Venezuela’s long economic decline, as would his strategy of pursing anti-American alliances. But as fallout continues over the high-profile murders, many Venezuelans are becoming more cynical about President Nicolás Maduro’s socialist agenda as tens of thousands of Venezuelans are being murdered annually. Maduro, Chávez’s hand-picked successor, is grappling with food shortages, falling oil prices, and annual inflation topping 50%. He rules a politically polarized country where just over 50 percent of voters support his leftist agenda. He possesses neither Chávez’s charisma nor mystical connection to Venezuela’s poor majority.

Spear, crowned “Miss Venezuela” in 2004, died in a hail of gunfire on a dark highway on Monday, January 6, with ex-husband Henry Thomas Berry, a 39-year-old British citizen who specialized in adventure tourism at a local travel agency. Their 5-year-old daughter suffered a leg wound.

Police said several bandits laid sharp objects on the road that flattened the car’s tires; other reports said the car was disabled after hitting a pothole — a common problem on poorly maintained roads. The couple locked themselves in their car as the bandits showed up, but to no avail: Six shots were fired as a tow-truck arrived. The couple’s ill-fated holiday in the spectacular mountains and plains of western Venezuela had been intended to give them a new start together.

With Spear and Berry’s murders, Venezuela’s skyrocketing murder rate suddenly has human faces – and President Maduro is on the defensive. He’d been focusing on deepening “21^st Century socialism.” This included an “economic offensive” against the commercial class: from owners of supermarkets to electronics stores to car dealerships – all were being ordered to offer government-set “fair prices.” And before November’s make-or-break municipal elections, he’d won votes by taking bread-and-circuses populism to new heights, tacitly giving Christmas shoppers, as some observers saw it, a green light to loot electronics stores. “We’re doing this for the good of the nation,” he said. “Let nothing remain in stock!” A number of retailers were jailed — accused of speculating, hoarding, and unfair lending.

Now, sensing political trouble over Spear and Berry’s murders, Maduro is shifting his attention away from his “economic offensive.” He’s instead calling for an unprecedented anti-crime program, and he recently met with big-city mayors, governors, and administration officials to come up with a plan. Details remain sketchy. But hopefully, Maduro will focus on improving the nation’s often corrupt and inefficient police forces and criminal-justice system. In the past, he and Chávez had believed socialism would address what they believed were crime’s root causes: capitalism and class-conflict; poverty and economic inequality — and even violent American movies shown on Venezuelan television and movie theaters.

Venezuela suffered the world’s fourth highest murder rate in 2010 after Honduras, El Salvador, and Jamaica, according to United Nation’s statistics. Official Venezuelan crime statistics are non-existent: the government stopped providing them ten years ago. But sociologist Roberto Briceño León, president of the Venezuelan Observatory on Violence, a watchdog group, estimates that yearly homicides have increased 427% since Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998, after campaigning on a platform to seek a “third way” between socialism and capitalism, and to reverse rampant corruption and declining living standards. “In 1998, we had 4,550 homicides in the country, but we closed the past year with 24,000,” Briceño León recently told Globovision, a Caracas television channel, in a segment about the Spear and Berry murders. To put those grim murder numbers into perspective: war-torn Iraq’s population is comparable in size to Venezuela’s, yet it suffered 7,800 killings in 2013 — about one third of Venezuela’s homicides. “A third of our murders, and yet the international community says absolutely nothing about the violence in Venezuela. Shame on them,” wrote Juan Cristobal Nagel, an opposition blogger at Caracas Chronicles.

To outraged Venezuelans, the couple’s murders were especially tragic because their lives were caught up with the rise and fall of the Venezuelan dream – an ideal that existed from the 1970s to mid-80s, the era of “Saudi Venezuela” when oil prices were soaring. Berry’s British parents had immigrated to Venezuela more than 40 years ago, when Caracas was a charming place known as the “city of red roofs.” His father was a mathematics professor at Simón Bolívar University. Spear, a fifth runner-up in the Miss Universe pageant, went on to because a successful soap-opera actress for the Spanish-language Telemundo network. In 2011, she had moved to Florida, one of more than 500,000 Venezuelan now living aboard to escape Venezuela-style socialism. Many are members of the business and professional classes, people whom class-warrior Chávez saw as part the problems ailing Venezuela.

Police investigating Spear and Berry’s murders quickly rounded up nine suspects who were part of a gang that preyed on motorists; they were carrying credit cards and a digital camera that belonged to the couple. It was splendid police work. But to most Venezuelans it underscored that their country, even under “21^st Century socialism,” has two standards of justice: one for the well-connected and famous, and the other for ordinary Venezuelans, observed Briceño León, the sociologist. Indeed, most Venezuelans doubt that police would have expended such an effort for ordinary Venezuelans, he explained. “People can commit crimes without any consequences,” sociologist Luis Cedeño, director of civic group Active Peace, told Globovision.

Whatever crime-reduction plan President Maduro implements will face a major problem: Venezuela is broke. Draconian currency exchange and price controls have left many supermarket shelves empty; even toilet party is in short supply. Attracting significant foreign investment is not an option — not after Chávez nationalized large swaths of the economy. Recently, Bloomberg News reported that Venezuela’s “economic distress is so acute that the central bank stopped releasing regular statistics for the first time ever, threatening to increase borrowing costs further as the nation faces $10 billion of financing needs.” Benjamin Wang, a money manager at PineBridge Investments LLC, was quoted as saying: “There’s no transparent data to measure the risk.”

As the fallout over the death of a beauty queen plays out, cynicism is likely to grow toward Venezuela-style socialism. So will murder, corruption, and economic decline. How ironic that a beauty queen’s death may serve as a catalyst for positive change that opposition candidates have been unable to achieve by defeating Hugo Chávez or Nicolás Maduro at the polls.

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Venezuela’s economy is on life support, yet its pretensions of humbling the United States persist. This is underscored by its plans to continue Hugo Chávez’s showcase anti-American propaganda program  – giving away free home-heating oil to poor Americans this winter, just like it has done for the past nine years. As usual, former U.S. Rep. Joseph Kennedy II is facilitating and cheering on what amounts to an anti-American program by the oil-rich yet impoverished South American nation.

There had been much speculation about whether Venezuela would continue, amid its deepening economic woes, to use oil largess to promote its leftist ideology abroad, as the late President Chávez had done. But CITGO Petroleum Corporation, the Houston-based arm of Venezuela’s state oil company, confirmed on Wednesday that it will indeed provide free home-heating oil to poor Americans, those who supposedly can’t afford heating oil.

Leftist firebrand Chávez, who died last March of cancer, launched the program in 2005. Since then, CITGO claims that more than 235 million gallons of home-heating oil have been distributed to more than 1.8 million low-income Americans. It says it has assisted families, homeless shelters, and native American tribes in 25 states and District of Columbia. Naturally, the blue states of the Northeast are major recipients given the wide use of home-heating oil there.

Chávez made anti-Americanism a cornerstone of his foreign policy. He devised sweetheart oil deals with like-minded nations to spread his leftist ideology — essentially using oil as a political weapon. His hand-picked successor Nicolás Maduro, a former bus driver and union leader, is showing yet again that he is determined to follow in Chávez footsteps.

Interestingly, CITGO’s announcement comes as a U.S. judge in South Texas fined CITGO more than $2 million for felony violations of the U.S. Clean Air Act committed by its Corpus Christi refinery. Pollution from the facility was blamed for sickening dozens of nearby residents. Presumably, they were low-income Americans, people who could only afford to live near a smelly oil refinery and who, it would seem, lacked the propaganda value of poor Americans elsewhere, especially in the Northeast’s blue states.

“We have committed to this program once again this year because we see it as a humanitarian effort that helps our most vulnerable neighbors stay warm during one of the coldest winters in history,” Nelson P. Martinez, President and CEO of CITGO Petroleum Corporation, announced in his company’s news release. “We can’t relieve the need for everyone but this is our humble contribution to share the responsibility of improving the quality of life in our communities by using the strength of our resources to help those in need. This is one of the most important values we share with our shareholder, Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), the national oil company of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela,” he added.

Kennedy, for his part, is again playing the role of useful Democratic idiot in Venezuela’s anti-American oil largess. A non-profit he created in 1979, Citizens Energy Corporation, has gladly partnered with CITGO to again deliver the fuel.

“The poor are facing a terrible hardship this winter,” said Kennedy, as quoted in CITGO’s news release. “Federal fuel assistance has dropped 40 percent over the last few years while heating oil prices have jumped by a third. With the kind of cold we’ve experienced this winter, the federal aid just doesn’t go as far. It’s a triple whammy on the poor. That’s why the generosity of CITGO Petroleum and the people of Venezuela is so important – it helps fill the fuel gap for the most vulnerable among us.”

Did Kennedy clear his comments about scaled-back federal fuel assistance with the Obama administration? Or perhaps the cutbacks to which he refers were made because the Obama administration was counting on Venezuela’s anti-American government to keep providing poor Americans (presumably Democratic voters) with free home-heating oil. And when referring to the generosity of Venezuela’s people, was Kennedy aware that no referendum was ever held among Venezuela’s voters as to whether their oil patrimony should be given away to further the ideological ambitions of their political leaders?  Under Chávez, Venezuela gave away billions of dollars of its oil patrimony in sweetheart oil deals with Cuba, the Caribbean, and left-leaning countries in South America. It’s all apart of Venezuela’s effort to spread its leftist ideology and counter American hegemony, which it sees as the cause of the world’s suffering.

President Maduro has been deepening Chávez’s socialism as he grapples with worsening food shortages, falling oil prices, and annual inflation topping 50%  – the region’s highest. Venezuela is quite literally broke. It can’t afford to give away its oil, yet it continues to do so because Maduro is dedicated first and foremost to his leftist ideology — not the welfare or ordinary Venezuelans.

Has any of this occurred to Joseph P. Kennedy and like-minded Democrats? The eagerness with which they embrace Venezuela’s oil largess suggest one of three things. They are useful idiots, fellow travelers – or both. 

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Massive and bloody anti-government protests have been roiling Venezuela for more than a month – provoked by an out-of-control murder rate, food shortages, and myriad instances of inept governance. But that didn’t stop a rogues’ gallery of Latin leftists, including Cuban President Raul Castro, from turning up in Caracas to honor the late Hugo Chávez on the first anniversary of the Venezuelan leader’s death.

Security forces and pro-government militias have responded with a vengeance against the protesters, leaving at least 21 dead and hundreds injured. Most were students.

