The news tonight is about Chavez getting hip surgery for an abscess. Hip survgery for an abscess? And he was in a tour through Brazil, Ecuador and Cuba were conveniently the abscess was diagnosed so he could get emergency surgery while there?
I do not buy it. I think that he had something else, and that he planned all along to have surgery into his hip, knee, whatever under the excuse of hip abscess (appendectomy being one of the mildest forms). What this incident reveals is that Chavez does not trust whatsoever Venezuelan medicine and doctors. That is, he cannot find chavista specialists good enough to trust the presidential health to their hands. Goes to tell you..... Soon 13 years in office and he probably has dental work in Cuba too.....
And this reminded me something I read in the gossip column of Bocaranda to whom I usually give limited confidence, and refuse to follow in twitter as he will tweet all day long... In the Thursday edition he claimed that Chavez in confidence would have said the following:
I am sure that if they beat me, something that I doubt very much as the polls I have tell me otherwise, and in the unlikely case that I may have to surrender power, I am sure that within 6 months, at most one year, I woudl be brought back in triumph, carried on shoulders [of "el pueblo"?] becasue the mess, the ungovernableness [word?] and the lack of military support for the chosen one will turn the country into chaos.I will pass of course on the chaos idea since the country is ALREADY in chaos; as well as on the value of this assessment. What strikes me is the notion of Chavez that without military support one cannot rule a country. Political parties and real institutions count for nothing in his world. I cannot think of anything better to illustrate that Chavez is not, never was a democrat, that democracy for him was at best a tool to reach power and impose his vision of things as he kills democracy.
Certainly such a confidence, if indeed these words are true, explains a lot. For example, as a military felon without any noteworthy achievement in his past, the only way he had to make sure the army would be faithful to him was to corrupt it, to let them dip into any lucrative business of the state, and even to allow the Venezuelan army to become a major operator in the narco state that Chavez has been building.
Of course, Bocaranda misses the whole point, as enamored as he is of hismelf and his ability to ferret out gossip.
Indeed it is a sad world where Chavez lives that pushes him to act and speak as he does. But you know, he has no none else but himself to blame.
There is a hierarchy of needs , set by rank. Thugo used Cuban doctors for his hip abcess. Fidel uses Spanish doctors for his intestinal issues.
ReplyDeleteBoth strong nationalists, ti woudl appear.
or both scared shitless (true for fidel) that their own doctors will kill them....
ReplyDeleteI c wut u did thar Daniel.
ReplyDelete:)
from El Universal newspaper:
ReplyDelete"... está [en Cuba] en compañía de sus familiares, su equipo médico y parte del gabinete Ejecutivo... en algunos días estará en condiciones de regresar de manera segura al país"
"... he is [in Cuba] with relatives, his medial team and part of his cabinet... in a few days he will be in a position to return safely [to Venezuela]".
Is Chavez trying to regain control of Venezuela by running it from Cuba? This must be his first show of initiative in 12 years.
Antonio
Chavez has all but hamstrung the doctors at the Clinica Metroplitana who are not Chavistas and many of these doctors are the best ones over there.He must also know that the cowardly ones pretending to be Chavista in order to keep their 'good jobs' might secretly treat him unenthusiastically.I mean all of this is beyond his control( which terrifies him).
ReplyDeleteHow could he then go in and ask precisely for those openly antiChavez? That would set a bad precedent for the rest( God forbid he turn the Hospitals into meritocracies).
Chavez created a paranoid situation in all working environments , and now has to pay the price.It is a vicious circle with paranoia.Paranoia creates fear and distrust, which creates paranoia which creates fear and distrust which creates paranoia.
Thus the web of fear in which he is caught.
My theory: syphilis. Pass it on.
ReplyDeleteJeffry, you may well be right since he is a self-confessed whorehouse rat in his younger days in the military. And in that kind of business in the backwaters of this beautiful country, health is a prime concern. Maybe a mission should be created to treat military vd.
ReplyDeleteThe main problem this world will eventually really have to deal with is not oil or the financial system or islamic radicalism, but FOOD. GM grains will postpone the inevitable (btw: keep eating your organically grown sh..! - pun intended - note what is happening in Europe / Germany!)
ReplyDeleteSeems to me that the best positioned country for this crisis is the US. We are autarchic, we have the leadership in GM technology and the fact that we are militarily the strongest in the world, as harsh as it sounds, will come pretty handy. There will likely be food wars and as history has taught us over and over (sorry for the clichéd truism) that when push comes to shove, the strongest will survive.
And Kepler, why do you constantly throw out these completely false statements about the US, in this case the demographics of the military? You seem to be brainwashed by e.g. CNN or the NYT? Have you still not learned that they lie? Or are you making up this stuff yourself, because in typical leftist fashion, that's how you'd like it to be? Sorry, when it comes to the US, you are clueless most of the time.
Thanks Boludo for publishing the correct statistics.
Mike
Anon Mike,
ReplyDeleteFirstly, I think you must have posted in the wrong place, since you seem to be referring to points and comments not in this comment thread.
Nevertheless, I wanted to respond to your predictions of an eminent world-wide food crisis and wars over same. Please Google "Thomas Malthus". He made the same predictions you are making about a hundred years ago. He was wrong then, and you are wrong now... and for the same reasons.