We noted recently two members of Congress calling for the nationalization/socialization of portions of the American oil industry. There’s clearly a real yearning for a communist-style command and control economy in this country.

Popular liberal columnist Ted Rall makes the case more explicitly:

THE CURE FOR HIGH GAS AND FOOD PRICES

Vital Businesses Need Nationalization…

…Did you know that Venezuelans pay a mere 19 cents per gallon? It’s 38 cents in Nigeria. Turkmenistanis might not have electoral democracy, but they only shell out $4.50 to fill a 15-gallon tank. Before we replaced Saddam Hussein with…with whatever they have in Iraq now, Iraqis paid less than a dime for a gallon of gas.

One of the things that these countries have in common, of course, is that they’re oil-producing states. Countries that export oil and gas have trouble explaining to their citizens why they should pay for their own natural resources–and most are smart enough not to try. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Burma, Malaysia, Kuwait, China and South Korea are just a few of the countries that keep fuel prices low in order to stimulate economic growth….

….Unlike corporations, governments don’t care about turning a profit. They care about remaining in power. Their reliance on political support (or, if you’re cynical, pandering) allows them to do things our much-vaunted free market system can’t, such as make sure that people can afford to eat and buy enough gas to get to work….

…Like the rest of the world, Venezuelan consumers have been squeezed by rising prices, and even shortages, of groceries. In 2007 Venezuela’s socialist-leaning government decided to do something about it. First they imposed price controls on staple items. When suppliers began to hoard supplies to drive up prices, President Hugo Chavez threatened to nationalize them. “If they remain committed to violating the interests of the people, the constitution, the laws, I’m going to take the food storage units, corner stores, supermarkets and nationalize them,” he said. Food profiteers grumbled. Then they straightened up…

…The problem isn’t the weak dollar or the non-existent housing market. It’s capitalism. A sane government doesn’t leave essential goods and services–food, fuel, housing, healthcare, transportation, education–to the vicissitudes of “magic” markets. Non-discretionary economic sectors should be strictly controlled by–indeed, owned by–the government….

Food, fuel, housing, healthcare, transportation, education…what’s left? I wish more would listen to what these people are saying, and think hard about the implications of putting them in charge.

In the last few weeks stark differences have emerged between Dems and the GOP on energy policy. With gasoline >$4/gal politicians on all sides feel compelled to say/do something. A recap of what each side is offering:

Democrats:

Sue OPEC 

On May 22nd the House passed the “Gas Price Relief for Consumers Act of 2008.” The act does three things: 1) amend the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (written in 1890)  “…to make oil producing and export cartels illegal…”; 2) Creates a Petroleum Industry Antitrust Task Force inside the DOJ to study cartels; 3) Orders a GAO study on the effects of mergers in the petroleum industry. The bill was co-sponsored by 20 Dems, with Dems voting for the bill by a margin of 219 to 2. Venezuela, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the cartel’s members have not yet responded to what efforts they will make to ensure their own national activities comply with this new US law.

“Windfall Tax” on US Oil Producers

Obama has called for a reprise of Carter’s “windfall taxes” on domestic oil producers. (Even the NYT editorial board eventually agreed that Carter’s version was a bad idea, although it took them almost a decade to figure it out.) The idea is that somehow the folks who produce oil for us will do a better job if we penalize them, or something.

“Compel” US Oil Producers to Produce More

On June 12 eighteen Dem Congressmen introduced the “Responsible Ownership of Public Lands Act.” The co-sponsors suggest oil companies leasing public lands might be secretly under-producing, a situation that they will remedy by imposing new fees on any acre leased that has not been drilled within one year. Never mind that it usually takes several years to determine whether newly leased land is worth drilling. After paying for the lease (usually 10 years) and the cost of exploration, the majority of these lands are returned to the government un-drilled. Not good enough for the Dems.

Increase Regulation of Energy Capital Markets

Just this weekend Obama outlined legislation directing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to “investigate proposals” for increasing regulation over the way oil futures are trades. New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine added, “I think everyone believes there’s too much speculation in the oil markets. A lot of the price of oil, I think, people put at the doorstep of speculators bidding up and holding supplies off the market.” Corzine thus neatly justifies this attempted power-grab by his estimate of what “people” think - note Corzine (a former bond trader and Goldman Sachs CEO) never says what he actually believes.

“Nationalize” US Refineries

Video of Maurice Hinchey (D-NY): “We (the government) should own the refineries. Then we can control how much gets out into the market.”

