Pejman Yousefzadeh

So yesterday, a tornado ripped through Moore, Oklahoma, killing “at least 91 people,” with “20 of them children.” To say that this is horrifying is to understate matters.

The calamity led blogger and public policy professor Michael O’Hare to write this post at the “Reality-Based Community” (try not to laugh). In its entirety, the original post read as follows:

Oklahoma is an oil state. Oklahomans vote for people like senators Inhofe and Coburn, who rail at the ‘myth’ of climate change.  After all, there are millions and millions of dollars still to earn selling oil to burn: what more evidence does a reasonable Sooner need?

People who think science is more than a political flag one can choose to wave or not, depending on whether there’s profit in it, are pretty sure that one of the effects of global warming is increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather.

I wish I believed that a just Providence sent things like today’s tornado upon people who vote for oil-whore Oklahoma Republicans.  I don’t, but could the devastation in Moore possibly give the survivors something to think about along these lines?

(Emphasis mine.) Actual “reality-based” commenters expressed a strong sense of shock and disgust that O’Hare would (a) seek to politicize the tragedy while the bodies are still warm, (b) tell us that he “wish[ed] [he] believed that a just Providence” sent the tornado “upon people who vote for oil-whore Oklahoma Republicans,” and (c) said that while he didn’t believe it, he wouldn’t mind if “the devastation in Moore” could “possibly give the survivors something to think about along these lines.” Because, of course, what the survivors really need right now is to be haunted by the thought that they might have brought this calamity upon themselves and their community thanks to the fact that they prefer to vote for Republican senators, and because there is apparently a straight line that can be drawn from voting for a Republican senator to dying/being injured/losing your home and possessions in a tornado.

Recognizing that he might have gone way too far, O’Hare then wrote an update in which he told us that the “reference to Providence” was a “pointer” to the claim “trotted out (for example) after Katrina,” that natural disasters happen to people who deserve to be punished.” O’Hare then tells us that if he “wished” he believed that natural disasters happen to people who deserve to be punished, “I would feel OK about the consequences, I guess even the children whose school was shredded around them” (and who died as well, one might add). O’Hare then assures us that he doesn’t believe that “natural disasters happen to people who deserve to be punished” (thank Providence for small mercies), but

… actions like putting carbon back in the air from underground as fast as possible have consequences, consequences that fall most heavily on the least deserving: the poor people who will not have enough to eat as floods and droughts deepen and come more often, and all the children still unborn around the world who didn’t get to dance at the fossil fuel party but will still have to figure out how to live in a toasted planet – yes, and children in tornado alley who never voted for anyone.

I also believe that the time to talk about politics and how we engage with that amoral reality is while the manifestations of foolishness, especially their injustice, are salient, and that doing so shows respect and sympathy for those who suffered and died for no good reason other than the cupidity of their leadership and its wilful ignorance (or worse, putative ignorance)

To which, my reply to O’Hare is “okay, but you still could have made that point without making comments that struck reasonable readers—including longtime fans of the blog you write for—as being utterly repulsive. You could have written ‘guys, this pattern of extreme weather will continue until we get climate change under control, and until we do, more people will die. Let’s please do something.’ You could have written ‘I am really outraged that our environmental policies are leading to more extreme weather, and more deaths.’ But you didn’t. You wrote instead ‘I wish I believed that a just Providence sent things like today’s tornado upon people who vote for oil-whore Oklahoma Republicans. I don’t, but could the devastation in Moore possibly give the survivors something to think about along these lines?’ Standing on its own, and even after the explanation you gave in your update, that’s repulsive. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell called, and they want their disgusting schtick back.”

As one of the commenters to O’Hare’s post noted, his post was in line with a tweet from Lizz Winstead, who is a co-creator of the Daily Show and who tweeted that “[t]his tornado is in Oklahoma so clearly it has been ordered to only target conservatives.” Unlike O’Hare, Winstead apologized for her tweet once the scope of the devastation became clear. Belated class is better than no class at all.

Up until recently, I have had the distinct pleasure of never having heard of E.W. Jackson. Too bad my lucky streak couldn’t continue.