The tear gas, rubber bullets and Chavista thugs on motorcycles, however, were out of sight and mind for Castro and fellow leftists, including Bolivian President Evo Morales and his Nicaraguan counterpart Daniel Ortega. Like Castro, they enjoyed Chávez’s oil largess over the years. Chávez had promoted himself as the savior of Venezuela’s poor yet gave away billions of dollars of their oil wealth as a way to expand his influence and build alliances against the United States. The firebrand socialist, famous for his colorful anti-American broadsides, died a year ago of cancer, on March 5th, at age 58.

A couple of Hollywood heavy weights – director Oliver Stone and actor Danny Glover – lent their celebrity to Wednesday’s ceremonies that included a military parade and civic events. Glover and Stone considered Chávez a friend and ideological soulmate.

Chávez’s hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro – a 51-year-old former bus driver and union leader – led the ceremonies at “El Comandante’s” sacred tomb – situated in a former military museum in Caracas that had served as the command center for a disorganized and bloody coup attempt that Lt. Colonel Hugo Chávez led on February 4, 1992, against a democratic government.

“Hugo Chávez was, without a doubt, the great leader who brought democracy. Never in history has there been a leader who so authentically loved the people of this country,” Maduro told cheering Chávez loyalists. The ceremony featured goose-steeping soldiers, columns of tanks, and low-flying Russian Sukhoi jets.

A lavish spectacle, it came amid the economic and social chaos produced by what Chávez called “21st Century Socialism,” and the bread-and-circuses populism is being deepened by Maduro in the oil-rich yet impoverished South American nation. Venezuela has long been a prize for Cuba, which sponsored leftist insurgences there in the 1960s. Now, socialist Venezuela has come to look more and more like Cuba, where basic goods also are scarce.

Ironically, Chávez had portrayed himself during his first presidential campaign as a moderate seeking a “third way” between capitalism and socialism. Claiming he’d traded the bullet for the ballet, he pledged to reverse declining living standards and root out Venezuela’s rampant corruption. But months after his landslide election victory, he did an about-face, praising Cuba’s communism and forming a close friendship with Fidel Castro. Soon he was forming anti-American alliances with Middle Eastern strongmen such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi. He nationalized large swaths of the economy in Venezuela; or to be precise: the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Early into his first term, Chávez insisted on the name change — inspired by Venezulea’s aristocratic independence hero Simón Bolivar — as he pushed through a rewritten constitution in a Congress packed with his loyalists.

As for Venezuela’s corruption, Chávez took it to new heights by allowing for the emergence of a new social class; what a Venezuelan journalist famously called the “Boliburguesía” — a portmanteau of the word’s Bolivarian and bourgeoisie. As has been reported often over the years, in print and broadcast media, they became rich overnight thanks to sweetheart contacts, cronyism, and corruption.

Glover, however, spoke only of Chávez as a man of the people to enthusiastic applause from Chávez loyalists. “His memory lives with us through the work that you do as citizens of this great nation,” he said.

Stone didn’t attend but in an interview with a local news outlet talked wistfully of his departed friend Hugo. “I miss Chávez, miss his spirit and presence,” he said. Stone allowed his documentary film, “My Amigo Hugo,” to premier on Venezuela television. (The government required all television stations, both state-owned and private, to broadcast it.)

An information war is underway. Government censorship – including twitter and Internet outages – have been another weapon the government has used in its battle against the protesters whom Stone compared to “the right-wing Cuban exiles in southern Florida.” Later, he complained that he’d been subjected to “verbal violence” over his support for the Chávez and Maduro regimes.

Social media, for its part, has helped organize the protests and shown the world the brutal handiwork of Venezuela’s security forces. Twitter’s SOSVenezuela has buzzed with photos claiming to show Cuban troops and military aircraft in Venezuela. Opposition protesters are convinced that Cubans are participating in the repressive crack-down against students. Over the years, Chávez invited many Cuban security agents and advisers into the country to help solidify his socialist rule.

Bread and circuses populism has a long history in Venezuela, as does statism and authoritarianism. But Chávez took these things to new heights. Now after 11 years of Chávez, and one year of Maduro, who is doubling down on Chávez’s policies, Venezuela is sliding toward basket case status. It has one of the world’s worst murder rates. Shortages of basic goods — including milk, medicines, and toilet paper – are common due to currency exchange and price controls that have made it unprofitable for business to import goods. And things are bound to get worse after recent government edicts requiring retailers and businesses to offer government-set “fair prices.” “Good Morning, Communism!” declared the respected newsletter VenEcomony after analyzing the impact of Maduro’s recent “economic war” against supposedly bourgeoisie retailers and businessmen. Maduro has called the opposition “fascists” and dupes of “Yankee imperialists.”

Venezuela has become a polarized country divided into two ideological camps, thanks mainly to class-warrior Chávez. And last month, opposition leader Leopoldo López, a 42-year-old Harvard-educated politician and former mayor, was sent to jail on trumped up charges, including murder and inciting rioters, for having lent his support to the ongoing street protests.

“HE WHO tires, loses”: that was the slogan printed on a T-shirt worn by López when he was arrested among a sea of supporters. To Maduro’s outrage, López had urged protesters to continue taking their grievances to the streets with peaceful protests; it’s the only option they have left against an authoritarian government. Unarmed student demonstrators have been using two valuable weapons: twitter (#SOSVenezuea) and YouTube. Powerful videos like this have gone viral:

In last April’s presidential election, Maduro prevailed over opposition leader Henrique Capriles, a state governor and former mayor, by a razor-thing 50.6 percent of the vote. Protesters rightly believe that Capriles ought to be leading the country in light of Chávez and Maduro’s demagoguery and populism on top of illegal campaign spending and threats against state employees who supported opposition candidates.

Students come mainly from the middle-class and have been the backbone of the nationwide protest movement. It started in early February in San Cristóbal, a college town in the Andean mountains of 650,000, following the sexual assault of a female student. Initially, the protests were provoked by out-of-control crime. But as they spread to every major city in Venezuela, students added additional grievances to their manifesto – corruption, electrical blackouts, and other quality-of-life issues. Here and there, there have been reports in social media of the protests spreading to working-class areas that have been traditional Chávez strongholds.

But the hope of pulling off a Ukrainian-style revolution seems remote. The military is with Maduro, by all accounts. The students and other protesters are a minority; and so far their rage has been vented mainly against the symptoms of bread and circuses socialism – not against the system itself; and that system is without a doubt corrupt. It revolves in part around the popular belief, especially among the poor majority, that Venezuelans ought to be rich and entitled by dint of their oil wealth — an impossibility in Venezuela today. It’s a sirens song – the paradox of plenty, as some call it – that keeps free-market policies at bay, keeps power concentrated in the hands of a few, and lends itself to a mentality that blames others. In this culture, anti-Americanism flourishes. Free-market policies and investor-friendly laws, on the other hand, would create wealth – far more than could be pumped out of the ground.

The prophetic warning of Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, a Venezuelan intellectual who was instrumental in founding OPEC, is often cited and worth quoting in respect to Venezuela’s long decline and current crisis. “Ten years from now, twenty years from now, you will see: oil will bring us ruin… Oil is the Devil’s excrement.”

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Some leftists have smartened up. Guerrilla insurgencies are passé for them. So are AK-47s from Cuba or the Soviet bloc or China.

They saw an easier way to seize power; so they got shaves, put on suites, and ran for office claiming to be left-leaning pragmatists. But after their election wins, they took advantage of a polarized citizenry and weak institutions to tear the system apart – more or less legally – from inside out.

The stealth approach worked well for Hugo Chávez in Venezuela where Cuban agents and goons are now pitching in to put down anti-government protesters fed up with Venezuela’s “21st Century Socialism.” During his first election campaign, Chavez denied he was a socialist and portrayed himself as a moderate despite having led an aborted coup against a democratic government.

Now, El Salvador seems poised to follow that same path after a former Marxist guerrilla leader – 69-year-old Salvador Sánchez Cerén – was elected president by a razor-thin margin and amid allegations of voting irregularities, which included claims that gang members were recruited to intimidate voters who opposed him. Sánchez Cerén had been El Salvador’s vice president — a hardliner in the ruling Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) party, named after a legendary Salvadorian rebel leader, Farabundo Martí, from the 1930s.

Sánchez Cerén had an uneasy relationship with President Mauricio Funes, a 54-year-old former television reporter who had never been a guerrilla but identified with the left.

Five years ago, the two teamed up in a union of political convenience that drew voters from across the political spectrum – and they won. Their election victory ended nearly two decades of conservative rule by the center-right National Republican Alliance (Arena). But President Funes’s political strategy was a pact with the devil. During his 5-year-term, his relationship with Sánchez Cerén and other FMLN hard-liners become increasingly strained, according to political observers.

Arena has yet to accept the outcome. But barring unexpected developments, Sánchez Cerén will take office on June 1. He will be the first guerrilla leader to govern the Central American country, where an atrocity-filled civil war raged nearly 13 years, killing at least 75,000 people and sending tens of thousands of refugees to the U.S. A peace accord was signed in 1992 between the military-led government and leftist groups that had fought under the FMLN umbrella. They were subsequently absorbed into the FMLN political party.

Venezuela’s turmoil overshadowed El Salvador’s bitterly contested election; for 50 percent of Salvadorians deeply fear the ideological left. They doubted Sánchez Cerén was a pragmatist who would work with opposition leaders and uphold El Salvador’s constitution. They had good reasons to be afraid: Sánchez Cerén has a long history as a Marxist ideologue. What’s more, he had a hand in murder and kidnappings during El Salvador’s horrific civil war – a dark past mentioned in a secret U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks. His “commitment to law and order cannot be easily assumed,” observed the missive for then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dated September 30, 2009, and signed by Deputy Chief of Mission Robert Blau.

Sánchez Cerén, an admirer of Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution, received 50.11% of the vote compared with 49.89% for Norman Quijano of Arena. Quijano was a former mayor of San Salvador, the nation’s capital.

A mere 6,364 votes carried Sánchez Cerén to victory in a run-off election on March 9. Some 3 million ballots were cast in the country of 6.2 million people.

Amid allegations of voter fraud, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal did a partial recount and, four days later, declared Sánchez Cerén the winner. Arena supporters have reason to be suspicious of the tribunal’s decision, because as some political analysts pointed out, most of its members have ties to the FMLN. Quijano hinted that the military might intervene, but military leaders said they were keeping out of the bitterly contested election.

Sánchez Cerén grew up in a working-class family — the ninth of 12 children whom his parents struggled to support. Five years ago, his campaign for the vice presidency was overshadowed by Funes’s campaign, but his entrance into the political arena did attract the attention of Washington and the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador. Embassy officials seemed skeptical that Sánchez Cerén had indeed traded the bullet for the ballot. They wondered if he remained a Marxist ideologue who was merely echoing the talking points of FMLN’s more moderate presidential candidate.

