Woody Allen, call your office.
In a scene straight out of Woody Allen's Bananas, Nicolás Maduro has decided that Christmas now will be celebrated on Oct. 1 in Venezuela, instead Dec. 25.
According to El País in English, a major news outlet from Spain:
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro announced Monday that this year’s Christmas holidays will begin in October. Hours after the Attorney General’s Office ordered the arrest of opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia on terrorism-related charges and in the middle of a profound political crisis, the Chavista leader took advantage of his television program to announce a change in the festive calendar. “It is September and it already smells like Christmas. And that is why this year, in homage to you, in gratitude to you, I am going to decree the advancement of Christmas to October 1,” Maduro said.
The Venezuelan president addressed his supporters while recalling the massive blackout last Friday, which affected around 80% of the country. Authorities attributed the failure of the power grid to sabotage by his adversaries, orchestrated from abroad. “The criminal electrical attack stopped the economy. People continued working, laboring, and with the support of the working class, in perfect civic-military-police union, we guaranteed absolute peace and the recovery, in record time, from one of the deadliest blows ever attempted against the electrical generation system,” he said.
Juan Forero at the Wall Street Journal, a longtime Latin America correspondent, had the best observation:
It could compare to the scene in the Woody Allen movie where the dictator ordered the locals to wear their underwear outside their pants among other idiocies.
It also could be compared to any of the lunacies in the Borat movie, 'The Dictator.'
Because crazy and irrational as it seems, it's obviously a distraction. And it's obviously how dictators work.
Maduro believes he can distract Venezuelans with Christmas, as if they had any money to spend on it anyway, to get their minds off the monstrous electoral fraud he pulled off in July where it's been verified that some 70% to 80% of the voters voted for his opposition, Edmundo Gonzalez.
Borat's movies liked to juxtapose the nutty commands of dictators over trivial things, with the underlying viciousness of the dictatorship itself, killing its opponents at the drop of a hat.
That's what we really see here in this Christmas pen-and-phone lunacy -- a crazy distraction to divert attention from the fact that Maduro has just ordered the arrest of the opponent he stole the election from on invented and ridiculous charges.
According to the Washington Post:
A Venezuelan judge has ordered the arrest of opposition candidate Edmundo González, who the United States and other countries say clearly beat the country’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, in the July 28 presidential election.
The country’s attorney general filed an arrest warrant Monday against González, a 75-year-old former diplomat, as part of an investigation into the opposition’s publication of vote tally sheets showing their candidate won more than twice as many votes as Maduro. The opposition published the receipts from more than 23,000 voting machines days after Venezuela’s electoral council claimed a victory by Maduro. Several independent reviews of the data, including by The Washington Post, suggest Maduro likely lost the election by a landslide.
He's also imprisoning protestors, including at least hundreds of children, into his dungeons without trial.
He's launched raids on supermarkets and demanded everyone's cell phones, in order to inspect for any selfies of attending protests.
I've seen subsequent reports confirming this.
And by the way, the supermarket store shelves are bare.
This, despite (actually because) of government measures to punish "price-gouging," along with rationing.
He's gotten meaner, more vicious, and more repressive than ever now that he's stolen his election in front of everyone's faces.
That's the ugly reality of a clown dictator, mincing forward and saying Christmas will be celebrated in October.
It's not about the date. It's about power. The thug is determined to exercise his, and it spins toward ever more irrational demands.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.