The title of this blog post describes what I think of Jackson and his “thoughts.” I’ll go ahead and add that if people like Jackson become the face of the Republican party, then people like me will go find another party to associate with. Which of course will kill the Republican party.

Because now, even more information has come out.

Start with the fact that we have yet another resignation:

President Obama on Thursday appointed senior budget adviser Daniel Werfel as the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, as that agency manages a scandal stemming from its targeting of conservative groups. The appointment is effective May 22.

More changes in the IRS leadership team were announced Thursday as well, with Joseph Grant, Commissioner of Tax Exempt/Government Entities Division, planning to retire on June 3, according to an IRS statement.

Obama on Wednesday demanded and accepted the resignation of the acting IRS commissioner, Steven Miller. The president said it is important to have a new leader for the organization while it attempts to put in safeguards to ensure the special screening of political advocacy groups does not happen again. Werfel has agreed to remain in the new job through Sept. 30.

Anyone who thinks that Grant’s resignation is just coincidental likely would be a good target for those seeking to unload subprime mortgage packages. Also, this is yet another nail in the coffin of the claim that responsibility for bad behavior was confined to low-level employees.

It’s also worth noting that the latest incredibly ridiculous excuse for the IRS scandal—courtesy of incredibly ridiculous people—is that the IRS abuses were justified by a “doubling” of claims from tea party groups for tax exempt status since the Citizens United ruling. The problem is that this excuse is utterly shredded by, you know, facts:

Applications for tax exemption from advocacy nonprofits had not yet spiked when the Internal Revenue Service began using what it admits was inappropriate scrutiny of conservative groups in 2010.

In fact, applications were declining, data show.

Top IRS officials have been saying that a “significant increase” in applications from advocacy groups seeking tax-exempt status spurred its Cincinnati office in 2010 to filter those requests by using such politically loaded phrases as “Tea Party,” “patriots,” and “9/12.”

Both Steven Miller, the agency’s acting commissioner until he stepped down Wednesday, and Lois Lerner, director of the agency’s exempt-organization division, have said over the past week that IRS officials started the scrutiny after observing a surge in applications for status as 501(c)(4) “social welfare” groups. Both officials cited an increase from about 1,500 applications in 2010 and to nearly 3,500 in 2012. President Obama ask Mr. Miller to resign on Wednesday.

The scrutiny began, however, in March 2010, before an uptick could have been observed, according to data contained in the audit released Tuesday from the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration.

The number of 501(c)(4) applications for all of 2010 was actually less than in 2009.

“It doesn’t bear out the statement that there was a surge in 2010,” said Bruce Hopkins, a tax attorney specializing in nonprofits. “That’s inconsistent with what Lois said last week.”

Facts don’t matter to liars, of course. But they should and do matter to those of us who are morally decent and intellectually honest.

There is a lot of nonsense being written on the IRS scandal—see here for nonsense from a reliably ridiculous source—but Professor Rick Hasen (who actually knows something about election and campaign finance law) has no problem whatsoever calling the IRS’s actions “terrible”:

Let’s not make excuses for the IRS. The agency shouldn’t have subjected conservative groups to special scrutiny. Campaign finance reform groups should have immediately called for hearings when this scandal broke: Imagine the hue and cry if the IRS during the Bush administration had singled out “progressive” groups for special tax scrutiny and sent them unprecedented questions about their contributors and activities. Given the danger going back to President Richard Nixon of using the IRS against political enemies, the agency has to be scrupulously nonpartisan and fair. Congressional investigations and the Department of Justice criminal investigation announced Tuesday are inevitable and warranted.