“We are struck by the irony of Sánchez Cerén commenting on the need for tolerance at the end of a week where media featured his having ordered summary executions of accused infiltrators during the civil war,” observed a confidential diplomatic cable dated September 26, 2008, and signed by then-U.S. Ambassador Charles L. Glazer. “It is still an open question whether he or Funes calls the FMLN shots.” The cable’s title: “FMLN VP Candidate Sánchez Cerén: Hard-liner’s Soft Sell.” It was sent to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, among others.

Last week, after the electoral tribune ruled that Sánchez Cerén had won fair and square, the president-elect declared: “We have the people’s sovereign mandate; starting June 1 we will govern for five more years. We are ready for a dialogue to build El Salvador.”

But Diario Latino, a Salvadorian newspaper, summed up the fears of 50 percent of the population with an editorial stating the obvious: Sánchez Cerén had dedicated much of his life to teaching and defending “Marxist-Leninist principles” and thus could be counted on to take El Salvador toward socialism.

Sánchez Cerén, for his part, provided the first indication of where he was heading when naming his transition team – six former guerillas. At least two were mentioned in U.S. diplomatic cables for their unsavory pasts as guerrilla fighters: José Luis Merino was involved in arms trafficking and Manuel Melgar in murder.

Funes was unable to run for reelection because El Salvador limits presidents to 5-year terms. But he had left El Salvador poised for growth.

“The last government has prepared the ground work in many ways for private investment to take off. It’s not for a lack of policy, the issue is political,” said Joydeep Mukherji, a managing director for Standard & Poor’s during a conference call with Bloomberg News.

Even so, Sánchez Cerén will lead a country with one of the world’s worst murder rates caused by violent gangs. The government has negotiated a truce with them but has yet to rein them in; they control neighborhoods and extort money from residents and businesses. About 35 percent of the population remains in poverty.

If Sánchez Cerén lives up to his reputation, expect to see El Salvador descend into Venezuela-style political chaos and economic decline, and for another wave of Salvadorian refugees to flee to America. President Funes must be regretting his pact with the devil right about now.

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It was one of the more clever protests against Venezuela’s repressive socialist regime – and specifically, against the region’s leftists governments who are supporting it. But this time, there were no street barricades or massive marches protesting what Venezuela-style socialism has wrought: out-of-control crime, food shortages, and a dysfunctional economy. No tear gas or rubber bullets were fired by Venezuela’s security forces or Cuban agents and goons. No Chavista thugs showed up on motorcycles.

This was a remarkably peaceful student protest — one utilizing headline-grabbing political theater to expose the moral corruption of Venezuela’s regional allies. Earlier this week, scores of students gathered outside four embassies: Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and Nicaragua. Like 18 other left-leaning nations in the Caribbean and Latin America, they are either ideological soulmates of oil-rich Venezuela or enjoy its oil largesse. Not surprisingly, they have remained silent over Venezuela’s brutal crackdown against massive anti-government protests that have raged for nearly two months — leaving at least 35 people dead and hundreds injured. Most were students. Hugo Chávez, a firebrand socialist, used sweetheart oil deals to make friends and build anti-American alliances soon after becoming president in 1999.

Besides the obligatory protest signs, the students brought something else: oil barrels. They lined several of them up outside each embassy, and then tossed fake dollars bills around them. At issue for the students was last Friday’s shameful meeting of the Organization of American States in Washington, D.C., where Venezuelan opposition lawmaker María Corina Machado got a cold shoulder from most OAS members. They had no interest in hearing her discuss Venezuela’s rights abuses.

The OAS’s mission includes promoting peace and democracy; yet its members argued for hours about whether Machado, a 46-year-old engineer, could or couldn’t speak. Coming to her defense, Panama made her a temporary part of its delegation — a procedural maneuver it hoped would allowed her to discuss Venezuela’s right abuses in a formal and public session. But Venezuela’s left-leaning allies ultimately prevailed, voting only to hear her during a private session reserved for ad hoc matters. The vote was 22 to 11.

Keeping the session private was unusual for an organization claiming to support transparency; whose charter allows for sanctioning rights abusers within its ranks. Yet Venezuela’s OAS member Carmen Luisa Velasquez defended the closed session and, according to The Wall Street Journal, provoked loud laughter when commending that it would be preformed “[w]ith total transparency: in privacy.”

It was an Orwellian remark, the sort of language you might expect in a communist state like Cuba, where language is turned on its head to serve the state. Machado said as much, blaming the behavior of the OAS on the influence of Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro and Cuba. Under Maduro, Cuba has gained an even bigger role in Venezuela than it had during Hugo Chávez’s days, according to many observers. Chávez died of cancer a year ago.

“They are afraid of the truth,” Machado told reporters after the OAS meeting. ”They don’t want the truth to come out about the massive repression taking place in Venezuela. They don’t want it to be known in the world and in our America.”

Machado is hardly alone in speaking out against Cuba. In recent months, its growing influence in Venezuela has provoked anti-Cuban protest marches; anti-Cuban graffiti (“Cuba Out!); and Cuba has been a frequent topic on social media. Venezuela’s twitter users — when not blocked by Venezuela’s Internet censors — have buzzed with accounts of Cuban goons and military equipment playing a part in the brutal crack-down of the student-led protest movement. Cuba receives 100,000 barrels of Venezuela oil a day in exchange for various types of technical assistance. It has long regarded Venezuela as a prize, having sponsored guerrilla insurgencies there in the 1960s. Recently, El Nuevo Herald, sister paper of The Miami Herald, documented the extensive role that Cuba’s security forces are playing in Venezuela, based on interviews with ex-intelligence agents in Venezuela.

The Cubanization of Venezuela is not only reflected in the repression which the OAS doesn’t want to hear about, but in the Maduro administration’s harassment and marginalization of opposition leaders — a strategy right out of the Castro brothers’ playbooks. After addressing the OAS, for instance, Machado was called a traitor by some Venezuelans lawmakers. The leader of Venezuela’s congress, Diosdado Cabello, even said her OAS appearance had violated the constitution; and so she had lost her seat in the legislature and was no longer immune from being prosecuted for allegedly provoking violent protests.

And earlier this week, security agents arrested one opposition mayor, and another was sentenced to ten months in prison. Both were accused of inciting rebellion by having failed to dismantle street barricades set up by anti-government protesters. This follows last month’s arrest of opposition leader Leopoldo López, a former mayor, for allegedly inciting protesters; or what President Maduro claimed was a call to murder, arson, and terrorism — charges Amnesty International called a “politically motivated attempt to silence dissent. “To this day, no evidence of any kind has been presented,” López wrote in a New York Times op-ed.

Machado, for her part, is no stranger to Chavista thuggishness. Last April, Chavista lawmakers attacked her in congress and broke her nose.

OAS members who supported Panama’s effort to give Machado a public hearing were: Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, United States, Guatemala, Honduras, México, Paraguay, and Perú. Among those opposing Panama’s effort: Brazil, Nicaragua, Uruguay, El Salvador, Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia and the Caribbean countries minus Barbados, which abstained.

The Obama administration has spoken out against Venezuela’s human rights violations, but it has yet to take action. While the OAS meeting was discouraging for U.S. interests and supporters of democracy, it did have an upside, as pointed out by Venezuela analyst Francisco Toro at Caracas Chronicles. “Nearly twice as many people live in the eleven countries that voted against the Maduro regime than in countries that voted with it. Out of the 17 Spanish speaking countries in OAS, 9 voted against the Maduro regime, just 8 for it.”

Machado reportedly took this video with her to explain what has been happening in Venezuela:

The video depicts a grim reality for Venezuela. Unfortunately, the country continues to roil, with reconciliation still a distant possibility.

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Food shortages. Economic chaos. Out-of-control crime. Things have never been quite so bad in oil-rich Venezuela. Massive and bloody anti-government protests have roiled the South American nation for more than two months — a response to what Hugo Chávez’s “21st Century socialism” has wrought to a nation that ought to be rich, but is instead poor.

Hugo Chávez can’t be blamed for everything, however.

The late Venezuelan president got plenty of help from a myriad group of useful idiots and propagandists. They helped sweep him into power in 1999 and gave him various kinds of support during his 14 years of increasingly autocratic rule, until dying of cancer one year ago. Now they’re giving their unquestioning support to his hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro — a bus driver and former union leader — who is doubling downs on Chávez’s policies. Maduro has ramped up Cuba’s role in Venezuela and, with the help of Cuban security agents and goons, has ordered a brutal crack-down on anti-government protests. He has jailed opposition figures on trumped-up charges while professing a desire for a dialogue with opposition leaders. Human rights groups are outraged. But not the worst of Venezuela’s useful idiots.

Who are they?

Living in Venezuela, the United States and overseas, they include left-wing politicians, government officials, journalists, and Hollywood filmmakers. Some unwittingly facilitated Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution and subsequently admitted they were duped after belatedly recognizing Chávez’s malevolence. But the most odious of them — the true believers — have proudly set aside their moral compass to worship at the alter of socialist ideology, much to the delight of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

And here are the first five of the top ten …

Eva Golinger

Eva Golinger, a lawyer and writer based in Brooklyn, is hands-down Venezuela’s biggest propagandist. The 40-year-old Venezuelan-American was a confident of the late President Chavez. She often appears on Venezuela’s state radio and television to defend Venezuela’s so-called “Bolivarian revolution.” Speaking with a think American accent, she promotes the virtues of socialism, belittles the opposition, and elaborates on the latest plot that Venezuela claims Washington has hatched against it.

“I’m a soldier for this revolution,” Golinger told The New York Times three years ago. In its profile, “In Venezuela, an American has the President’s Ear,” The Times called her “one of the most prominent fixtures of Venezuela’s expanding state propaganda complex.”

Recently, Golinger defended the Maduro regime during an interview on Fox News Latino, even as his security forces were engaged in a brutal crack-down against massive anti-government protests. Human rights groups were outraged, but not Golinger. “The protesters have been a minority of people…concentrated in upper and middle class areas,” she claimed. But there have been reports of lower-class Venezuelans increasingly joining the anti-government protests. Maduro also didn’t inherit Chávez’s halo or ability to sail to comfortable election wins. In balloting shortly after Chávez’s death, Maduro won by a razor-thin margin. This was despite credible claims that like Chávez, he benefited from election irregularities and voter intimidation including by Chavista motorcycle thugs.

Born at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, Golinger’s father was a military psychiatrist during the Vietnam War. She enjoyed a privileged life as a doctor’s daughter; yet she ridicules Venezuela’s opposition leaders for having attended prestigious schools in the United States, something she suggests makes them out of touch with ordinary Venezuelans. Golinger, for her part, attended preppy Sarah Lawrence College near New York City. When not living in her upscale apartment in Caracas, she earned a law degree at City University of New York.

