Chávez defeats RCTV

Venezuelan autocrat Hugo Chávez made good on his threat to shut down his nation's oldest television network on Sunday night, replacing RCTV with a government operated mouthpiece station. Thousands of Venezuelans took to the street, and predictably, they were dispersed with tear gas, plastic bullets and water cannons. Eroding civil liberties are, apparently, much more noticeable when Chávez's yammering mug replaces your favorite telenovela.

At any rate, it didn't take long for Chávez to announce his intentions to target the remaining television outlets he views as hostile to his "Bolivarian revolution", accusing the Globovision network of airing a veiled assassination threat. Globovision was, perhaps predictably, attacked by Chavista thugs as "retaliation" for assaulting the dignity of the President. The shutdown of RCTV sends a message to Venezuela's remaining independent press that unless they start toeing the Chavista line, they're next in line to be shut down.

Western leftists, predictably, ignore the fact that Chávez is systematically eliminating his potential political threats because (as Quico from the Caracas Chronicles put it), Chávez is stroking their ideological erogenous zones. They're creaming their jeans over the decision, calling RCTV a complicit partner in the anti-Chávez coup attempt in 2002. Perhaps they'd forgotten (or rather, ignored) that Chávez himself attempted a coup d'etat in 1992? They're squirming, but when push comes to shove, they can't ignore the fact that Chávez has become a dictator who rules by decree, squashes the free press, and is poised to turn Venezuela into nothing more than a squalid OPEC aligned Cuba. On the other hand, they've never had anything bad to say about any dictatorship that offers free health care, so I suppose they've got that going for them.

UPDATE: Publius Pundit has pictures galore of all hell breaking loose in Caracas.

UPDATE II: Now CNN has incurred the wrath of the caudillo!