Professor Hasen thinks that the thing to do in response is to strengthen disclosure laws. I have no problem with that, but two things bear remembering: (1) Disclosure laws should not put any limits whatsoever on the amount of money that can be spent in supporting a 501(c)(4). I happen to think that money is speech, and if we can call flag-burning speech in Texas v. Johnson (a ruling I agree with, given my high regard for the First Amendment), then we can call spending money to advance political causes speech as well. (2) The identity of those who bankroll certain 501(c)(4)s may be somewhat interesting to know—I certainly would be less inclined to support a 501(c)(4) that I know is bankrolled by neo-Nazis or communists—but in the vast majority of cases, one really shouldn’t need to know the identity of bankrollers in order to be able to determine whether or not one supports the aims of various 501(c)(4)s. The nature and scope of the argument made by 501(c)(4)s matters a whole lot more than does the identity of those making the argument.

This is appalling:

Harvard professor and famous historian Niall Ferguson reportedly made some bizarre and offensive remarks about economist John Maynard Keynes at an investment conference yesterday.

According to financial writer Tom Kostigen, the editor at large of Private Wealth and Financial Advisor magazines, Ferguson made two startling suggestions about Keynes at the Tenth Annual Altegris Conference in Carlsbad, California:

• Keynes’ economic philosophy, Ferguson reportedly suggested, was the result of Keynes not caring about future generations.
• Keynes didn’t care about future generations, Ferguson reportedly suggested, because Keynes was gay and did not have children.

To his credit, Ferguson has now apologized. Good for him, but why make the comments in the first place? It is incumbent on those who criticize the application of Keynesianism—and I include myself in that group—to make sure that we understand what Keynesian arguments are, lest responsible criticisms get drowned out by the backlash against irresponsible criticisms. And as a general matter, it helps not to cite Keynes’s sexual orientation when criticizing his economic philosophy. There is no tie whatsoever between the two, and frankly, even before he sought to make the connection, Ferguson should have wondered whether the presence of heterosexual Keynesians might undermine his argument.

But as I write, at least Ferguson has apologized. Dick Harpootlian, by contrast, doesn’t seem to have the good grace or intelligence to follow Ferguson’s example:

Conservatives are outraged after a Democrat in South Carolina allegedly insulted Republican Gov. Nikki Haley’s Indian heritage at a party gathering in Columbia on Friday.

The state’s Democratic Party Chairman, Dick Harpootlian, is believed to have said the party will take on the Conservative in the next gubernatorial race and send ‘Nikki Haley back to wherever the hell she came from.’

Gov. Haley was born in the U.S. but her parents are from India.

Yahoo political reporter Chris Moody tweeted on Friday that Mr Harpootlian made the comment, in support of Democrat challenger Vince Sheheen, who has declared he will run for governor.

There were no details on the venue or context for the comment but Harpootlian is at the helm the 2013 Dem Weekend in Columbia, South Carolina.

One can easily imagine what the popular media reaction would be if a Republican state party chair made similar comments. Note that Harpootlian was an early and fervent supporter of Barack Obama in 2008, and bundled nearly $400,000 for Barack Obama’s re-election. The responsible thing for any enterprising journalist to do is to ask the president whether he stands by Harpootlian’s disgusting comments, or whether he is willing to condemn them. Thus far, of course, we have heard crickets from the administration, from the media in general, and naturally, from the port side of the blogosphere.

Matthew Yglesias asks whether we should all become Marxists.

No. We shouldn’t.

This has been the first of doubtless many Simple Answers to Ridiculous Questions.

It is a mystery. Anyway, in the aftermath of the gun control defeat and Dowd’s hilariously bad column on the same, here is Megan McArdle trying desperately to explain Politcs 101 to a hopelessly confused student in Dowd:

… The American President and The West Wing are not searing portrayals of effective political management. They’re drama. The first question a dramatist asks is not “Is this how it really works?” but “Is it entertaining?” And the second is “Can the audience understand this in less than thirty seconds?” Veracity is way, way down the list. If you want a clue to how realistic it all is, consider that Aaron Sorkin awarded Jed Bartlett the Nobel Prize in Economics. Then go interview some Nobel Prizewinning Economists and ask yourself whether a single one of them would have the desire, or the ability, to run for president.

Jed Bartlett doesn’t win policy debates because of his amazing tactical skills, his overpowering arguments, or the sheer persuasiveness of his granite-faced brand of urbane folksomeness. He wins them because Aaron Sorkin is a liberal and he wants Republicans to lose on the major issues. Unfortunately for liberals, Tom Coburn and John Boehner don’t have their lines faxed over from Hollywood every morning.