In 2010, Chávez took her on one of his globetrotting trips aimed at building anti-American alliances; it included stops in Syria, Iran and Libya. Chávez introduced her as “La novia de Venezuela” or “Venezuela’s girlfriend.”

Golinger writes for pro-Venezuela websites, hosts a weekly show on RT Spanish (formerly called Russian Television), and is the author of “The Chávez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela” and “Bush vs. Chávez: Washington’s War on Venezuela.” She also writes for the leftist site Venezuelanalysis.com. How much she earns for such work is unknown.

Golinger has denied being on Venezuela’s payroll, but opposition activists dug up documents showing she received nearly $10,000 from the Venezuela Information Office to pay for a conference in Madison, Wisconsin, on media reform.

True believers like Golinger, however, never shill only for money, and nor did her counterparts among earlier generations of Americans — all those starry-eyed leftists who happily shilled for the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba. Like Golinger, they burned with the desire to be part of something greater than themselves — the creation of a heaven on earth. A socialist utopia.

Oliver Stone

Hollywood has produced more than its share of useful idiots and propagandists over the years. First, they rallied around the Soviet Union. Then Cuba. Now they see Venezuela as an emerging socialist utopia.

Oliver Stone, the director and screenwriter, is Venezuela’s biggest propagandist in Hollywood — more so than celebrities like actors Danny Glover and Sean Penn who, like Stone, regarded Hugo Chávez as a friend and ideological soul mate. Stone has by far the greatest propaganda value for Venezuela’s leftist regime, however.

Consider his 2009 documentary “South of the Border.” It explores the rise of leftist governments and movements in South America which were inspired by Hugo Chávez’s election and enjoyed his oil largesse. To Stone, these movements are the answer to the region’s economic development. At the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Stone was photographed hobnobbing with Chávez on numerous occasions — even as he was being widely condemned by right groups. But Stone has called Chávez nice guy. Not surprisingly, Stone didn’t bother to interview opposition leaders when making the film, which he promoted on a tour of South America.

Stone’s next documentary was “Mi Amigo Hugo,” about his friendship with Chávez. On the first anniversary of Chávez’s death last March 5th, Venezuela’s government premiered the film on state television and (by government edict) private television channels. Talk about a captive audience! Stone wasn’t on hand in Venezuela for the premiere; it was just as well because massive and bloody anti-government protests were then underway — fueled by outrage over food shortages, out-of-control crime, and a dysfunctional economy. Danny Glover, however, did show up and gave a rousing speech in support of Venezuela’s “21st Century socialism.”

Over the years, many of Stone’s films have had a leftist and anti-American agenda. The most recent example was “The Untold History of the United States” — an anti-American hatchet job that aired last year on the the Showtime cable channel. And let’s not forget “JFK” which taught millions of young and impressionable viewers that President John F. Kennedy was murdered by right-wing conspirators tied to America’s vast military-industrial complex.

Left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore used to be one of Chávez’s useful idiots, incidentally; but he had a falling out with Chávez’s thin-skinned supporters after claiming to have given Chávez political advice and helped him write a U.N. speech. This supposedly happened during a late-night drinking session with the strongman in his hotel room at the Venice Film Festival.

Stone, ironically, has made millions of dollars in the United States thanks to its free-markets, rule of law, and respect for private property — and yet he believes that Venezuela, Cuba, and South America is better off without these virtues.

Stone is not only a shill for tyranny, he is an incredible hypocrite.

Bart Jones

Bart Jones, a left-learning American journalist, was a “local hire” reporter for the Caracas bureau of the Associated Press in the mid-1990s, back when Venezuela was a relative backwater. He didn’t start out as a journalist in Venezuela, however. In 1992, he went there as a missionary for the left-leaning Maryknoll order of the US Catholic Church. He worked 18 months in a slum where he soaked up huge amounts of right-wing social injustices (as he saw it) and then joined the AP. By dint of hard work and talent, Jones eventually became one of the bureau’s lead reporters — just in time to cover Hugo Chávez’s unexpected rise to power.

Who would have guessed that Jones was a closet Chavista while writing all those supposedly objective articles for the AP? His political views were on display in his 2009 biography of Chávez: “Hugo! The Hugo Chávez Story from Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution.” The book has gotten many reviews and is highly readable. It is the only source of in-depth information for many hankering to learn about Hugo Chávez and his so-called Bolivarian revolution. Jones, however, delivers a decidedly lefty view — presenting Chávez as a veritable saint and portraying all who disagree with him as classists, racists, or oligarchs. To Jones, Venezuela’s troubles revolve around a brown-skinned poor majority living under the thump of a white-skinned elite. A simplistic leftist narrative, it ignores the rainbow of colors existing among Venezuelans, including among more than a few of its politicians over the years.

Jones also condemns Venezuela’s private media as doing the dirty work of anti-Chávez oligarchs. In particular, he lashes into its biased coverage (and, yes, it was definitely slanted) during Chávez’s brief ouster during a failed military-civilian uprising on April 11, 2002. Private media outlets, however, didn’t start out being virulently anti-Chávez; they only started waving the anti-Chávez banner when Chávez played a gigantic bait-and-switch on Venezuela — imposing a socialist regime despite having claimed to be a moderate, not a socialist, during his first election campaign. As Jones skewers the anti-Chávez media, one wonders if he is similarly troubled about how most of America’s mainstream media was in Barack Obama’s camp from the get go. Jones surely cherishes his first amendment protections, yet he seems delighted that Venezuela’s government has neutered private media outlets or driven them out of business.

It’s troubling that Jones researched much of his book long after Chávez had revealed himself to be a megalomaniac — a despot who was leading Venezuela toward an authoritarian and poverty-ridden abyss. Checks and balances were dissolved, power was concentrated in Chávez’s hands, and quality-of-life indices took a nose dive. Human rights groups were alarmed. But not Jones. He shrugs off Chávez’s authoritarianism and personal excesses, including his womanizing and purchase of an Airbus 319 presidential jet that he rode on with Chávez; it wasn’t as opulent, he wrote, as Chávez’s critics had claimed. To Jones, Chávez can do no wrong because he is ruling in behalf of Venezuela’s poor majority.

Jones, incidentally, rented an apartment a few floors above me in an upscale complex on a tony corner of eastern Caracas, now an opposition stronghold. One day, Bart and I ran into each other at the entrance. We talked shop for a few minutes, and I asked about his thoughts on Chávez’s growing and inexplicable anti-American rhetoric.

Jones was normally calm and affable, but he suddenly launched into a frothy anti-American rant, declaring the United States had unleashed unspeakable atrocities upon Latin America in the past, and so it was totally understandable that Chávez was now telling those in Washington to go “f–k themselves.”

This, incidentally, was during Bill Clinton’s presidency. But like many of Chávez’s worshipers, Jones was living in another era. Not long after our conversation, in early 2000, Jones moved to Long Island, New York, and became a reporter for Newsday, a daily with a politically left-wing outlook.

How lucky for Jones that he and his Venezuelan-born wife aren’t raising their children in the country that he regards as a beacon of emerging social justice.

Joseph P. Kennedy II

Joe Kennedy II has been the Venezuelan government’s favorite useful idiot in Massachusetts since 2005. Since then, the former U.S. representative and scion of the Kennedy family has facilitated and cheered on what amounts to an anti-American program by oil-rich yet impoverished Venezuela. Though his non-profit Citizens Energy Corporation, Kennedy and Venezuela’s government provide free home-heating oil to needy Americans.

In so doing, Kennedy and Venezuela’s leaders get to portray themselves as heroes of the poor. The media-savvy Chávez started the program and Maduro has continued with it — even as Venezuela’s inflation-wracked economy slides toward basket-case status. CITGO Petroleum Corporation, the Houston-based arm of Venezuela’s state oil company, claims that more than 235 million gallons of home-heating oil have been distributed over the past nine years to more than 1.8 million low-income Americans.

Joining Kennedy are two Democratic politicians who negotiated the oil deal: former Rep. Bill Delahunt from Massachusetts, who had served on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and Queens Rep. Gregory Meeks, who took off time from fighting corruption allegations to attended Chávez’s funeral last year. Both reportedly introduced Kennedy to Chávez on a trip to Caracas.

Kennedy, to be sure, isn’t as stupid as he seems. Citizen’s Energy reportedly pays him a cool $86,311 annually.

Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Briain

Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Briain, young and lefty Irish filmmakers, arrived in Venezuela in September 2001 to make a documentary about firebrand leftist president Hugo Chávez.

Their research took an unexpected turn after seven months.

On April 11, 2002, while in the presidential palace, Chávez was briefly ousted from power amid massive pro- and anti-government marches in response to Chávez’s increasingly polarizing leadership. At least 20 people died and more than 150 received gunshot wounds, with some gunfire coming from shadowy snipers whose allegiances and motives were never determined.

Their riveting 2003 documentary, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” attracted large audiences and generated rave reviews. It won some prestigious awards.

It also is riddled with errors and manipulated footage — all to serve the pro-Chávez leftist narrative they had gone to Venezuela to film.

As useful idiots, they dished up a huge wallop of international propaganda for Chávez’s increasingly embattled government. To Chávez’s delight, they portrayed his outster as an old-fashioned Latin American-style coup involving right-wing oligarchs backed by Washington (the Bush administration in this case).

Venezuela’s government never set up a non-partisan commission to establish what precisely transpired, perhaps due to political convenience; or so observed the Caracas Chronicles blog, citing newspaper columns by opposition editor Teodoro Petkoff, a prominent former Marxist guerrilla and now opposition figure with neoliberal economic views.

So what happened behind the scenes during Chávez’s ouster for 47 hours?

Level-headed journalists and analysts without an ideological ax to grind have variously described the military-civilian uprising against Chávez as evolving from a self-coup that Chávez orchestrated (in order to dissolve Congress and Supreme Court and declare martial law); a coup against him by top generals (spurred mainly by Chávez’s illegal order to turn the military loose on anti-government protesters and create a bloodbath); or a counter-coup due to concerns by generals and officials, including some loyal to Chávez, about where the uprising was heading. They believed Chávez’s ouster, while appropriate, had nevertheless proceed in an unconstitutional direction when newly appointed president Pedro Carmona, a businessman who headed the business chamber Fedecamaras, moved to dissolve Congress. This also lost him union support that was vital for successful governance.

It’s a complicated story, to be sure. But the leftist version makes for a more thrilling documentary and serves a leftist narrative — even if the truth is wildly distorted. Or as veteran journalist Phil Gunson explained in The Columbia Journalism Review: “Constructing a false picture of a classic military coup devised by an allegedly corrupt and racist oligarchy, they omit key facts, invent others, twist the sequence of events to support their case, and replace inconvenient images with others dredged from archives.”

