I agree that the Western press' coverage of Venezuela has often been annoying fawning - but other Western sources come across as strangely vituperative. He's neither running a paradise nor a hell, but I definitely side with the people who think that Chavez-style government is not something we'd want here.

But as for the article you linked, this literally made me laugh out loud:

It's been months since I have had an oatmeal breakfast or a nice cup of espresso with a drop of milk

Oh my god what a privileged life this guy leads - I'm sure the hearts of starving children worldwide are breaking at the mention of his espresso drought. That he expects me to sympathize with this kind of privation obscures the fact that - and I otherwise agree - government control of resources that takes milk from the grocery shelves isn't "humanist policy", it's repression. So for much of this article, I'd agree with the point, just not the rhetoric per se.

But in some respects this guy's article is representative of what I called the "strangely vituperative" writing about Chavez that comes from the other side. I groaned when I read this:

As isolated as it was, the whole episode [of looting in Sabaneta] was reminiscent of the bloody riots that erupted in Caracas in 1989 with a death toll of some 700 people.

Say that again? An isolated and bloodless example of looting in a small town is reminiscent of a what? How about, simply, that looting at a grocery store is a key example of how the centralization of resources is a failure, without trying to turn it into Bloody Evil Carnage Armageddon!

I have no knowledge of nuts and bolts of Venezuelan marketplace, but in the countries I've been to that did have price controls the way it worked was that anything that was in short supply was being bought out and sold at the flea/produce market at a premium. If the government implemented policy of controlling flea/produce markets the trade in these items moved completely underground into the "black market".

A lot of people were supplementing their incomes by queuenig for hours to purchase things in quantities they didn't need to resell or barter them for other items that were in short supply.

Chavez obviously did not familiarize himself with even a basic text on the history of socialist economy in the Soviet Bloc. But then again he didn't just appear out of nowhere in a perfectly working country where everybody was happy, well fed and well paid. I also wonder how many people in a typical 3rd world country could even afford things like espresso or milk at real prices or have a refrigerator to store the milk once they buy it or even electric service to run it for that matter.

Disgruntled intellectuals, be they on the left, right or in the middle can, for all I care, go and Cheney themselves. Common people don't care about most of the things they'd send others to die for. As long as Chavez helps them put food on their families' tables they'd have his back. His next step will probably be setting up some target for public outrage - the "them" - speculators who are responsible for shortages, CIA or Chinese or who knows what...