And Megan McArdle points us to Walter Russell Mead, whose scorn for Dowd is magnificent to behold:

Column writing is dangerous work and long success in the game can lead to the stifling of that Editor Within who keeps you from looking too stupid in print. A rich self esteem, fortifed by decades of op-ed tenure and dinner party table talk dominance, has apparently given Ms. Dowd the confidence to believe that she is a maestro of political infighting, a Clausewitz of strategic insight and a Machiavelli of political cunning rolled up into one stylish and elegant piece of work. From the heights of insight on which she dwells, it is easy to see what that poor schmuck Barry Obama can’t: those 60 votes on gun control were his for the taking, if he was only as shrewd a politician as Maureen Dowd

The President needs to get his hands dirty, our genteel and accomplished op-ed writer advises the ex-community organizer and Chicago pol. He needs to get real, get down in the dirt, muck around with the senators and exercise raw power. Don’t make empty gestures and don’t give up, she advises him: fight! fight! fight!

[…]

If only Lyndon Johnson had understood the art of political pressure as well as Maureen Dowd. “You work with us, we’ll work with you.” It’s… brilliant! Reminding her about her six year term… if that doesn’t swing her around, nothing will. “You’re a mother…” This is a set of brass knuckles no one could resist. The NRA must be thanking its lucky stars that a bumbling amateur like Barack Obama is in the White House instead of the arch-politician Maureen Dowd; Heidi Heitkamp would have been putty in her elegantly manicured hands.

It goes on like that for quite a while, so be sure not to miss the entire blog post. I’d like to think that McArdle’s patient and desperate attempt to explain the facts on the ground—added to Mead’s entirely justified contempt for Dowd’s political instincts—would alert the New York Times to the fact that its columnist is simply not on the ball. But I have my doubts that the Times will take note. It seems content to have Dowd perpetually on its payroll, perpetually writing as though she is fourteen years old.

Nota Bene: To be fair to Dowd, she does seem to get the usual gaggle of suckers to approve of her drivel. I suppose she deserves some form of congratulations for that.

shitmystudentswrite:

On the other hand, Levi-Strauss, the inventor of denim jeans is an example of structuralist opposition. He made the denim jeans fashionable and popular.

To wit:

High school is full of hypotheticals, like “How does one solve for x?” and “What happens if I skip class?” But this week, students at Albany High School were given an alarming thought puzzle: How do I convince my teacher that I think Jews are evil?

That question was posed to about 75 students on Monday by an unidentified 10th-grade English teacher as a “persuasive writing” exercise. The students were instructed to imagine that their teacher was a Nazi and to construct an argument that Jews were “the source of our problems” using historical propaganda and, of course, a traditional high school essay structure.

“Your essay must be five paragraphs long, with an introduction, three body paragraphs containing your strongest arguments, and a conclusion,” the assignment read. “You do not have a choice in your position: you must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!”

The assignment — first reported by The Times Union of Albany — prompted an embarrassed reaction from school district administrators, who were alerted to it by a concerned parent on Wednesday night.

“Obviously, we have a severe lack of judgment and a horrible level of insensitivity,” said Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard, superintendent of Albany’s schools. “That’s not the assignment that any school district, and certainly not mine, is going to tolerate.”

Dr. Vanden Wyngaard, who met with Jewish leaders in Albany and made a public apology on Friday, said the assignment was apparently an attempt to link the English class with a history lesson on the Holocaust. The assignment itself seems to back up that theory, telling students to use “what you’ve learned in history class.” It also suggests using “any experiences you have.

And lest you think that this is an isolated problem …

[The assignment] echoed another recent, controversial assignment in Manhattan, where an elementary school class was given math problems featuring the whipping and killing of slaves, according to The Associated Press. That assignment was an effort to combine math and social studies lessons.

