This shouldn’t surprise us, Hollywood is a fantasy factory – so it seems that the foreign policy experience of these folks reflects more their career than it does any true understanding of the reality of the governments they so enthusiastically defend. Recently, Hollywood liberals have found a new group of dictators to support. They now heedlessly defend the nouveau authoritarians of South America, like Hugo Chavez, Rafael Correa, and Evo Morales.

In the most recent episode, Sean Penn wrote an op-ed in Huffington Post condemning the State Department for economic sactions against Venezuela’s oil company, PDVSA. Decrying the sanctions’ unfairness, Pennsays that ‘Venezuelans live in abject poverty’. On that we agree: the plight of the poor in Venezuela is stunning. Yet Mr. Penn it seems has not stopped to think of why so many Venezuelans are so poor in such a rich country. Under Chavez’s twelve-year rule alone, Venezuela has earned close to 1 trillion dollars in oil wealth. Yet the people remain desperately poor. Lets put this in perspective, this one thousand billion dollars translates to over $130,000 per average Venezuelan family. What did Chavez do with it? It is hard to believe that after 12 years of this kind of hard income Chavez – who Penn defends so wholeheartedly – has been unable to reduce poverty. This seems to be more a reason to call for new leadership than to defend the current one. If this were the case in the United States, of a President who after holding the equivalent of three terms, as Chavez has – Mr. Penn himself would probably be calling for a change in the White House – and rightly so.

This further illustrates the double standard of armchair experts and coddlers of corrupt despots. They seem willing to accept dictatorships of the left if those regimes justify their authoritarianism in the name of “equality” or “social justice.” Every dictatorship in history has had to justify its abuses, even the most brutal – Mussolini made the trains run on time, Stalin brought modern factories and electricity to rural Russia and Hitler eliminated inflation and unemployment and built the Autobahns. Oh, yes, they also perhaps went a bit far in how they “persuaded” their populations that the regime meant well.

Hollywood liberals praise the perception of Third World “socialist” programs without ever having to experience the reality. It is easy to praise Chavez’s inadequate housing programs from the comfort of a Malibu mansion, or Castro’s medical system while being attended by the best doctors in California when the reality is that an ordinary Cuban being operated in a Cuban hospital for ordinary citizens has to take his or her own bedsheets, sutures, and even aspirin to the hospital. But those are not the Cuban hospitals that appear in Hollywood’s films, like Michael Moore’s “Sicko”. The hospitals in Hollywood’s make-believe world are reserved for tourists and others who pay in foreign currency (even the hated American Dollar). Those facilities are clean, well-stocked and modern. They also do not allow Cubans, except high-ranking members of the Cuban Communist Party, Government or Armed Forces.

That is bad enough, but when it comes to freedom, Hollywood types are noticeably quiet. They live in the world’s epicenter of free speech, enjoying immense power and privilege provided them by capitalism – and use that position to decry the very system which made them wealthy. Yet they say nothing when TV stations are shut down or taken over (for example, 3 in Venezuela, 3 in Ecuador, 2 in Nicaragua) or when excellent movies made by skilled filmmakers are denounced as “imperial plots” (as in the case of Secuestro Express in Venezuela – a movie that would have won at Cannes several years ago but was vetoed by the Chavez government for allegedly showing a “negative vision” of Venezuela). Instead of standing with their colleagues – those in the entertainment industry – they say nothing as dictators control free expression and as ordinary citizens (should we call them “audiences?”) are denied the right to watch, read or listen to what they want.

Naturally, Hollywood (and Mr. Penn) have the right to say what they will – something that is not the case in the countries they so freely defend. But it is way past due that those who defend the liberties that Mr. Pennenjoys point out the inconsistencies in their logic.

Finally, with regards to the sanctions on PDVSA, Chavez willingly brought these problems on himself. The sanctions were imposed by the US on a half-dozen countries and companies, including PDVSA, that have financial and energy ties with Iran, ties that in the opinion of the US Congress and Administration help finance Iran’s terrorist activities around the world.

If Mr. Penn has such an excellent relationship with Hugo Chavez, and if Chavez is equivalent to “the US President” as Penn states, he could perhaps use his access to convince the Venezuelan dictator to cease dealing with the anti-semitic and repressive government of Iran, for the good of the Venezuelan people who Mr. Penn seems to care about so much. Should he do so, however, I imagine Mr. Penn would find himself unwelcome in Hugo Chavez’s workers’ paradise.