Gunson, a former Caracas correspondent, noted that the film portrays the opposition as “rich, white, racist, and violent. Unseen are the armed bands of Chavista thugs who for years have made the center of Caracas a no-go area, beating up or shooting opposition marchers or TV crews who dare to approach.”

The film’s title takes its name from the fact that the opposition media excluded the Chavista point of view from its coverage. But Venezuela’s private media outlets, as mentioned above, hadn’t always been virulently anti-Chávez; they got that way after Chávez revealed himself to be an authoritarian leftist — not the moderate he’d claimed to be during his first election campaign.

In portraying the private media as being anti-Democratic oligarchs, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” also omits the fact that, as protesters were being shot in the street, Chávez ordered radio and television channels to carry one of his long-winded speeches. As the shooting and violence continued, private broadcasters then put up a split screen — one side showing the violence in the streets, the other showing Chávez’s speech. In response, Chávez ordered the National Guard to shut down private television stations.

What’s more, Chávez wasn’t restored to office by “people power”; that is, by massive street demonstrations by his slum-dwelling supporters. He was returned to power as a result of behind-the-scenes political intrigues. And after that happened, his supporters took to the streets.

The lefty BBC, Ireland’s RTE, and other European broadcasters underwrote “This Revolution Will Not be Televised,” noted Gunson. Chávez had 20,000 copies made in Cuba.

As a rejoinder to the poisonous falsehoods of “This Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” a documentary was released in 2004 called “Radiografía De Una Mentira” (“X-Ray of a Lie“). It was not a box office hit, having only been released (with English-subtitles) on YouTube and on DVDs.

Winning back hearts and minds bewitched by leftist propaganda is invariably an uphill battle.

Read Part II of this article in tomorrow’s edition of FrontPage Magazine. 

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Hugo Chávez’s “21st Century socialism” has been a disaster for Venezuela, an oil-producing country that ought to be rich — but is instead poor. Bloody anti-government protests have roiled the South American nation for more than two months, provoked by food shortages, economic chaos, and out-of-control crime. But Chávez, the late firebrand president, can’t be blamed for everything; and nor can his hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro, a former bus driver and union leader. They have gotten plenty of help from a diverse group of useful idiots and propagandists. Who are the top ten? Yesterday, FrontPage listed the top five. Here are the rest.

Mark Weisbrot

Mark Weisbrot, a left-wing American economist, is a steadfast defender of Venezuela’s leftist regime. He is often quoted as an expert source on Venezuela and regularly writes newspaper columns in support of Venezuela’s leftist regime. He has a PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan and is co-director of the lefty Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. This gives him an aura of credibility to journalists in the mainstream media who, when writing about Venezuela, want to get both sides of the story — including the leftist pro-Venezuela version that Weisbrot provides. And so they go to Weisbrot, an able propagandist.

After Chávez’s death, Weisbrot published a column in Al Jazeera English that lauded the despot for standing up to the United States and improving the lives of millions of poor Venezuelans — no matter that Venezuela was then sliding toward basket-case status. Weisbrot also has defended Chávez’s hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro — despite worsening food shortages, out-of-control crime, and economic chaos. And in typical leftist fashion, Weisbrot has turned a blind eye to Maduro’s brutal crack-down against massive anti-government protesters that have been widely condemned by human rights groups. A pal of Oliver Stone, Weisbrot co-write the filmmaker’s pro-Chávez documentary “South of the Border.”

Leftist propagandists and useful idiots have always been well-represented in the academic world. Weisbrot is one of them.

‘Red’ Ken Livingstone

Hugo Chávez made many friends in Europe, and one of his biggest propagandist was Ken Livingstone — a British Labor Party politician and former mayor of London. He’s known informally as “Red Ken”

In 2006, Chávez arrived in London on one of his many globetrotting trips in his presidential Airbus 319. He got a big welcome from “Red Ken” who gave Chávez a rock-star’s welcome at a rally where Chávez called President George W. Bush a “genocidal assassin.” And at private functions, the Venezuelan strongman and former coup leader (who’d once called himself a “Maoist” and praised Cuba’s “sea of happiness”) hobnobbed with like-minded parliamentarians and celebrities. The later included virulent anti-American playwright and Nobel laureate Harold Pinter and activist Bianca Jagger, former wife of Rolling Stone Mick Jagger.

“He was a friend and a comrade,” said Livingston after Chávez’s death. “He was focused on what he could do for the people of Venezuela and of course also what he could do for poor people in New York or London. He saw himself as part of an international movement to change the way things are.”

As London’s mayor, Livingstone, now 68 years old, enjoyed Venezuela’s oil largesse, having signed an oil deal that used discounted Venezuelan oil for London’s buses and trains, thereby allowing half-price bus and train fares for those on income support. In exchange, Livingston sent experts from his government to work in Venezuela to provide advice on recycling, waste management, traffic and on reducing carbon emissions. Venezuela had a similar arrangement with Cuba. The program, considered an embarrassment by conservatives, was discontinued when Livingstone departed the mayor’s office.

“Red Ken” and his ideological soul-mates easily overlook Venezuela’s poverty and rights abuses — so bedazzled are they by the leftist regime’s anti-Americanism.

Rafael Caldera

Rafael Caldera, a twice-elected Venezuelan president, unwittingly turned himself into a useful idiot by paving the way for Hugo Chávez to succeed him as president. Like other politicians of his generation, Caldera hungered for power well into his 70s — even if it meant holding back younger talent in the Christian Democratic Party that he founded. Longing for a second presidential term as he neared 80 years old, Caldera left the Christian Democrats and made deals with old leftist enemies to form the Convergence Party, which opposed the unpopular neoliberal reforms undertaken by the previous elected president, Carlos Andrés Pérez. Those reforms provoked price riots and a bloody and aborted coup by then-Army Lt. Colonel-paratrooper Hugo Chávez.

Venezuelans and the military overwhelmingly rejected Chávez’s aborted coup on February 4, 1992 — yet in a seminal speech to Congress, then-Senator Caldera legitimized the coup (and Chávez) by contending there were justifiable reasons for it — a statement aimed in part at the unpopular President Pérez of the rival Democratic Action party, a Caldera nemesis. Caldera also defended the massive rioting that swept Venezuela when Perez’s reforms sparked dramatic price hikes for gasoline and public transportation. Perez, a former populist, saw the economic reforms as the only way to pull Venezuela out of its growing economic dysfunction. After winning the presidency, Caldera pardoned Chávez in a politically popular move — thus paving the way for him to run for office. Ironically, Caldera also turned away from Venezuela’s old petrodollar-fueled populist polices; a miserable economy forced him to undertake unpopular free-market reforms. Those unpopular polices would provide Chávez with political fodder during his presidential campaign, when he claimed to be seeking a “third way” between “savage neoliberalism” and socialism.

Caldera, a former sociology and law professor, must have realized his useful idiot status when Chávez was sworn-in as president. As a stony faced Caldera looked on, Chávez went off script and called the constitution “moribund” when taking his oath — an early indication of where he would take Venezuela.

John Maisto

John Maisto, the U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela during Hugo Chávez’s first term, is famous for having coined a phrase that to many observers encapsulated the Clinton administration’s wishful thinking regarding Chávez. “Watch what he does, not what he says,” advised Maisto, a career diplomat, even as Chávez was already on the record for making over-the-top statements, including that Venezuela would be “traveling toward the same sea as the Cuban people.” Maisto, to be sure, may have been upbeat in his public statements to avoid antagonizing the thin-skinned Chávez, fearing that taking a tougher line would push him into Cuba’s camp. But as it turned out, Chávez did exactly what he said he’d do as he quickly made anti-American alliances with governments in Latin American, the Middle East, and China. At home, he concentrated his power in a rewritten constitution. Eventually. Miastro’s mantra — “Watch what Chavez does, not what he says” — became a symbol of Washington’s naivety and inaction toward an increasingly powerful Hugo Chávez.

“Maisto was always soft on Chávez, like he was soft on Daniel Ortega during his stint as Ambassador to Nicaragua in the 1990s, before he was sent to Venezuela,” wrote former Heritage Foundation analyst John Sweeney in an essay, “Playing the Washington Blame Game.” He described Maisto as “a career diplomat strongly associated with the Democratic Party and Liberation Theology ideas.”

Venezuela had once been a pro-American country, aside from an occasional flag burning outside the U.S. Embassy. But Chávez’s regular anti-American rants, which started early into his first term, eventually had an effect on public opinion. “From a pre-Chávez level of over 65% approval (for the U.S.), today the positive image of the U.S. has fallen to a historic low of 31% in Venezuela,” according to a confidential diplomatic cable dated March 26, 2008, that was signed by then-Ambassador Patrick Duddy and titled: “Embassy Strategic Communications – Countering Chávez’ (sic) Anti-Americanism.”

Accordingly, the U.S. Embassy finally decided it must respond with a major public relations campaign in Venezuela to counter the growing anti-Americanism. The so-called “Maistro Doctrine” was dead, having extended even into the Bush years.

Some useful idiots are more culpable than others, of course. Maisto thought his softball approach would win Chávez over, rather than driving him into Cuba’s orbit. But it may have instead conveyed weakness to a man who easily made friends with fellow strongmen in the Middle East and left-learning authoritarians in Latin America. Ultimately, the now-75-year-old Maisto may have been a victim of his own naivety, having made the mistake (common among leftists) of projecting his own good intentions and decency on an evil man.

Luis Miquilena

Miquilena a 94-year-old former former Chávez mentor and top official, was a prominent leftist in Venezuela with roots starting in the communist party in his early years. Like many desiring a change for the better in Venezuela, he rallied around Chávez after his aborted coup on February 4, 1992, as an Army Lt. Colonel-paratrooper. But like many who supported Chávez, Miquilena was an unwitting useful idiot and, to his credit, he would publicly admit his mistake.

Widely considered the man who molded Chávez into a presidential candidate, Miquilena left Chávez’s administration, disillusioned, a few years into his first term. “As far as I see it, he is a left-winger. Obviously. But he has gotten into bed with the failed left,” he said.

Regarding Cuba’s increasing influence in Venezuela, Miquilena also observed: “Venezuela today is a country that is practically occupied by the henchmen of two international criminals, Cuba’s Castro brothers. They have introduced in Venezuela a true army of occupation. The Cubans run the maritime ports, airports, communications, the most essential issues in Venezuela. We are in the hands of a foreign country.

Miquilena, of course, is hardly the first unwitting useful idiot of a leftist despot. He will not be the last. 