I don’t have any proof whatsoever that these assignments were motivated by racism or anti-Semitism. However, I have plenty of support for the proposition that they were motivated by extreme stupidity. And I am horrified to think that there are many more instances of stupidity—perhaps more subtle, but no less pronounced—occurring in our school systems nationwide. How kids can be expected to compete when they are held back by incredibly bad teaching is a complete mystery.

shitmystudentswrite:

Christians usually marry only one person for life. This is called monotony.

Of course it is.

There were far too many people on the right who were willing to tolerate the activities of birthers, since those activities were seen as undermining Barack Obama’s claims to political legitimacy. To be sure and to be fair, the overwhelming majority of those on the right thought that the birther movement was ridiculous and accepted the fact that Barack Obama was and is the legitimate president of the United States, but there certainly should have been more of an effort by the right in general to police its own—our own—and to read the birthers out of the movement much as William F. Buckley read the John Birch movement out of conservatism back in his day.

Alas, that opportunity was largely missed. Now, the right is beginning to reap the consequences. You see, the birthers have decided to go after Ted Cruz:

Birthers, it turns out, can be bipartisan. They have a new target — the rapidly rising GOP senator Ted Cruz.

Though he bears all the marks of a Texan — the swagger, the signature twang, and the ever-present cowboy boots — 42-year-old Cruz was born in Calgary, Alberta, to an American mother and a Cuban father. By dint of his mother’s citizenship, Cruz was an American citizen at birth. Whether he meets the Constitution’s requirement that the president of the United States be a “natural-born citizen,” a term the Framers didn’t define and for which the nation’s courts have yet to offer an interpretation, has become the subject of considerable speculation.

And it involves some of the same people who sparked conflict — and drew charges of racism — by raising questions about the circumstances of President Obama’s birth. Donald Trump, for one, says he is impressed by Cruz but hasn’t yet looked extensively at his background.

The homepage of the website Birthers.org is currently devoted to making the constitutional case against Cruz’s eligibility. He is lauded for representing his state “with a passion not seen in Texas since the Alamo” and cheered for being “one hell of a Senator,” but Birthers.org’s denizens emphatically conclude that he cannot be president “because the law of Canada made him a citizen of Canada by BIRTH.”

On ObamaReleaseYourRecords.com, alongside the latest news about the president’s fraudulent birth certificate and his close ties to Islam, anonymous authors blast the media for propagating the “myth” that the Constitution permits a Cruz presidency. “What complete madness to suggest someone born in another country is a ‘natural born Citizen’ of the United States and eligible to be POTUS,” one of them argues. “It is complete rubbish and they know it.”

If all of this sounds nothing short of stark-raving insane, that’s because it is:

Legal scholars are firm about Cruz’s eligibility. “Of course he’s eligible,” Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz tells National Review Online. “He’s a natural-born, not a naturalized, citizen.” Eugene Volokh, a professor at the UCLA School of Law and longtime friend of Cruz, agrees, saying the senator was “a citizen at birth, and thus a natural-born citizen — as opposed to a naturalized citizen, which I understand to mean someone who becomes a citizen after birth.”

Federal law extends citizenship beyond those granted it by the 14th Amendment: It confers the privilege on all those born outside of the United States whose parents are both citizens, provided one of them has been “physically present” in the United States for any period of time, as well as all those born outside of the United States to at least one citizen parent who, after the age of 14, has resided in the United States for at least five years. Cruz’s mother, who was born and raised in Delaware, meets the latter requirement, so Cruz himself is undoubtedly an American citizen. No court has ruled what makes a “natural-born citizen,” but there appears to be a consensus that the term refers to those who gain American citizenship by birth rather than by naturalization — again, including Texas’s junior senator.

We learned a long time ago that the birther movement is filled with a bunch of cranks who like nothing more than finding and slaying imaginary dragons. These people have nothing of use whatsoever to offer the political process, and yet, they get outsized attention because of their weird ways and because laughed out of polite company long ago by the right, which should have moved quickly from the beginning to ostracize the birther movement in every way that it could. Now, the right is reaping the whirlwind. Ted Cruz is trying to do his job as a United States senator. Too bad the birthers have decided to make his job harder by setting their myopic sights on him.

shitmystudentswrite:

Romeo can’t really be blamed for Ophelia’s death.