Stone was the guest of pro-Hugo Chavez, anti-tea party professor, Miguel Tinker Salas, according to the student newspaper. When answering a question about Chavez’s support for the Iranian dictatorship and Hezbollah, Stone curiously leaned over and whispered with Tinker Salas. I guess he was looking for the party line.

Even the left-wing newspapers think Stone’s film is propaganda. “South of the Border” was savaged in the New York Times. The Washington Post said Stone lobbed softball questions to Chavez. NPR said Stone treated Latin American leaders with “kid gloves.”

Stone, who says that he “liked what we saw” in Latin America, never met with any dissidents while there.

Here’s the transcript of an exchange with Stone and a Pomona college student. You can watch the exchange here…

Student: Chavez considers the dictatorship of Iran great for its people and fully supports the government. He also considers Hezbollah to be heroic and legitimate. Do you agree? And Danny Glover got money from the government of Venezuela; did you? And who financed this film?

[Leans over, and whispers to pro-Chavez professor Miguel Tinker Salas]

Stone: We did not get any money from the government of Venezuela for the film. We made this movie outside that domain, and we were critical, if need be, but we liked what we saw. As you can see from the movie, we were trying to balance what we see as an extremely negative picture, so we were not going to go into a ‘he-said-you-said’ kind of documentary because I think it would have taken far longer and we would not have been able to cover the general movement of change in South America. This is truly a first look, a 101 type course, on South America. On the issue of the Middle East, on Iran, I heard, and on Hezbollah, I’m not going to get into that argument, but I will say Chavez trades with us in oil and Iran is a standing member of OPEC and has been for quite a few years and all, not just Chavez, but Saudi Arabia, all the members of OPEC, Russia, and have quite a lot of [business dealings] to Iran, so does the United States, too, by the way.

A huge amount of (business  dealings) as we know. Something like 250 firms are doing business with Iran, so what you read in the media is, again, you know it’s very distorted about Iran. There are some many problems, but a lot of that is bullshit. So re-examine your sources on Iran and on Hezbollah too because Hezbollah keeps getting re-elected in a very strange sort of balance in the Middle East, so I, I just, you know, let’s get off the American view of the Middle East. Just get away from it.

Student: Okay, thank you.

For those unfamiliar with the 2007 Foreign Film Oscar winner “The Lives of Others,” it is a German thriller about the Stasi in 1984 East Germany, the then-Communist German Democratic Republic. The Stasi, GDR’s Ministry of State Security, enforced Party policy and loyalty of speech and action. The goal of the Stasi was to know everything, and they did so through an extensive network of agents and informants that touched the lives of everyone in the GDR. 

In “The Lives of Others,” a strong, mournful Soviet-influenced string soundtrack accompanies an equally Soviet-influenced plot. East Germany’s lone socialist playwright with both talent and loyalty, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), becomes the target of heavy surveillance when a high-up GDR official falls for his actress girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck) and wants him removed. Loyal socialist Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) oversees the surveillance operation to find fault with the socialist artist. But as the hypocrisy of his GDR comrades drives him from faith in the Party, and the faultlessness of his playwright subject leaves him sympathetic, Wiesler begins to question his allegiances, and as Dreyman grows subversive, Wiesler is forced to make a choice – between a Party of falsehood and a man of merit. 

First-time director (and story screenwriter) Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck drained the color from the film, save those moments of happiness between Georg and his girlfriend Christa-Maria. Dull grays and pale blues emphasize the drab atmosphere that pervades hopeless East Germany. 

Choosing a foreign film as the “best” seems like something that Hollywood establishment would do rather than a magazine like NRO, but they aren’t the only conservatives to call it a masterpiece: William F. Buckley, Jr. was a big fan. 

While the film is not based on a historical event, the film accurately portrays Stasi-inflicted fear and influence. Some of the actors in the film were a part of the cultural movement in East Germany in the 1980s, and it shows through powerful performances. Lead actor Mühe, when asked how he prepared for his role as a Stasi officer, said simply: “I remembered.” 

The film is important for more than artistic reasons however. According to Uwe Spiekermann, a deputy director of the German Historical Institute, “Lives of Others” was the first film from East Germany to portray the Stasi in a serious light, instead of mocking them in comic farce. 