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Former President George W. Bush is remaining mum on the tragedy unfolding in Iraq. But as an army of bloodthirsty Islamists rampages across Iraq with the goal of establishing a 7th century religious tyranny — a caliphate — it’s worth recalling who years ago had predicted this would happen if the Democrats got their way.

It was President George W. Bush and his top officials.

They warned early on that Iraq was ripe for the rise of an Islamic caliphate — either in a failed state created by Saddam Hussein or, they later contended, if the U.S.-led coalition bugged out without leaving behind a stable Iraq. Two years into the U.S.-led occupation, in 2005, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld warned that a premature withdrawal would be disastrous — and he foresaw what has in fact happened. He explained, “Iraq would serve as the base of a new Islamic caliphate to extend throughout the Middle East, and which would threaten legitimate governments in Europe, Africa and Asia.”

Vice President Dick Cheney also warned of the rise of a caliphate if the U.S. withdrew before Iraq was capable of governing and defending itself. “They talk about wanting to re-establish what you could refer to as the seventh-century caliphate” to be “governed by Sharia law, the most rigid interpretation of the Koran,” he said.

Gen. John P. Abizaid, then America’s top commander in the Middle East, also offered prescient testimony in 2005 to the House Armed Services Committee, forseeing what the terror masters would do in a weak Iraqi state. “They will try to re-establish a caliphate throughout the entire Muslim world. Just as we had the opportunity to learn what the Nazis were going to do, from Hitler’s world in ‘Mein Kampf,’ we need to learn what these people intend to do from their own words.”

Liberals jeered such dire predictions — and especially at the repeated use of the word “caliphate.”

The New York Times, for instance, ran a piece on December 12, 2005, that mocked the forgoing Bush-administration officials for their warnings of a “caliphate” — portraying them as foreign-policy amateurs peddling an alarmist view of the Middle East. Wrote reporter Elisabeth Bumiller:

A number of scholars and former government officials take strong issue with the administration’s warning about a new caliphate, and compare it to the fear of communism spread during the Cold War. They say that although Al Qaeda’s statements do indeed describe a caliphate as a goal, the administration is exaggerating the magnitude of the threat as it seeks to gain support for its policies in Iraq.

Members of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, obviously don’t believe what’s printed in The New York Times. ISIS, incidentally, has reportedly been preparing to make its move for several years — right under the radar of the Obama administration. Were they emboldened by President Obama’s endless apologies to the Muslim world? Or the deadlines he’d set for leaving Iraq and Afghanistan? Probably all of the above. But what no doubt really energized them was President Obama’s failure to negotiate a deal with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that would have left sufficient U.S. troops in Iraq.

President Bush, for his part, issued a prophetic warning in 2007 when vetoing a Democratic bill that would have withdrawn U.S. troops. “To begin withdrawing before our commanders tell us we are ready would be dangerous for Iraq, for the region and for the United States,” he said.

It would mean surrendering the future of Iraq to al Qaeda. It would mean that we’d be risking mass killings on a horrific scale. It would mean we’d allow the terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they lost in Afghanistan. It would mean increasing the probability that American troops would have to return at some later date to confront an enemy that is even more dangerous.

A little history is worth recalling. Saddam’s failure to account for his weapons of mass destruction, including remnants of his toxic arsenal (some of which was in fact found), gave the Bush administration legal cover for going into Iraq. But only a fool would believe weapons of mass destruction were the only reason for the war. The U.S.-led invasion, or liberation, was in fact part of a vision to remake the Middle East: a long-term project to liberate millions in Iraq; nudge the region toward modernity; and above all make America safer in a post-9/11 world — all by correctly defining who the enemy was and taking the war on terror to them.

The Bush administration certainly encountered setbacks in Iraq and made mistakes; the fog of war invariably upsets the best-laid plans of politicians and generals. But Iraq only plunged into utter chaos after President Obama brought home U.S. troops, despite warnings that Iraq was not ready to govern or defend itself. The blood and treasure that America spent in Iraq has been squandered.

The terror masters were energized in Syria, thanks to the Obama administration’s tepid support of moderate rebels there. Now they are on the march, just as President Bush and his top officials had predicted. After they establish their regional caliphate in Iraq and Syria, expect them to next turn their attention toward their real enemies: America, Israel, and the West. Oil prices are bound to go through the roof, sending the global economy into a tailspin.

President Obama and his foreign-policy advisors have blood on their hands. But if Obama remains in character, he’ll do what he usually does — blame it all on George Bush.

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What has happened to America’s Presbyterians? Leaders of Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) have joined ranks with the radical left in recent years. They vilify Israel, apologize for Islamic terrorists, and cheer on the Palestinian cause.

Now, these leftist elites are savoring an important victory, having pushed through a resolution to divest from U.S. companies operating in Israel: Caterpillar, Motorola Solutions, and Hewlett Packard. The contentious vote in the church’s general assembly passed by a narrow 310-to-303, and was a long-time goal of leftist Presbyterians, who since 2006 had submitted four divestiture resolutions that failed to muster sufficient votes.

Divestiture is largely symbolic: The companies in the portfolio of America’s largest Presbyterian denomination represented a pittance of its investments, about $21 million. But leftist Presbyterians saw divestiture as a way to shame the companies and ostracize Israel over what they believe is its humiliation of Palestinian Arabs and illegal occupation of their lands – a situation they claim begets terrorism. They conveniently forget that Israel has been ready to trade land for peace since its birth in 1948. As for the companies they vilify: Caterpillar’s bulldozers are used in anti-terror operations; and Motorola Solutions and Hewlett Packard provide electronic security systems.

More than a few rank-and-file Presbyterians were outraged over the June 20th divestiture vote; tens of thousands have left the church in recent years as it drifted left. “We stand in full support of Israel’s right to protect its citizens and of all American companies to engage in honest free enterprise,” said Rev. Paul deJong, senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Fort Myers, the oldest Presbyterian church in Lee County, Florida.

“The church has been infected,” a Presbyterian seminary student in Texas once told me, a women in her 30s who became a minister. She was referring to a pro-Palestinian conference hosted several years ago by Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, an affiliate of Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). At the time, leftist Presbyterians were calling for a divestiture resolution.

Israel is not perfect, of course; no country is. But the venom of Israel-bashing Presbyterians has been troubling because of how it negates anything positive about the Middle East’s only democracy. Israel is singled out as a rights abuser.

What accounts for this moral confusion?

Israel-bashing didn’t used to be fashionable, including among Presbyterians. Indeed, Israel was widely admired in the years after its birth and miraculous growth. Upbeat news articles spoke of those “plucky Jews.” But no more. Now Israeli Jews are denied credit for their nation’s economic and democratic miracle, growing out of a region that American writer Mark Twain – passing through as a travel writer in 1867 – had described as an unpopulated and “desolate country.”

Now, Israel’s story has a new twist, one put forth by left-leaning Presbyterians and fellow-travelers in other Christian denominations. Jews achieved what they did because they exploited somebody else: Palestinian Arabs. In this view Palestinian Arabs, not Jews, are now the chosen people.

This Israel-bashing narrative also bristles with anti-Americanism, and over the years it has become popular in America’s universities. That’s an old story. But what’s less well known is that this same narrative has gained currency at many Christian seminaries. Many seminary professors have adopted a world view similar to the post-modern left; what for them is a strange hybrid of Christianity, Marxism, and Edward Said. (Said, of course, was the high-profile Columbia University professor who popularized the idea of Palestinian victim hood within an anti-Western context.) At some Presbyterian seminaries, students in their early 20s –  future ministers and church leaders – have been indoctrinated for years with the ideological poison of the post-modern left, albeit within a Christian context.

Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary

One Presbyterian seminary that I’m familiar with is in Texas: a 112-year-old institution whose idyllic grounds are near the University of Texas campus in Austin, the state capital. I’m not a Presbyterian, incidentally. I’m not even a regular church-goer, although I regularly attended a mainline Protestant church as a youngster. Eight years ago, however, I took a greater than usual interest in religion, after noticing  Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary was hosting a thought-provoking conference: “American Churches and the Palestinians.” The theme of the two-day event was inspired by a line from Isaiah 58:6: “To Loose the Chains of Injustice…”

I briefly visited the conference, and that passage’s subordination to a political view quickly became clear: Israeli Jews were colonial oppressors; and Palestinian Arabs were their victims. The event’s main sponsors were hardly friendly toward Israel: The Interfaith Community for Palestinian Rights; Friends of Sabeel-North America; and Pax Christi USA. Hundreds of religious leaders from around the country, representing various denominations, attended along with seminary faculty.

Consider three high-profile guest speakers:

Robert Jensen, a radical left-wing University of Texas journalism professor, discussed what he claimed was biased media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – biased, that is, against Palestinian Arabs. Jensen was hardly unbiased himself, however. Days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, he gained national notoriety for his inflammatory Op-Ed in the Houston Chronicle, “U.S. Just as Guilty of Committing Own Violent Acts.” The attacks, Jensen argued, were “no more despicable than the massive acts of terrorism…that the U.S. government has committed during my lifetime.”

Two years earlier, Jensen published an Op-Ed in the Houston Chronicle and Palestine Chronicle. Its title and first sentence were the same: “I Helped Kill a Palestinian Today.”

“If you pay taxes to the U.S. government, so did you,” Jensen explained. He went onto to say that “the current Israeli attack on West Bank towns is not a war on terrorism, but part of a long and brutal war against the Palestinian people for land and resources.” He said nothing about billions of U.S. dollars of international aid flowing over the years into the Palestinian territories – only to be squandered, pocketed by corrupt officials, or used to fund terrorism.

At the conference’s dinner, the main speakers were Cindy and Craig Corrie, parents of Rachel Corrie. At age 23, Rachel Corrie died when she stood in front of an Israeli Defense Forces bulldozer conducting anti-terror operations – clearing tunnels utilized by Palestinian terrorists. The driver failed to see her, and she was run over. Corrie is now a martyr to her supporters – their very own Joan of Arc. But the more accurate description of her would be “terror advocate.” A memorable photo shows her clad in Muslim garb – her face contorted with rage as she holds a burning American flag drawn on a piece of paper.

Corrie’s parents head the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice, a non-profit “that conducts and supports programs that foster connections between people, that build understanding, respect, and appreciation for differences, and that promote cooperation within and between local and global communities.”

The conference’s star speaker was the Rev. Naim Ateek, a Palestinian Episcopal priest who founded and directs the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem. He has questioned Israel’s right to exist, and like his Presbyterian counterparts apologizes for Islamic terrorists. He distributed a thought-provoking scholarly paper he’d written: “What is theologically and morally wrong with suicide bombings? A Palestinian Christian Perspective.” The subject was timely. Suicide bombings were more common at the time: Israel’s “separation barrier” – which has saved lives by thwarting suicide bombers, but that leftist Presbyterians widely criticized – was not finished at the time.