But he was definitely responsible for the nonsense that Lizzy Proctor had to go through.

“Because the Economist made a snide crack about sewers back in 1848—no, not a typo, we are talking about an Economist article from one hundred sixty five years ago—I can diss present day conservatives.”

If anyone ever wanted to know what a desperate and laughable argument looks like, well, here you go.

Now that Hugo Chavez has gone to meet the arch-enemy of his Maker, it’s time to remind all and sundry just how dreadful a legacy he has left behind.

First, let’s take account of the purblind:

US filmmaker and long-time Hugo Chavez supporter Oliver Stone hailed the late Venezuelan leader as a “great hero” on Tuesday, saying he will “live forever in history.”

Actor and activist Sean Penn, another Hollywood friend to Chavez, also paid tribute saying the world’s poor had lost a “champion” and America had also lost “a friend it never knew it had.”

“JFK” and “Natural Born Killers” director Stone said: “I mourn a great hero to the majority of his people and those who struggle throughout the world for a place.

“Hated by the entrenched classes, Hugo Chavez will live forever in history,” he added in a statement released by his publicist, adding: “My friend, rest finally in a peace long earned.”

Stone has regularly praised Chavez, whom he interviewed for a 2009 documentary “South of the Border,” exploring the outspoken Venezuelan leader’s role in bottom-up change sweeping South America.

Penn, in a statement reacting to Chavez’s death aged 58, added: “Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of Vice President (Nicolas) Maduro.

“Today the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion. I lost a friend I was blessed to have.

“My thoughts are with the family of President Chavez and the people of Venezuela,” he added.

Uh-huh. Let’s consider just how good Chavez has been to the people of Venezuela.

We’ll start with the fact Chavez left Venezuela in terrible shape:

Dead at 58, Hugo Chávez leaves behind a country in far worse condition than it was when he became president, its future clouded by rivals for succession in a constitutional crisis of his Bolivarian party’s making and an economy in chaos.

A former paratrooper, Mr. Chávez had a radical vision for “21st Century Socialism,” which was never fully explained. His skillful rhetoric, which filled supporters with utopian dreams, was used to justify the methodical destruction of Venezuela’s democratic institutions and the free market.

Shortly after coming to office, he rewrote the constitution to his liking and aggressively set out to rig elections and stifle adversaries in the legislative branch and the courts. Unable to brook criticism, he turned his fire on the independent news media, eventually silencing most voices of opposition by bully tactics and economic intimidation.

His Bolivarian regime rewarded supporters and punished opponents, giving rise to enormous corruption and the creation of a new class of greedy oligarchs with political connections. Unfortunately for Venezuela and for all his political skills, the president was both an incompetent executive and a worse economist.

In an energy-rich country that once knew no blackouts, electrical shortages are frequent, the result of Mr. Chávez’s plundering of the country’s public oil company. In a country that once enjoyed a thriving free market, prices are controlled and food items often scarce.

In recent weeks, while Mr. Chávez was hospitalized, Venezuela was once again forced to devalue its currency, this time by one-third. This was the inevitable outcome of a series of disastrous economic decisions that included nationalizing the telephone company and other utilities, which scared off foreign investors and spurred capital flight.

This might help explain why Venezuelans in the United States—who unlike those in Venezuela proper, are free to express their opinions—are so delighted that Chavez is dead:

Venezuelans in the U.S. cheered and expressed cautious optimism that new elections will bring change to their homeland after the death of President Hugo Chavez.

“My hope is that Venezuela will become a free country once again,” said Elizabeth Gonazalez, 52, who wore a smiley face sticker on her sweater with the words, “Venezuela without Chavez.”

A jubilant celebration broke out in the Miami suburb of Doral late Tuesday after word spread of the death of the 58-year-old leftist. Many dressed in caps and T-shirts in Venezuela’s colors of yellow, blue and red.

“He’s gone!” dozens in the largely anti-Chavez community chanted.