“Socialize” Domestic Oil Companies

Video of Maxine Waters (D-CA) tells the President of Shell Oil she wants to “socialize” his company.

Republicans:

Increase Production 

In his radio address on June 21 Bush made 4 proposals: 1) Drill ANWR; 2) Lift the 25 year ban on drilling on the outer continental shelf (OCS); 3) Lift the ban on exploiting shale oil reserves in the American West; 4) Increase refining capacity by allowing new refineries to be built in the US for the first time in 30 years.

On the second point its worth noting that Brazil has recently announced two massive oil discoveries on its own OCS, possibly turning that country into one of the largest oil exporters within the next 10 years. Its also worth noting that Canada, Mexico, Cuba, and even China (in Cuban waters less that 100 miles from Florida) are all already exploring the North American OCS.

Although McCain is still only “considering” ANWR, he largely agrees with everything Bush proposes. The American people apparently do too - according to Rasmussen only 18% of Americans oppose OCS drilling (including only 37% of self identified “liberals”). McCain is also calling for the construction of 45 new commercial nuclear reactors. The last commercial nuclear reactor in the US to come online started construction in 1973.

The GOP proposals are straightforward. They acknowledge the reality of increased oil demand from emerging economies like China and India. The solution is removing regulatory obsticles that make the US the only major oil producer in the world where new production is effectively illegal.

Some Dem proposals are laughably stupid (i.e. declare OPEC illegal so we can sue them). The rest seek to turn public concern about oil prices into yet another opportunity to expand regulation, expand government power, and grind down and demonize the private economy.

From Reuters:

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a socialist and fierce U.S. critic, warned on Tuesday that relations with Washington could worsen if Republican candidate John McCain wins this year’s presidential election.

Meanwhile, as Chavez masses troops on his border with Colombia, presses his claim to 62% of neighboring Guyana, and transmits hundreds of million$ to FARC terrorists, Peru now claims he’s supporting insurgents there.

From AP:

Hugo Chavez has been accused of using Venezuela’s oil riches to meddle in Colombia, Argentina, Bolivia and Nicaragua. Now, Peru’s president says the Venezuelan leader may be doing it here by funding militants and anti-poverty centers that preach populist revolution.

Its not as bad as when Osama endorsed Kerry, but I suspect many Leftists may welcome Chavez’s endorsement. From CS Monitor:

Leftwing activists flock to Venezuela to soak up the socialist ‘revolution’
Like Havana, Cuba, and Chiapas, Mexico, before it, Caracas draws liberals from around the world who want to experience Hugo Chavez’s experiment in socialism…

…Caracas in the early 2000s has become what Petrograd was under Lenin in the early 1900s. It’s what Havana was in the early days of the Cuban revolution. It’s what Chiapas, Mexico, became for a time in the 1990s when “Subcomandante Marcos” launched an armed struggle to help the indigenous people there – a magnet for socialists and students, radicals and revolutionaries, leftists and a few Hollywood luminaries.

Until recently, they didn’t have anywhere to go. Socialism was in retreat, “revolutions” scarce. Then along came Mr. Chávez and his gambit to forge a “21st century socialism.” Suddenly, Caracas is the new leftwing petri dish. “This is the most interesting social experiment in the world taking place today,” says Fred Fuentes, an Australian who moved to Caracas last July, as he sips from a mug with the government motto “Rumbo al Socialismo” (On the way to Socialism). “Venezuela is the key place to be observing.”…

Gran Colombia was a South American country from 1819-1831. Previously the Viceroyalty of New Granada, Gran Colombia won independence from Spain in a revolution led by Simon Bolivar. The country included all of present day Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama, and portions of Costa Rica, Guyana, Peru, Brazil, Nicaragua, and Honduras.

Bolivar’s vision of a single Latin American state was thwarted by local nationalists, most notably in Ecuador and Venezuela. But Bolivar remains a powerful symbol in the region. His face graces currency and coin in Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela.

Hugo Chavez has adopted Bolivar as a symbol of nationalism and regional unity. In 1999 he oversaw the drafting of a new Venezuelan constitution, which he called  a “Bolivarian Constitution”. That year he changed the name of the country from República de Venezuela to República Bolivariana de Venezuela. Chavez calls his political ideology Bovarian Socialism (a little like an American communist calling themselves a Jeffersonian Socialist - as a Basque aristocrat Bolivar likely would have had little use for Chavez’s statist populism).

In 1999 Chavez also revived a 170 year old border dispute with neighboring Guyana, claiming sovereignty over 62% of that country’s territory. Chavez’s claim is based on the historic north western border of Gran Colombia.

