"He who says he supports Chavez but votes 'no' is a traitor, a true traitor," Hugo Chavez declared to a packed arena of uniformed supporters. "He's against me, against the revolution and against the people." True traitors conflate self with nation, party with nation. The megalomaniac Chavez's picture should appear next to the definition of "cult of personality." He is a self-obsessed dictator seeking to usurp even more power by suspending aspects of Venezuela's constitution. "It's black and white--a vote against the reform is a vote against Chavez," Chavez, characteristically referring to Chavez in the third person, said in an interview of Chavez conducted by Chavez's state media. Chavez.

So mesmerized by charismatic socialists are leftists that their professed ideals of civil liberties and democracy fly out the window at first sight of a fist-pumping, podium-banging despot. But to the Left, at least in real time, such despots aren't despots at all. After the fact, the example of the red-flag-flying National Socialists comes to mind, socialist oppressors get transformed into right-wing oppressors. No leftist, to a leftist, is capable of such abuse of power.

It's easy to identify tyrants in history. Identifying them in the present proves more difficult. Even ones who award themselves panjandrum titles, don military garb, and engage in histrionics that would make Mussolini blush escape the "tyrant" designation by progressives who imagine themselves always at a point in history too "advanced" for all that. A socialist tyrant, because of the ideological affinity to foreign leftists, is, apparently, no tyrant at all. From a leftist's perspective, it's as if "tyrants," "despots," and "dictators" exist exclusively outside the Left--in the same way that "coups" always seem describe rightist power-grabs and "revolutions" leftist power grabs.

No tyrant calls himself a "tyrant." According to most tyrants, their power comes from "the people," a modern source for legitimacy that is to dictators what "God" was for kings. This rhetorical appeal to democracy, however crude and simplistic a parlor trick, magically convinces large numbers of people that the enemies of liberty are its friends.

It's not as if the American Left is reluctant to employ such terms as "fascism," "oppression," or "dictatorship." The abusive language the Left promiscuously hurls at Republican presidents apply more easily to the foreign dictators they so foolishly venerate. Don't count on Hugo Chavez receiving the George Bush treatment from American radicals anytime soon, though.

Bush lied, people died.

If there were such a fallacy, that might be called the "No True Scotsman Fallacy". This is popular to the "skeptics" when Christians are explaining why no true Christian would stretch somebody on the rack until they gave a pre-programmed confession. But as close a tie as there is between anti-religious and leftists, there still might not be any overlap among the "no true leftist" crowd.

As of 1997, one in ten gallons of gasoline used in the U.S. came from Venezuela. Since then, a combination of Chavez and his energy minister seizing foreign businesses and people in the U.S. wising up to Citgo have dropped Venezuelan petroleum usage dramatically.

The question really is, why are we still reliant on getting our energy supplies by having to deal with the inconsistencies of any of these third world petty despots when we have millions of gallons of oil in and around the continental United States?

Our Government talks a good game about being energy independent but it’s hollow talk and we continue to be held hostage by some of the World’s worse reprobates.