And why shouldn’t they be happy?

IN Caracas, Venezuela, you could tell a summit meeting mattered to Hugo Chávez when government workers touched up the city’s rubble. Before dignitaries arrived, teams with buckets and brushes would paint bright yellow lines along the route from the airport into the capital, trying to compensate for the roads’ dilapidation with flashes of color.

For really big events — say, a visit by Russia’s president — workers would make an extra effort, by also painting the rocks and debris that filled potholes.

Seated in their armor-plated cars with tinted windows, the Russians might not have noticed the glistening golden nuggets, but they would surely have recognized the idea of the Potemkin village.

[…]

That same dramatic flair deeply divided Venezuelans as he postured on the world stage and talked of restoring equilibrium between the rich countries and the rest of the world. It now obscures his real legacy, which is far less dramatic than he would have hoped. In fact, it’s mundane. Mr. Chávez, in the final analysis, was an awful manager.

The legacy of his 14-year “socialist revolution” is apparent across Venezuela: the decay, dysfunction and blight that afflict the economy and every state institution.

Read the whole thing, which makes clear that just about everything Chavez touched turned to ashes. More from Michael Moynihan:

Chávez presided over a political epoch flush with money and lorded over a society riven by fear, deep political divisions, and ultraviolence. Consider the latest crime statistics from Observatorio Venezolano de la Violencia, which reckons that 2012 saw an astonishing 21,692 murders in the country—in a population of 29 million. Last year, I accompanied a Venezuelan journalist on his morning rounds at Caracas’s only morgue to count the previous night’s murders. As the number of dead ballooned, the Chávez regime simply stopped releasing murder statistics to the media.

All of this could have been predicted, and wasn’t particularly surprising from a president who believed that one must take the side of any enemy of the “empire.” That Zimbabwe’s dictator Robert Mugabe was a “freedom fighter,” or that Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko presided over “a model of a social state.” Saddam Hussein was a “brother,” Bashar al-Assad had the “same political vision” as the Bolivarian revolutionaries in Venezuela. He saw in the madness of Col. Gaddafi an often overlooked “brilliance” (“I ask God to protect the life of our brother Muammar Gaddafi”). The brutal terrorist Carlos the Jackal, who praised the 9/11 attacks from his French jail cell, was “a good friend.” He praised and supported FARC, the terrorist organization operating in neighboring Colombia. The list is endless.

His was a poisonous influence on the region, one rah-rahed by radical fools who desired to see a thumb jammed in America’s eye, while not caring a lick for its effect on ordinary Venezuelans. In his terrific new book (fortuitously timed to publish this week) Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, The Guardian’s Rory Carroll summed up the legacy of Chávez’s Venezuela as “a land of power cuts, broken escalators, shortages, queues, insecurity, bureaucracy, unreturned calls, unfilled holes, uncollected garbage.” One could add to that list grinding poverty, massive corruption, censorship, and intimidation.

This was Chávez’s reign and his legacy; extralegal, vindictive, and interested in the short-term gesture rather than the more difficult, long-term solution. From his revolutionary comrades in Cuba, he borrowed the slogan “patria, socialismo o muerte”—fatherland, socialism or death. The fatherland is a shambles, Bolivarian socialism has failed, and Comandante Chávez is dead. May the “revolution” die with him.

Quite so. It should come as no surprise that the Iranian regime is deeply saddened by Chavez’s death, having lost in Chavez an inspiration for how to annihilate a country’s prospects and oppress its people.

It’s worth noting as well that Chavez left behind a country with an unbelievably dysfunctional political system. Link:

In one neighborhood, Chávez supporters set fire to tents and mattresses used by university students who had chained themselves together in protest several days earlier to demand more information about Mr. Chávez’s condition.

“Are you happy now?” the Chávez supporters shouted as they ran through the streets with sticks. “Chávez is dead! You got what you wanted!”

Let it be noted that in Venezuela, asking for political transparency can leave you vulnerable to mob attack. More:

Shortly before announcing that Hugo Chávez died, Venezuela’s government resorted to one of the late president’s favorite ploys to try to unite his supporters: allege a conspiracy by the U.S. to destabilize the country.