Just in case anyone thought Chavez was kidding about Guyana, in 2006 he changed the Venezuelan flag, adding a star for the ”lost province.” (He also changed the direction of the charging horse on the National Crest - it now runs to the left, of course.)

This provocation was accompanied by a significant buildup in the Venezuelan military. While his country’s economy was collapsing, in 2005 Chavez spent $2.2B on Su-27 fighters and 900,000 new assault rifles. In 2006 he spent $5B on 24 Su-30s and 58 attack helocopters.

In 2007 he initiated the National Simon Bolivar Project of 2007-2021, basically a complete conversion of Venezuela, which still enjoys some private property, freedom of the press, and other civil liberties, into a socialist dictatorship.

Chavez has a friend in the newly elected president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa (the vice president happens to be named Lenin). Correa identifies himself as a ”cristiano de izquierda, al socialismo del siglo XXI“(chrisitan of the left, a 21st century socialist). When Chavez compared Bush to Satan in his 2006 UN speech, Correa said that was unfair to the devil.

Chavez also has friends in neighboring Colombia - the terrorist group FARC, which was established as the militant wing of the Colombian Communist Party in the 1960s. FARC has diversified into the drug trade, but its 8000 man army still claims Marxist-Leninism as its inspiration. The Colombian government recently claimed Chavez gave FARC $300MM last year.

Last week Correa and Chavez used Colombia’s killing of a FARC leader as a justification to begin massing troops on Colombia’s borders. Today we learn that Nicaragua (governed by a coalition of socialist parties) is withdrawing its ambassador to Colombia and sending its own troops to join Venezuela’s buildup. Writing approvingly of the Marxist mobilization against Colombia, Fidel Castro exclaimed, “Bolivar awakens every 100 years!”

Colombian president Alvaro Uribe is extremely popular at home. In 2006 he won nearly 3x as many votes as the next closest candidate, and presently has a domestic approval rating >80%. His popularity comes from from his aggressive efforts against FARC and free market policies that have given Colombia one of the fastest growing economies in the world.

The same things obviously make Uribe unpopular among Marxist dictators and terrorists in the region. It may also explain why the American Democrats controlling Congress regularly go out of their way to undermine him.

Fortunately, Uribe can count on American support so long as there is a Republican in the White House. But if Obama or Clinton wins in November our most important South American ally likely will be left to fend for itself.

From The Telegraph:

Has anyone noticed, either, that what we used to call the working class has shrunk? Not merely because, as surveys tell us, so many now think of themselves as “middle-class”, but because something called the respectable working class has almost died out. What sociologists used to call the working class does not now usually work at all, but is sustained by the welfare state. Its supposed family units are not as the rest of us might define the term. It lapses routinely into criminality and lives in largely self-inflicted squalor. It has low educational attainment and is bereft of ambition. It is what we now call the underclass.

We have an underclass because we pay to have one. I do not mean that to be a glib remark, from which it could be inferred that, if we were to stop paying for one, it would magically disappear. What I mean is that 60 years of welfarism, far from raising people out of poverty and of the vices that sometimes (but not inevitably) go with it, has simply trapped them there. Welfarism has smashed the traditional, and vital, family unit. The state readily takes responsibility for families if those who should be running them decide, in part or in whole, to abdicate it. The huge outlay of money that allows this to happen is represented by politicians - and not exclusively those of the Left - as a great act of humanity and philanthropy…

…That welfarism should allow people to pass their duties to the state was certainly not envisaged by Beveridge when he drew up his blueprint for a welfare system in 1942. As a Liberal of the best sort, Beveridge saw his job as to design a safety net for those who, in distressing scenes in the 1920s and 1930s, had lived in dire poverty owing to mismanagement of the world’s main economies after the First World War. The Attlee government interpreted Beveridge differently, and ensured that welfare instead would provide a career structure for those who chose not to work, or not to provide for their families.

That was bad enough; but real toxicity has been created by combining this destructive profligacy with a liberal experiment in criminal justice that has now utterly failed, and with the sacrifice of our state education system on the altar of Marxism. Given how many of our young grow up without any moral example in their lives, without discipline or serious learning at school, and in the knowledge that the police will not confront them or, if they do, that the courts have little power to punish, it is small wonder we have pockets of lethal anarchy throughout the green and pleasant land…

…Many of the “solutions” to our social problems that have been trotted out since Rhys Jones was killed are right. Given the mess we have allowed to be made, a dose of authoritarianism is needed: more police being more vigilant, catching more criminals and putting them in more prisons.