John O. Koehler wrote in “Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police” that the Stasi employed “102,000 full-time officers and noncommissioned personnel on its rolls, including 11,000 members of the ministry’s own special guards regiment. Between 1950 and 1989, a total of 274,000 persons served in the Stasi.” 

Including informants, the Stasi network reached into the lives of every East German. 

“The Stasi was much, much worse than the Gestapo, if you consider only the oppression of its own people,” Koehler quotes Simon Wiesenthal of Vienna, Austria, a Nazi hunter. “The Gestapo had 40,000 officials watching a country of 80 million, while the Stasi employed 102,000 to control only 17 million.” 

With its network of informants, the Stasi had a spy over every 66 citizens, and an informer for every 6.5 citizens. “It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests,” Koehler said. He concludes that the communist oppression by the Stasi was, while not as heinous as the attempted extermination of the Jews, as brutal in its oppression as the Nazis. This number is shocking, yet even more shocking is the habit of cultural elites in the United States to hail dictators like Hugo Chavez as democratic leaders, while their artistic kin from across the globe were jailed for speaking the truth about such people. Among punishable crimes in the GDR was engaging in “propaganda hostile to the state,” something artists in the United States should be ashamed to have supported when they defended communism in the past, and when they do so now. 

There’s my sermon. I’ll leave you with Buckley’s final words on the film: 

“I looked at the record and was gratified to find, in the critics’ files, encomiums absolutely unconfined in their admiration of this movie, which in fact won the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film. And I was unsurprised to find that what seems the whole of East Germany is riven by its impact. Since so many East Germans were complicit in the postwar reign of the German Democratic Republic, there is a corporate national shame at the betrayal of life, as so brazenly done by so many millions, but whose country, at least, has given the world this holy vessel of expiation.”

Obviously some hopefuls for similar success, George Soros, Barack Obama – not to mention the likes of Hugo Chavez – are riding on the back of what basically amounts to world ignorance about the entire nightmare of the Communist Revolutions worldwide.

As a perfect revelation of Hollywood’s utter narcosis, the Warren Beatty film, REDS, is not the indictment of Communism which some might try to paint it as, but the very effective portrait of Communism’s harmlessness.

A few American “idealistic” Leftists were, well, merely disappointed with the Russian Revolution.

That’s it.

Nothing more dangerous than broken dreams.

David Lean’s Dr. Zhivago?

That is just the beginning of the truth within Soviet and now neo-Soviet Russia.

Try this for openers.

We have an endless series of cinematic revelations about Nazi Germany.

Where are the classics about the unrelentingly homicidal enterprises of Marxism worldwide?

With a shamelessly Marxist President in the White House, isn’t it about time for the so-called Republican Moneyed Class to cough up for films revealing the Nazi-like realities of the Stalin/Mao/Kim Jong Il dictatorships?

Generally speaking the seminally important distinctions between Good and Evil have been lost in Hollywood and The Left defines that as sublime Progress.

Why was Hollywood so eager to erase or obfuscate ancient moral certitudes?

Because, like the proverbial “Mountain,” The Golden Rule, for instance, is there not to be climbed but to be questioned and challenged.

For the last half century in Hollywood, to climb that mountain of Truth is to increasingly destroy it, shrink it, gnaw at it, dissolve it or, in frequent cases, portray the Mountain of Truth as evil.

How do we make a Communist apologist like Oliver Stone and his POV the heroic vision and America the villain?

We make a film like Platoon.

In it the audience must soon realize that it is better to be almost anything in the world of Platoon except an American combatant in Vietnam.

Why?

We now know, because of Oliver Stone’s blatant admiration for the Communist Hugo Chavez, that, in the eyes of Oliver Stone, a Communist Vietnam is automatically the hero when confronted with the villainously Capitalist and Free Market America.

Stone makes no case as to why a Communist dictatorship is better.

He doesn’t have to.

America had Vietnam outgunned and yet lost because, according to an Oliver Stone assessment, America is an evil bully and Communism is The Indomitable Little Guy.

Must the profoundly exceptional but basically British film, The Killing Fields, and its revelations about one of the smaller but equally hellish, Communist dictatorships, be the sole glimpse into the bottomless snake pit of Communist tyranny?