Vice President Nicolás Maduro kicked out two U.S. military attachés for allegedly plotting against Venezuela and even suggested that Washington may have been behind Mr. Chávez’s cancer.

“Behind all of [the plots] are the enemies of the fatherland,” Mr. Maduro said on state television, flanked by the entire cabinet, state governors and Venezuela’s military commanders.

Mr. Maduro said that the U.S. Embassy’s Air Force attaché, Col. David Delmonaco, and another unnamed U.S. military official had approached members of the Venezuelan military and tried to recruit them into plans to “destabilize” the oil-rich South American nation. Mr. Maduro didn’t offer further details on the alleged plot.

Mr. Maduro also suggested that the country’s “historic enemies,” a phrase long used in Venezuela to refer to the U.S. and its allies, may have caused Mr. Chávez’s cancer. He said the country would likely discover in the future that Mr. Chávez “was attacked with this illness.”

This is the response of the government of a country which is going down the tubes?

And let’s remember what the last presidential election was like. Consider this story about Henrique Capriles, who challenged Chavez last year, and who is likely to challenge his successor, Maduro, in upcoming elections. Look at what he had to put up with:

Last year, government supporters threw racist and homophobic taunts at Capriles, who has Jewish roots and lost great-grandparents in the Treblinka concentration camp in German-occupied Poland during World War Two.

One can be certain that these attacks were approved by Chavez, or by people close to him.

This blog post has gone on for a while, so I will close it by recommending this piece by Zack Beauchamp, who is on the other side of me politically, but who is a worthy and interesting interlocutor on Twitter. He urges Democrats not to think fondly of Chavez—and isn’t it sad that some Democrats needed urging? Finally, consider this from the late and missed Christopher Hitchens regarding a 2008 trip to Venezuela:

Recent accounts of Hugo Chávez’s politicized necrophilia may seem almost too lurid to believe, but I can testify from personal experience that they may well be an understatement. In the early hours of July 16—just at the midnight hour, to be precise—Venezuela’s capo officiated at a grisly ceremony. This involved the exhumation of the mortal remains of Simón Bolívar, leader of Latin America’s rebellion against Spain, who died in 1830. According to a vividly written article by Thor Halvorssen in the July 25 Washington Post, the skeleton was picked apart—even as Chávez tweeted the proceedings for his audience—and some teeth and bone fragments were taken away for testing. The residual pieces were placed in a coffin stamped with the Chávez government’s seal. In one of the rather free-associating speeches for which he has become celebrated, Chávez appealed to Jesus Christ to restage the raising of Lazarus and reanimate Bolívar’s constituent parts. He went on:

“I had some doubts, but after seeing his remains, my heart said, ‘Yes, it is me.’ Father, is that you, or who are you? The answer: ‘It is me, but I awaken every hundred years when the people awaken.’ “

As if “channeling” this none-too-subtle identification of Chávez with the national hero, Venezuelan television was compelled to run images of Bolívar, followed by footage of the remains, and then pictures of the boss. The national anthem provided the soundtrack. Not since North Korean media declared Kim Jong-il to be the reincarnation of Kim Il Sung has there been such a blatant attempt to create a necrocracy, or perhaps mausolocracy, in which a living claimant assumes the fleshly mantle of the departed.

If only Hugo Chavez were as obsessed with venerating the living as he was with glorifying the dead, Venezuelans may have done better under his leadership.

1. Why is anyone surprised by Dennis Rodman’s trip to North Korea, and its revelation that he may be more than slightly crazy? We in Chicago have known that he is crazy for quite a while, even though, admittedly, we are grateful that the employment of his craziness helped the Chicago Bulls win three of their six championships.

2. Why does anyone care that Dennis Rodman soft-pedals (to say the least) the appalling and despicable human rights abuses in North Korea? Was anyone under the impression that Rodman is a younger version of Henry Kissinger, and therefore, his opinion on foreign policy issues somehow matters?