But our politicians remain too cowardly to implement the prescription. The grammar schools that once helped the poor out of poverty are reviled even by the leader of the Conservative Party, who went to Eton. The scaling down of benefits to the undeserving poor, hand-in-hand with a drive to help people into work and to take responsibility for themselves and their own, is too terrifying for any political party to contemplate.

Collectivism is a slippery slope.

Expansive central planning projects that promise to help people more often do the opposite. The government creates a program to help indigent people, creating more indigent people in the process, thus increasing the demand for programs to help indigent people - repeat until society implodes (e.g. Zimbabwe, USSR, Red China, North Korea, Cambodia…)

These programs can easily emerge from democratic processes since in the short term they are often so popular. Thus many European democracies that had freer economies than the US after WWII have slid into socialist stupor.

How can democracies protect themselves? - a strong constitutional foundation. Governments must not be permitted to claim limitless authority simply because they are elected. Basic principles - individual rights, protection from coercion, enforcement of contracts, defense of property rights - must be upheld regardless what some temporary majority may vote for.

Update 8/29/07:

On a related note, from WF Buckley Jr. this morning:

…democracy, provoked, can act outside the bounds of reason. It was an old saw seventy years ago that the impoverished farmer in the Soviet Union next door to the successful farmer worked not to replicate the practices of his neighbor, but to urge the state to confiscate his neighbor’s harvest. Venezuela’s hatred of the United States generates the equivalent of calls to confiscate the successful harvest.

In certain quarters in Venezuela the hatred of the superpower to the north can be all consuming. When Hugo Chavez, a demagogue of surrealistic extremes, came along, many saw a racy attractiveness in the totality of his iconoclasm. In 2002, the United States, we have been given to believe, had a hand in an attempt to dethrone Chavez. But it didn’t work, and the result of it was a democratic reelection in which Hugo Chavez got a higher percentage of the vote than Abraham Lincoln did when he ran for a second term.

What will happen now?

What always happens when policies are set in flat collision with reality. Venezuelans will become poorer, the political scene will close its door on freedom of the press, and some day down the line, the people will be rescued from the exorbitant lengths to which, acting on democratic license, they took themselves.

Marxist dictatorship, industry nationalizations, populist land reform, anti-colonial race war - this county has all the hallmarks of a leftist paradise.

Alas, the fun cannot last forever. From yesterday’s Telegraph:

The economy of Zimbabwe is facing total collapse within four months, leaving the country facing a slide into Congo-style anarchy, The Sunday Telegraph has been told.

Western officials fear the business, farming and financial sectors may be crippled by Christmas, triggering a collapse of government control that could leave the country prey to warlords and ignite long-suppressed tribal tensions…

And the LA Times:

A drive across Zimbabwe today reveals a desolate portrait of decline: Aimless mobs of people wait along the rural roads, each with a silent pleading gesture for a lift at every passing vehicle. With fuel almost dried up, unemployment at 80% and transport too expensive for most, movement is almost frozen.

Along the highways, brown grass stands high between the thorny acacias in a stunning vista of what Africa must have looked like before mechanized agriculture made farming Zimbabwe’s main export business. Now, most farms lie dormant.

Meat disappeared after the government shut down private abattoirs, transferring all slaughtering to a quasi-governmental organization that cannot meet demand. Fuel supplies dried up after the National Oil Co. of Zimbabwe was made the sole authorized distributor.

In towns, straggling queues form at any rumor of sugar, maize or bread. Most supermarket shelves are empty of basic staples: no meat, no sugar, no maize, no bread, no pasta, no rice, no milk.

Authorities have focused on one sector after another, accusing them of collaborating with the opposition, supporting regime change or engaging in economic sabotage…

Its worth remembering how we got here, how one of the most vibrant economies in Africa, a net food exporter, was converted into a starving dictatorship with >10,000% inflation. How a fragile post-colonial, democratically elected government was overthrown by Marxist thugs.

Unfortunately, the US deserves much of the blame. From The Weekly Standard (June 2007):

In April 1979, 64 percent of the black citizens of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) lined up at the polls to vote in the first democratic election in the history of that southern African nation. Two-thirds of them supported Abel Muzorewa, a bishop in the United Methodist Church. He was the first black prime minister of a country only 4 percent white. Muzorewa’s victory put an end to the 14-year political odyssey of outgoing prime minister Ian Smith, the stubborn World War II veteran who had infamously announced in 1976, “I do not believe in black majority rule–not in a thousand years.” Fortunately for the country’s blacks, majority rule came sooner than Smith had in mind.