Ateek’s paper navigated a thicket of theological issues, but its conclusion was fairly simple: Suicide bombers do indeed violate Christian doctrine – but the desperation fueling their misguided actions is understandable: It’s Israel’s fault. Neither Ateek nor his Presbyterian supporters, incidentally, have ever given credence to three other “root causes” of Palestinian Arab terrorism: Islamist ideology; the culture of hate permeating Palestinian culture; or an “honor-shame” mentality that undermines efforts for peace which the overwhelmingly majority of Israelis desire.

Visiting the conference, I walked down hallways lined with exhibits outside classrooms where “workshops” were held. The exhibits bristled with pro-Palestinian political literature and books. One focused on Palestinian culture, displaying clothing and other items. (Not included were suicide vests or a replica of the Sbarro pizzeria suicide bombing; such an exhibit was displayed by clever Hamas student activists at al-Najah University in Nablus).

Rev. Ateek, of Sabeel, must have felt right at home. He was clearly a favorite speaker – a veritable celebrity. Conference-goers eagerly repeated his stories of alleged Israeli terrorism against Palestinians, including when, he says, his family was forcibly removed by Israeli troops on May 12, 1948. This, of course, was days before Arab armies tried to wipe Israel off the map. Perhaps Ateek’s personal stories are true; perhaps not. However, what’s clearly false about these stories, revolving around Israel’s creation, is that Ateek presents them as normal and everyday occurrences, the result of Israel’s aggression; the defining narrative of what Israel was and became.

The conference was a sold-out event; and no doubt it and similar events in recent years have persuaded increasing numbers of Presbyterians to support divestiture. The conference’s main organizer, Whitney S. Bodman, must have been pleased. A high-profile professor at Austin Seminary, he is an expert on Islam. He’s an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, and holds a doctorate in comparative religion from Harvard University. His research interests, he says, includes “Christian theology in an Islamic context.” Politically active, Bodman has praised terror group Hezbollah as a nation-building organization that fends off Israel’s aggression. He has worked closely with the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the problematic Muslim group. Above all, he has been a prominent figure on the “inter-faith dialogue” circuit that attempts to bridge differences with Muslims. That effort kicked into high gear after the 9/11 attacks.

Speaking at a “religious diversity” symposium not long after Europe’s infamous “cartoon riots,” Bodman belittled the idea that Muslims alone were responsible for Islamic-inspired terrorism and mayhem, and endeavored to smooth over the hurt feelings of Muslims. He explained: “First, remember that no incident happens in a vacuum and the violence and hatred exploding throughout the world today is not really about one event or something as seemingly trivial as a cartoon. It is an accumulation of hurt over months and years. It is Iraq and Palestine, suicide bombings and Abu Ghraib and Gitmo and 9/11 and this whole sense that there really is a clash of civilizations, an insidious danger to our way of life.”

What must the learned professor have thought about an Islamic terror plot in Canada that made headlines around this time – one involving 17 young Muslim men and youths? Their roots were not in the Middle East but Canada – home to anti-Americanism, multiculturalism, and unlimited tolerance. Yet they wanted to blow up Canada’s landmarks and behead the prime minister.

In their eagerness to appease Muslims, some Presbyterians have put themselves in even more compromising positions. In October, 2004, Ronald Stone, a retired professor of Christian and social ethics at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary (affiliated with Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), met in southern Lebanon with Hezbollah commander Sheikh Nabil Kaouk, while on an official “fact-finding mission” to the Middle East.

Stone caused a furor when he told an Arab television channel that “relations and conversations with Islamic leaders are a lot easier than dealings and dialogue with Jewish leaders.”

“We treasure the precious words of Hezbollah and your expression of goodwill towards the American people,” he added. It was an odd way to describe Hezbollah, which Washington has designated a terror group for killing hundreds of Israeli and Americans. This included 200 U.S. Marines in the 1983 suicide bombing of their Beirut barracks and deadly attacks on the Israeli Embassy in Argentina in 1992 and Israeli cultural center in Buenos Aires in 1994.

Stone was part of the lead group of the church’s Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy. The church repudiated his remarks. But the controversy didn’t stop the head of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in the Chicago area, Rev. Robert Reynolds, from meeting nearly one year later with a Hezbollah commander, much to the outrage of Chicago-area Jewish leaders.

Subtle Indoctrination

It’s hardly coincidental that these Presbyterian leaders and activist echo the political and theological line that’s promoted at more than a few Presbyterian seminaries. Sometimes, the political indoctrination of young seminary students can be insidious.

A few weeks before its pro-Palestinian conference, Austin Seminary hosted a photography exhibition related to the conference’s theme: Palestinians as victims; Jews as their exploiters. Dozens of heart-rending photos adorned hallway walls outside classrooms. For future ministers and religious leaders, the photos were there to see, ponder, and absorb. The exhibit was from left-leaning documentary photographer Alan Pogue, a Vietnam War-veteran specializing in political and social issues from a “social justice” angle.

The exhibition’s theme was unmistakable: European Jews displaced by World War 2 had created Israel – and ejected Palestinians from their ancestral homes. In fact, this was the caption of one photo. There were no positive photos of Israel or Israeli-Jews.

Two photos arranged side by side impressed me for the subtle anti-Americanism and moral equivalence suggested by their juxtaposition. One was a photo from New York City after the September 11 attacks – a poignant scene of a make-shift sidewalk memorial. It was a still life of sorts: flowers, photos, and mementos left by friends and family members.

Beside it was a strikingly similar photo – one of a Baghdad sidewalk memorial. It remembered the approximately 300 mostly women and children killed by a U.S. precision-guided bomb during the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq. They died in an underground shelter that U.S. military planners presumed was one of Saddam Hussein’s command-and-control centers. Just before the war, however, it was converted into an air-raid shelter – one Saddam’s military men avoided. This of course is a common tactic among Middle Eastern terrorists and “insurgents” – putting civilians in harms way, and then when they are killed blaming and shaming the enemy.

Pogue saw things differently. His caption referred to the photos’ “similarities.” The subtle impression was that Americans now knew the same horrors their government had visited upon foreign lands.

Curiously, the photo exhibit was removed the day before a rare event at the seminary: a colloquium of Presbyterian ministers and rabbis held two weeks after the pro-Palestinian conference. The event’s title: “A Difficult Friendship: Divestment, Dialogue, and Hope.”

It was a revealing title. Seminary professors have gone out of their way in recent years to bridge “differences” with Palestinian Arabs and Muslims – even to the extent of excusing Islamic terrorism or apologizing for Judeo-Christian culture and history. Yet their “difficult relationship” is with Jews – not Muslims.

No wonder that a generation of seminary students has been infected with the poison of the postmodern left: a poison that vilifies Israel, America, and even the West. In casual conversations I had with young and idealistic seminary students, I noticed a common thread: They couldn’t bring themselves to condemn other cultures — especially those they considered underdogs. You’ve heard of self-hating Jews. They were self-hating Christians.

One Austin Seminary student in her early 20s, an honor student, told me about participating in an “interfaith” function with Muslim men at Austin Seminary; and after the Muslims broke their fast she offered to shake hands with one man in a flowing robe. Yet he only reluctantly grasped her hand, she recalled.

She wasn’t shocked or put off.

She made excuses for him, explaining it was important to “understand” his culture. Yet this was in a Christian seminary — and a Muslim holy day was being celebrated there.

In explaining Arab rage against the West, this same student mentioned the “crusades” – no matter that quite a few Jews had their heads lopped off by crusaders; or that the crusades were a delayed response to Muslim aggression. Now, Islamic aggression is on the march again – and some of its religious underpinnings are making inroads into the Christian faith, judging by what’s being taught at more than a few Christian seminaries.

One seminary student even spoke of terror master Yasar Arafat as a freedom fighter. “You know, he won a Nobel Peace Prize,” he reminded me.

Recently, Austin Seminary got a new dean, a long-time theology professor at the seminary named David H. Jensen. One of his more interesting scholarly articles pondered the cultural imperialism fostered by America’s most famous hamburger: the Big Mac. In “The Big Mac and the Lord’s Prayer,” Jensen argued that McDonald’s and its all-American mean were emblematic of the dark underbelly of globalization – and even at odds with Christian values. “The McMeal is…a parody of the Eucharist, extending an invitation to all, but embodying only one culture,” he wrote. Interestingly, McDonald’s strongest sales at the time were in none other than anti-American France and former Cold War enemies China and Russia. All of which underscores the perception gap that exists between leftist elites and ordinary people – a gap now reflected in the battle between rank-and-file Presbyterians and leftist elites in Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

Years ago, the Presbyterian church was part of the venerable WASP establishment. It had produced many presidents over the years. Its parishioners were well-heeled, well-educated, and very successful. They believed in America. Those days are gone.

Now that divestiture is finally a reality, the soul of Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) may have been lost forever to the left. Decent Presbyterians, like those at First Presbyterian Church of Fort Myers, will face an uphill battle to reclaim it.

The left is in charge, for now.

David Paulin, an Austin, Texas-based freelance writer, is a former foreign correspondent previously based in Venezuela and the Caribbean.

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It had seemed to the four clean-cut college freshman that night like a typical McDonald’s: spanking clean, well-lighted, and safe. It was in a good neighborhood too, right next to Texas A&M University in College Station – a campus known for its friendly atmosphere and official down-home greeting: “howdy”

Out on a double date, the two couples pulled into the parking lot of so-called “University McDonald’s” shortly after 2 a.m. that Sunday – and beheld a scene unlike anything portrayed in all those wholesome McDonald’s television commercials. Before them, hundreds of young black males were loitering about, some without shirts.

Other local residents — the more cynical and world-weary, both whites and most blacks — would have taken one look at the crowd and driven off, dismissing many of the young and posturing black males as thugs. But not them: innocent white kids from the suburbs. They presumed this was post-racial America — and that they were in an easy-going college town.

Twenty minutes later, two of them were dead.

Incredibly, the race of the assailants was scrubbed from local news coverage; and utterly missing from tersely written wire-service stories about a Brazos County jury’s whopping $27 million negligence verdict on July 30 against “University McDonald’s” – an outlet owned by the Oak Brook, Illinois-based fast-food giant. What the media considered unmentionable nevertheless loomed over a riveting seven-day trial, which came amid the growing phenomenon of black-on-white violence — unprovoked attacks on whites and black mob violence like the so-called “knock-out game.”