Why aren’t American Conservatives backing more than Fox News?

What is missing?

The artists to create the films?

Why haven’t the works of Solschenizyn been more fully mined by American screenwriters?

Real Killing Fields

The recent and tenaciously revealing biography of Mao Zedong by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday is just waiting for the right young, American genius to take us into that excruciating journey to hell that Mao takes all of China into.

The Death of a Dissident is a book that merely opens the door to a contemporary life and death that Wikipedia finds fascinating enough to give one of its longest and most thorough examinations to.

Here is one of the most powerfully resonant dramas of the inevitable and, I’m sure, final clash between a Free World and Communism.

Or, as tyranny’s most recent euphemism is known, The Progressive New World Order.

The book, Death of a Dissident, was optioned for a movie awhile ago but, so far, we hear nothing about it.

In the 1930’s and ‘40’s, the Soviets and their American sympathizers entered the performing arts of the United States under the orders and guidance of Joseph Stalin.

Enterprises like the Group Theater, its graduates and admirers, co-opted most of “artistic seriousness”, almost all of Hollywood film-making and, as a sickly residue, infected the Mainstream Media.

The television ratings alone reveal an American hunger for traditional American values.

Fox News is trouncing the other networks!

The Obama News Network’s response?

But where is our conservative Oliver Stone, Stephen Spielberg or James Cameron?

Nowhere to be found.

An endless horizon of material sits before such an artist.

That quintessentially American film-maker is out there.

We just have to find him and help him … or her!

Oh, I know it’s long, but please try to view The Soviet Story in its entirety.

If not for yourself, then for the sake of your children. If something is not done soon about actually educating American youth, revealing to them the horrors of Communism and the Communist threat inside Washington, D. C. … well … Hollywood Left will easily seduce them.

New York Left had me on their leash for many years.

Thank God for my hard time in a Catholic high school!! Those years in a priest’s prison showed me the only possible road to heaven on earth.

I’m sorry Oliver, but as a *wink-wink* pro-Hugo Chavez filmmaker you can’t ask the Venezuelan strongman to let you film him pedaling around on a little girl’s bicycle and then not edit out the part where he falls off without giving away that subversive right-wing desire of yours to make a world-wide joke of a tyrant clown who hates your beloved America and cozies up to the terrorists who would do her harm. So don’t blame me. You blew your own cover.

And for those who doubt this theory, let me present to you the facts. Below are highlights from Stone’s illustrious career. Take a good look at what this patriot’s accomplished and then tell me he’s not a double agent for God and apple pie:

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SCARFACE (1983): Stone wrote the screenplay about the consequences of a feckless president (Carter) being duped by a dictator (Castro) into letting a bunch of criminals into the country. If there’s a stronger and more effective piece of anti-open border propaganda, I have yet to see it. Stone was ahead of this curve by a full quarter of a century.

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WALL STREET (1987): Pure genius. Hands down the greatest recruitment tool for Wall Street ever produced, and done so with Leftist Hollywood’s money. Stone so romanticized the business of finance that Wall Street was flooded with young men wanting to get their greed-is-good on.

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BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY (1989): After winning the Oscar for “Platoon,” Stone could make any film he wanted and chose the most damning portrayal of dirty, filthy, narcissistic, anti-war hippies ever.  Tom Cruise portrays Ron Kovic, a heroic individual who fought for his country in Vietnam, but the director (who would win his second Oscar) turns him into one of the most unlikable screen protagonists of the last 25 years.

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THE DOORS (1991): Stone does it again, this time portraying the baby boomer’s precious sixties as a hedonistic nightmare of drug addiction, domestic violence, and open paganism. Jim Morrison’s legions of poorly dressed worshippers (and the surviving Doors) were furious at Stone’s deconstruction of their precious idol.

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JFK (1991): An absolutely brilliant film, maybe the best of the decade, and the finest piece of reverse-propaganda ever committed to celluloid. Stone wraps his cinematic ridicule of the Grassy Knollers into a wild fever dream of outlandishly stupid conspiracy theories knowing that the result would be a renewed interest in the JFK assassination in the era of computer technology and forensic science. And now, thanks to both those sciences, we no longer doubt Lee Harvey Oswald worked alone. Yes, we owe Oliver Stone a debt of gratitude for helping to heal the deepest national wound of the 20th Century.