Less than a year after Muzorewa’s victory, however, in February 1980, another election was held in Zimbabwe. This time, Robert Mugabe, the Marxist who had fought a seven-year guerrilla war against Rhodesia’s white-led government, won 64 percent of the vote, after a campaign marked by widespread intimidation, outright violence, and Mugabe’s threat to continue the civil war if he lost. Mugabe became prime minister and was toasted by the international community and media as a new sort of African leader. “I find that I am fascinated by his intelligence, by his dedication. The only thing that frustrates me about Robert Mugabe is that he is so damned incorruptible,” Andrew Young, Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations, had gushed to the Times of London in 1978. The rest, as they say, is history.

The article further recounts how the Carter administration systematically undermined Muzorewa’s popularly elected government, notably leaving in-place sanctions that had been designed to force the previous non-democratic government controlled by minority whites to accept popular rule. Carter insisted that militant Marxists be allowed to first share power, then take control in a ridiculously compromised do-over election.

A generation later Carter is still scouring the world in search of rag-tag Marxists groups attempting to seize power through violence. We wrote in June about his efforts to get the US to “establish some communications” with a tiny but vicious group of Marxists attempting to overthrow the democratic government in Nepal.

And, of course, there’s his affection for Venezuelan Marxist Hugo Chavez. The Carter Center has been one of few international observers to regularly endorse Venezuela’s recent tainted elections. They’ve been notably silent on Chavez’s recent president-for-life declaration.

Chavez actions since taking power - land reform, hyper-inflation, nationalization, price controls - bear striking resemblance to Mugabe’s own play-book. Unfortunately for the people of Venezuela (and maybe the people of Guyana who’s Chavez now claims 62% of) Chavez’s thuggocracy may be more enduring.

As Daniel Yergin has argued, the Soviet Union’s inevitable economic collapse was forestalled by perhaps 20 years by their enormous wealth in natural resources. The entire economy was otherwise in free-fall, but, particularly after the Arab-Israeli wars in the 1960s and 70s, and thanks to economically thriving and therefore energy hungry Western democracies, a few marginally operated oil fields were able to keep their entire, fatally flawed economy afloat into the 90s.

Chavez’s emergent dictatorship enjoys such a cat seat today. And with the help of a few leftist politicians, idiot celebrities, trustifarians, and American useful idiots in general, the left’s newest darling dictator may survive to oppress the citizens of his own country longer than even Mugabe has.

From AFP:

Guyana’s President Bharrat Jagdeo on Thursday criticized the Kyoto Protocol on climate change for failing to allow countries like his nation with pristine unharvested forests to earn carbon credits.

“The Kyoto Protocol is limited in that sense, and it’s short-sighted in that it encourages bad behaviour basically among countries; if you cut down trees and you plant them back you get money, if you preserve them, you don’t get anything,” Jagdeo told a forum on agro-energy.

That’s right, President Jagdeo. And we’ll see a lot more of this BS as the world is converted to an Orwellian kleptocracy, the ultimate goal of idiotic treaties like the Kyoto Protocol.

Use your political power to bring your own population to heel and there will be a spot for you among the UN elites with the other 3rd world dictators. Keep asking questions and you’ll have an unhappy life among your countrymen as they are starved into submission by some other UN approved leader.

Speaking of, there may be a UN approved thug on the way sooner than you think. On seizing power Venezuelan tough guy (and hero of the American Left) Hugo Chavez claimed 62% of neighboring Guyana actually belongs to him.

From Newsday:

“Get rid of all these rotten politicians that we have in Washington, who are nothing more than corporate toadies,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmentalist author, president of Waterkeeper Alliance and Robert F. Kennedy’s son, who grew hoarse from shouting. “This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors.”

In 1983 RFK Jr pled guilty to felony heroin possession. His only jobs have been in government and in charities funded by his family. Now he’s calling to criminalize political disagreement. Typical leftist hero.

RFK Jr’s cousin and co-inheritee Joe Kennedy III (irresponsible jeep flipping girl crusher) has been in the news a lot lately - acting as propaganda front man for Venezuelan thuggocrat Hugo Chavez with his 1-800-Joe-4-Oil stunt.

