"That's all well and good, Reg. I'd take issue with a few of your points above, but your are entitled to your views."

My main points have to do with the way right wingnut goons create fiction wholesale from this situation to try to buy political points. Marc's opening post in this thread is basically a repeat of his behavior in his thread about "gun control"...the guy is all hat and no cattle of late and who knows how this turns him on.

"Bottom line is: how do the pluses and minuses of Chavismo stack up for Venezuela? As someone who has lived there, has friends and family there (from both sides of the Chavez divide), and has seen the country both before and after Chavismo, the answer is obvious. His rule has been an absolute disaster in almost every way. Trust me on this: I've educated myself on the subject far more than Sean Penn has, and I will trust the judgment that I've come to from having seen things with my own eyes."

I treated Chavez as any other politician...with the expectation that he won't get anywhere near perfection and that both his triumphs and failures will be magnified. In the end though what I think of him is far less important than what the people in Venezuela think of him...and in this regard I would say you have a large advantage because you have direct access to people that as you stated, deal with it everyday. So, just to be clear I don't doubt anything you say about Chavez and how people feel about him in Venezuela...I do have major doubts about how that situation is treated in the media here and I have seen a lot of what I can easily identify as pure bullshit coming from Republican politicians and news outlets about it though.

This is why I used Joe Kennedy and Citizens Energy as an example. The Right wingnuts in office and the media slam that program and Mr. Kennedy as if he is promoting an enemy of the state by taking the oil and helping the poor and needy and say nothing of the fact that the FOR PROFIT business Chavez does with companies in the United States dwarfs what is doled out to Citizens Energy programs...but they never mention a word of that...the companies here that are profiting from Venezuelan oil get a free pass...why do you suppose that is, Ross?

I can tell you why and in a lot of ways it has a lot to do with why Citizens Energy had to go to Venezuela to get oil for the poor and needy in the first place. All of this side of the story has a lot less to do with countries and people than it does politics, products, and profit.