Chris Hamilton, lead lawyer of the small Dallas firm that humbled the corporate giant, was asked, during a phone interview, how many reporters had even bothered to inquire about the race of the assailants during the many interviews he gave.

“You’re the only one,” he replied.

Race, of course, was irrelevant to the high-stakes negligence trial that revolved around McDonald’s lack of on-site security and corporate responsibility. Yet shortly before the trial, Hamilton hinted at the issue of race – suggesting that two very different worlds were colliding at University McDonald’s during its after-midnight hours – a mix that was potentially volatile. The trial, he told a local television reporter, was not only about seeking justice for his clients — but about the public’s need “to know what’s really going on at McDonald’s: what the risks are; what the dangers are of sending your kids there, particularly after midnight.”

His extensive pretrial investigation – numerous depositions, pathology reports, and an in-depth analysis of police records – told a story that was heartbreaking and infuriating, and that until the trial had remained largely out of pubic view as the case was handled by College Station Police, Brazos County District Attorney Jarvis Parsons, and an asleep-at-the-wheel news media.

Apart from legal arguments over alleged corporate negligence, the high-profile trial offered a shocking view of how a thuggish black subculture flourished at University McDonald’s. The blame could be laid squarely upon McDonald’s black managers, and on the failure of higher-ups in McDonald’s to ensure patrons, both black and white, were safe during late-night hours – an increasingly lucrative market for the fast-food giant.

Beaten to Death

For the two young couples, the evening had started at a country-western concert at “Hurricane Harry’s” in College Station’s entertainment district; and afterward, just after 2 a.m. on Sunday, February 18, 2012 — a quick trip to nearby “University McDonald’s” as it’s widely known.

Parking his Toyota 4Runner, Denton James Ward, age 18, stepped down from the big SUV with Tanner Giesen, then 19 years old. The two friends from Flower Mound, an affluent Dallas suburb, headed to the McDonald’s bathroom; Ward wore his cowboy hat. The girls -  Lauren Bailey Crisp and Samantha Bean, both 19 – took the SUV to the drive-through.

Both inside and out, University McDonald’s was bustling. But it definitely wasn’t the usual daytime crowd – clean-cut and mostly white “Aggies” as A&M’s students are known. Instead, up to 400 black males were loitering about the parking lot, a police officer later estimated. Inside, it was mostly a black crowd too: a large number of black males were loitering about, many without food. Some were shirtless.

This was the usual after-midnight crowd on Saturdays and Sundays at the 24-hour McDonald’s. And unbeknownst to the two couples – and many in College Station – this McDonald’s was a major late-night trouble spot.

Police were constantly responding to late-night fights, assaults, and disturbances among huge crowds that were mostly black – a problem one top police official called a “drain on resources.” Most of the reported incidents – some 200 in the three years preceding Ward and Crisp’s deaths – involved black-on-black violence by gang bangers and, according to one police officer, members of black college fraternities. One police report described an unidentified man’s head getting bashed against a curb. White patrons appeared to be especially susceptible and at risk – and when they were attacked, the blows were particularly vicious. The hours of 2-to-3 a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays were especially volatile, with at least a dozen fights and assaults reported during those hours in the year preceding Ward and Crisp’s deaths.

For Ward and Giesen, the trouble started seconds after exiting McDonald’s front door. “You’re in the wrong neck of the woods, cowboys,” Giesen recalled a young black male saying.

Unwittingly, they’d blundered into a highly-charged situation. Shortly before they’d arrived, two black males had gotten into a loud argument inside the restaurant. A gun was brandished. But manager Lindsey Ives didn’t call the police. She told the men to take their dispute outside.

In an instant, a bloodthirsty mob was upon the college students.

A fist slammed into Giesen’s face. Ward tried to break-up the altercation, according to trial testimony. Instead, he suffered a brutal mob stomping lasting several minutes. Some 20 young black males closed in – mercilessly kicking and punching his head and body and even jumping on him, witnesses said. Giesen was knocked unconscious.

An athletic young man — 5-foot-6 and 163 pounds – Ward had a handsome face framed by a mop of rusty brown hair. But after the beating, one witness — a retired U.S. Marine and one of a few white customers – said Ward’s face was “really messed up”; was “broken” and “mushy” and “just did not look natural.”

Bean and Crisp, both 19, rounded the corner of the drive-through to see the mob stomping. The horrified and frightened young women jumped out of the SUV screaming for it to stop. Crisp, Ward’s girlfriend, even rushed into the melee, according to trial testimony. Blood poured from Ward’s face. Some nearby good-Samaritans, including a few black females, helped the frantic teens lift their dates into the 4Runner’s back seat; Ward was unable to speak or walk. Danisha Stern, a trial witness, then told them to “get out of there . . . it’s not safe.”

Immediately, the terrified girls took that advice – rather than waiting for police. Bean, Giesen’s date, took the wheel with Crisp occupying the front passenger seat. Speeding away, Bean made a frantic across-town dash for an emergency room. She worried somebody from the McDonald’s mob might follow and run her off the road.

Ward was drifting in and out of consciousness. Blood was everywhere. Fearing he was slipping away, Crisp frantically climbed into the back seat, kneeling on the floorboard to do what she could — pushing him back into his seat when he slumped forward. They had been dating three months. The girls were “freaking out,” Giesen recalled. “I remember lots of screaming and yelling going on.”

Then – about 10 minutes after speeding away from University McDonald’s – Bean ran a red light. The 4Runner was hit broadside by a Chevy Silverado pick-up — then spun violently and crashed into a light pole. Ward and Crisp were pronounced dead at the scene; Bean and the Silvarado’s five occupants were uninjured. Police initially thought Ward and Crisp had died in the crash, and they had considered charging Bean. But pathologists at the negligence trial, both for the plaintiffs and McDonald’s, agreed Ward was beaten to death – the fatal kicks and punches delivered to the lower back of his head and chin.

The mob at McDonald’s grew into a frenzy after the couples fled. A police officer arriving at the scene, five minutes later, grabbed his AR-15 rifle when he stepped out of his patrol car – fearing he was amid a full-blown riot. It was, he recalled, like “scenes that we have seen multiple times at that McDonald’s.”

Crisp, a dark-haired beauty from Dripping Springs, a suburb of Austin, wanted to be a nurse. She was a biology major at Blinn College as was Bean, a resident of College Station. Ward, also a student at the junior college, was set to transfer to Texas A&M the next year to study industrial engineering. He had an all-American background in high school: letters in football and baseball; Little League umpire; and a member of the Fellowship of Christian athletes. He and Crisp were from large families.

Giesen was briefly treated at an emergency room; his abdomen bore a boot print. He now suffers bouts of amnesia due to brain trauma.

In College Station, nobody dared to ask if a “hate crime” had possibly occurred. But Stern, the black good-Samaritan, testified that the black mob had piled on Ward in part because he was white; or as she explained: “He was trying to save his friend or stop the attacks…targeted at his friend. And he was a white male so I guess any — anything that was — anybody that was not helping the fight, like, adding to the injury or whatever, was seen as an opponent or something, you know.”

Police made only one arrest, charging Marcus Jamal Jones – known to friends as “Plucky” — in the mob attack. Without outdoor security cameras and uncooperative witnesses, it was no doubt hard to make a case. Last March, “Plucky” pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault and served a 90-day jail sentence.

Minutes after the mob attack, the 6-foot-2 Plucky entered the McDonald’s without a shirt. “We was fight’en,” he was heard to say. Earlier in the evening, he’d said he was looking for a fight, witnesses reported.

Playing the race card

It was Plucky who introduced the word “nigg-r” into the case. After his arrest, he told police that seconds before Ward and Giesen were attacked, somebody had said “nigg-r.” But he admitted he didn’t know who’d uttered the epithet – or even if the person was black or white. During the trial, he changed his story, claiming Giesen had uttered the epithet. But Giesen denied using a racial slur and identified Plucky as the person who remarked, “You’re in the wrong neck of the woods, cowboys.”

Interestingly, Plucky got a job with a McDonald’s supplier, Mid-South Baking Company in Byran, Texas, three months before the trial — and before his epiphany that Giesen was the person who’d said “nigg-r.”

Why was University McDonald’s so popular among black gang bangers and black fraternity members? Carlos Butler, the outlet’s black general manager, could take credit for that. An aspiring hip-hop artist, he hosted large hip-hop concerts attracting some 1,500 people — and after those events many of the black hip-hoppers headed to University McDonald’s.

Interestingly, Butler told a police detective he always had “a lot of security” at his hip-hop events.

Yet at University McDonald’s, Butler had no off-duty police officer providing security — even on nights that the hip-hop and gangsta crowd showed up in large numbers.

Cost for an off-duty cop – a mere $100. Police had told Butler such a late-night security measure, in use at other nearby 24-hour outlets, could stop trouble before it started.

The all-white jury — eight women and four men – took only four hours to render their $27 million judgment: $16 million for Ward’s parents; $11 million for Crisp’s.

According to a recent article in The Eagle, a daily paper in College Station, the problems at University McDonald’s persist. Lawyers for McDonald’s have vowed to appeal. They are sticking to their argument that poor choices made by the two couples – namely their underage drinking and Bean’s reckless driving – were responsible for Ward and Bean’s deaths. McDonald’s definitely took the negligence case seriously, though. During opening arguments, it had 12 lawyers at the defense table. Hamilton handled the contingency-fee case with two associates – nearly 40 percent of the legal talent in a firm of eight lawyers. “They tried to bury us in paperwork and money,” he remarked.

Parents and relatives of Ward and Crisp attended the trial, but on Hamilton’s advice sat outside the courtroom except when testifying about how the deaths of their children had affected them. They are not giving interviews. Hamilton, however, said they felt vindicated that the jury had rejected the blame-the-victim strategy of McDonald’s lawyers. Marshall Rosenberg, lead lawyer for McDonald’s, did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

The media’s handling of this case was no surprise: political correctness rules in America’s newsrooms. But imagine a hypothetical crime: two clean-cut black couples go into University McDonald’s during the daytime – and are viciously attacked by a mob of whites. An international media circus would erupt! Big-time journalist from all over the world would descend on College Station to deal with the deplorable state of America’s race relations caused by bigoted whites. President Obama would weigh in with a few comments about America’s racial sins; and Attorney General Eric Holder – just like with the Ferguson disturbances – would travel to College Station, where Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would be leading protest marches.

But the narrative they’re promoting is false.

It obscures where most of the hate is coming from. Crime statistics have long reveled the real problem: high levels of black-on-black violence, followed by black-on-white violence and mob attacks — and the latter has been on the increase at an alarming rate, underscoring deep pathologies in a growing black-thug subculture — even as liberals in the mainstream media and Washington are unwilling to acknowledge this fact.

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