From Sunday’s Washington Post article Assault on an Ally:

COLOMBIAN President Álvaro Uribe may be the most popular democratic leader in the world. Last week, as he visited Washington, a poll showed his approval rating at 80.4 percent — extraordinary for a politician who has been in office nearly five years. Colombians can easily explain this: Since his first election in 2002, Mr. Uribe has rescued their country from near-failed-state status, doubling the size of the army and extending the government’s control to large areas that for decades were ruled by guerrillas and drug traffickers. The murder rate has dropped by nearly half and kidnappings by 75 percent. For the first time thugs guilty of massacres and other human rights crimes are being brought to justice, and the political system is being purged of their allies. With more secure conditions for investment, the free-market economy is booming.

In a region where populist demagogues are on the offensive, Mr. Uribe stands out as a defender of liberal democracy, not to mention a staunch ally of the United States. So it was remarkable to see the treatment that the Colombian president received in Washington. After a meeting with the Democratic congressional leadership, Mr. Uribe was publicly scolded by House Majority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), whose statement made no mention of the “friendship” she recently offered Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Human Rights Watch, which has joined the Democratic campaign against Mr. Uribe, claimed that “today Colombia presents the worst human rights and humanitarian crisis in the Western hemisphere” — never mind Venezuela or Cuba or Haiti. Former vice president Al Gore, who has advocated direct U.S. negotiations with the regimes of Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, recently canceled a meeting with Mr. Uribe because, Mr. Gore said, he found the Colombian’s record “deeply troubling.”…

…Some, like Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), reflexively resist U.S. military aid to Latin America. Colombia has received more than $5 billion in economic and military aid from the Clinton and Bush administrations to fight drug traffickers and the guerrillas, and it hopes to receive $3.9 billion more in the next six years. Some, like Rep. Sander M. Levin (D-Mich.), are eager to torpedo Colombia’s pending free-trade agreement with the United States. Now that the Bush administration has conceded almost everything that House Democrats asked for in order to pass pending trade deals, protectionist hard-liners have seized on the supposed human rights “crisis” as a pretext to blackball Colombia.

Perhaps Mr. Uribe is being punished by Democrats, too, because he has remained an ally of George W. Bush even as his neighbor, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, portrays the U.S. president as “the devil.” Whatever the reasons, the Democratic campaign is badly misguided. If the Democrats succeed in wounding Mr. Uribe or thwarting his attempt to consolidate a democracy that builds its economy through free trade, the United States may have to live without any Latin American allies.

Today Bob Novak picks up the story in the Chicago Sun Times:

Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe returned to Bogota this week in a state of shock. His three-day visit to Washington to win over Democrats in Congress was described by one American supporter as “catastrophic.” Colombian sources said Uribe was stunned by the ferocity of his Democratic opponents, and Vice President Francisco Santos publicly talked about cutting U.S.-Colombian ties.

Uribe got nothing from his meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders. Military aid remains stalled, overall assistance is reduced, and the vital U.S.-Colombian trade bill looks dead. The first Colombian president to crack down on his country’s corrupt army officer hierarchy, and to assault both right-wing paramilitaries and left-wing guerrillas, last week confronted Democrats wedded to out-of-date claims of civil rights abuses and to rigidly protectionist dogma.

This is remarkable U.S. treatment for a rare friend on the South American continent, where Venezuela’s leftist dictator Hugo Chavez can only exult in Uribe’s embarrassment as he builds an anti-American bloc of nations…

…Hopes that the Democratic majority in Congress might perceive the importance of supporting Colombia were dashed April 20 when Al Gore canceled a joint appearance with Uribe at an environmental event in Miami. Gore cited allegations of Uribe’s association with paramilitary forces a decade ago, charges denied by the Colombian president.

Gore’s snub legitimized what the new congressional majority is intent on doing anyway. Democrats follow both left-wing human rights lobbyists and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney’s protectionist campaign against the Colombian free-trade agreement.

What the hell is the matter with the Dems? Are they completely fixated with taking the wrong side of every possible issue? These people have no problem cuddling up with thuggocrats in Syria and Venezuela, but will go out of their way to offend and undermine a popular, legitimate, effective American ally.

In the five years since Uribe was elected president his country’s GDP has grown 24%. According to Bloomberg monthly kidnappings have fallen from 314 in May 2002 to 13 in December 2006.

But its a tough neighborhood. Venezuela shares a long land border with Colombia, and is already making territorial claims on 62% of Guyana, its neighbor on the other side.

For the DNC everything seems to be an opportunity to play petty politics, no matter the cost to the US. Its hard to believe American’s would ever trust a member of their party with the top job in 08.

El Gusano de Luz documentary- how Chavez fabricated the 2002 coup to consolidate his own power.