Will beauty queen's murder help bring down Venezuela's soc government? [Sound familiar?]

".....Now, outrage over the murders is prompting many Venezuelans to confront the contradictions of Venezuela-style socialism. One of the biggest ironies: violent crime has exploded since President Hugo Chávez, a firebrand leftist, took office 15 years ago. This has happened, moreover, as capitalism has increasingly been dismantled -- supposedly replaced by more economic equality and "social justice" in the oil-rich yet impoverished South American nation......

.......Maduro, Chávez's hand-picked successor, is grappling with food shortages, falling oil prices, and annual inflation topping 50%. He rules a politically polarized country where just over 50 percent of voters support his leftist agenda.....

....With Spear and Berry's murders, Venezuela's skyrocketing murder rate suddenly has human faces -- and President Maduro is on the defensive. He'd been focusing on deepening "21st Century socialism." This included an "economic offensive" against the commercial class: from owners of supermarkets to electronics stores to car dealerships -- all were being ordered to offer government-set "fair prices." And before November's make-or-break municipal elections, he'd won votes by taking bread-and-circuses populism to new heights, tacitly giving Christmas shoppers, as some observers saw it, a green light to loot electronics stores. "We're doing this for the good of the nation," he said. "Let nothing remain in stock!" A number of retailers were jailed -- accused of speculating, hoarding, and unfair lending.......

..... Official Venezuelan crime statistics are non-existent: the government stopped providing them ten years ago. But sociologist Roberto Briceño León, president of the Venezuelan Observatory on Violence, a watchdog group, estimates that yearly homicides have increased 427% since Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998, after campaigning on a platform to seek a "third way" between socialism and capitalism, and to reverse rampant corruption and declining living standards.....

2000 - David Horowitz

".......The focus of Hillary Clinton’s ambition is not her country. But it is not merely herself either. It is also a place that does not exist. It is the vision of a world that can only be realize when the Chosen accumulate enough power to destroy this one.

That is why Hillary and Sid Blumenthal, her fawning New Left Machiavelli, call their own political philosophy the politics of “The Third Way.” This distinguishes their politics from the “triangulation” strategy that Dick Morris used to resurrect Bill Clinton’s presidency. Morris guided Clinton, in appropriating specific Republican policies towards a balanced budget and welfare reform as a means of securing his re-election. Hillary Clinton was on board for these policies, and in that sense is a triangulator herself. But “triangulation” is too obviously tactical and too crass morally to define a serious political philosophy. Above all, it fails to project the sense of promise that intoxicates the imaginations of political progressives. That is why Hillary and Sid call their politics “The Third Way.”

“The Third Way” is a term familiar from the lexicon of the left with a long and dishonorable pedigree. It is the most ornate panel in the tapestry of deception I described in the beginning of this essay. In the 1930s, Nazis used “The Third Way” to characterize their own brand of National Socialism as equidistant between the “internationalist” socialism of the Soviet Union and the capitalism of the West. Trotskyists used “The Third Way” as a term to distinguish their own Marxism from Stalinism and capitalism. In the 1960s, New Leftists used “The Third Way to define their politics as an independent socialism between the Soviet gulag and the democracies of the West.

But as the history of Nazism, Trotskyism and the New Left have shown, there is no “third way.” There is the capitalist, democratic way based on private property and individual rights – a way that leads to liberty and universal opportunity. And there is the socialist way of group identities, group rights, a relentless expansion of the political state, restricted liberty and diminished opportunity. “The Third Way” is not a path to the future. It is just the suspension between these two destinations – a holding pattern while the stigma of leftist disasters recedes. It is a bad faith attempt on the part of people who are incapable of giving up their socialist schemes to escape the taint of their discredited past.

Is there a practical difference in the modus operandi of Clinton narcissism and Clinton messianism? I think there is, and it is the difference between “triangulation” – a cynical compromise to hang onto power until the next election cycle, and “The Third Way” – a cynical deception to ensure the permanence of Them. It is the difference between the politics of getting what you can, and the politics of acquiring power to change the world.".......

You cannot read the entire article about how (why) Venezuela has declined, without thinking about what is happening here in the United States under Obama and the Democratic Party.

In both places, the underclass trades support for continued benefits, and the Left has continually increased the size of the underclass until it is dominant.

The ugly part comes when the free stuff runs out.

At that point, you have an underclass which cannot be supported by the producers any more, and who will fight to continue to be supported. At that point, the only way out for the productive class is the extermination of the underclass.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/16/the-question-to-haunt-the-west/

“.....The Senate Intelligence Committee’s long-anticipated and much-feared report on its investigation into what happened at the American legation in Benghazi on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, was devastating in its particulars. The senators cite chapter and verse of the kind of incompetence and irresponsibility that we once thought was all you could expect in banana republics and backwaters of the undeveloped world.

But it was more than that: The report, and the official response to it, revealed the truly terrifying. What kind of idiot country are we becoming in this second decade of the 21st century? An official spokesman for the State Department, which imagines it’s the keeper of the nation’s conscience, suggested that when the going gets tough, the tough run home. Maybe the world is just too dangerous for Americans to get out and about. “Hard decisions must be made when it comes to whether the United States should operate in dangerous overseas locations.” Quote, unquote.

There is no understanding of history in the nooks and crannies of this administration, that the United States has never retreated from “operating in dangerous overseas locations,” and the day it does the nation is finished. Not so long ago everyone understood that, and gloried in the determination that such a day would never come. Stonewall Jackson warned soldiers “never take counsel with your fears.” It was an admonition for one and all......”

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