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NIXON (1995): Only Nixon could go to China and only Stone could ask us to feel sorry for the crook.

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WORLD TRADE CENTER (2006): This is where Stone almost screwed up and let his true self show. Like every other rational American, the director made the mistake of thinking Hollywood would finally turn around and rally to their country’s side in the war against Islamic terrorism after the attacks of September 11th. Obviously, when Stone looked over his shoulder and found himself alone he realized he had made the same mistake we all did.

But ever the genius spy, he rallied quickly with…

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W. (2008): To save President Bush from further cinematic embarrassment, Stone wisely got ahead of the Hate-Filled Hollywood Hack Brigade to intentionally produce a money-losing Bush bio so embarrassingly awful it would poison the well and make it impossible for anyone to even consider making another. Mission accomplished.

And Stone’s 4th of July gift to America this year…?

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SOUTH OF THE BORDER (2010): Stone completely blows his cover as an obvious right-winger by simply going too far in acting the Useful Idiot. No one is this useful of an idiot.

For 78 minutes that feel like a bad “60 Minutes” segment that never ends; Stone’s on-camera, running around South America interviewing Leftist leaders of various countries who hate America. After making kissy-face with Hugo, the director then heads South to chew coca leaves with Bolivia’s Evo Morales, during — ironically (or not?) — a discussion about how the DEA is just another tool of American Imperialism. After the coca leaves take effect, the subtitles should’ve read AWKWARD when Stone asks Morales to step outside the Presidential Palace so the two of them can kick around a soccer ball. Obviously star-struck, Morales agrees and the result is like a deleted scene from Chaplin’s “Great Dictator.”

Michael Moore makes an appearance bawling out CNN’s Wolf — I lost on Jeopardy – Blitzer for waiting until 2007 to get angry with Dick Cheney; Stone gushes to Chavez, “I’ve never seen such energy, never,” and later asks (no joke) Argentina’s president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner how many pairs of shoes she owns. But the topper is how the two-time Oscar winner continually spits out the words “capitalism” and “privately-owned media” as though they’re both bad things.

The documentary is unforgivably dull and the America bashing repetitive. “Border” isn’t even well produced. Instead of coloring the subtitles yellow, they’re white and at times impossible to read. And Stone just tries too hard to convince us he’s a left-wing dupe. The soaring, over-the-top score that accompanies every speech Chavez gives about the people’s revolucion is right out of a Zucker brothers’ spoof.

So obvious are the lies here, that the New York Times – The New York Times – felt compelled to fact check. But even they missed some obvious ones. Are we really supposed to believe President Bush told one of these leaders that war is the answer to a bad national economy? Stone never questions that little anecdote. He just shakes his head knowingly before yukking it up with Uncle Fidel’s tyrant brother.

If anything, the premise of Stone’s agitprop is all about hair-splitting. The director’s indignant that the American media, especially Fox News, refers to Chavez as a dictator. My guess is that Chavez would prefer being called a dictator on Fox and Friends as opposed to being seen on big-screens throughout the world falling off his little sister’s bike.

But that’s Stone’s brilliant right-wing master plan, right? What else could it be? The only other answer is that he’s laughably incompetent….

Nah, he’s one of us.

Once upon a time the Washington Post was a reliable newspaper with ethical investigative reporters. That of course was before Woodward and Bernstein elevated the Fourth Estate denizens to deity wannabes who could bring down a president. Now the once vaunted daily allows amateurish, star-struck reporters to give entertainment celebrities a pass in lieu of professional journalistic coverage. 

I’ve written for three newspapers in the past twelve years and endured the critique of numerous editors who’d never let me get away with the one-sided article that Ann Hornaday wrote about Oliver Stone. She allowed Stone to make the following statement without challenging his resources: 

“I interviewed Chávez because I thought he’s an underdog and he’s getting the shaft,” Stone says simply. “Because he’s a democratically elected leader and he’s getting a bum rap. The elections in Venezuela have been monitored to death. They have electronic and paper ballots. It’s the cleanest system I’ve ever seen. And we’re condemning them? After how Bush got elected in 2000? It makes me angry, this double standard, this hypocrisy.” 

Thus Oliver Stone appears to be a committed member of the Bush Derangement Syndrome Club which still can’t get over the 2000 election which by the way has also has been monitored to death by Democrat counters and a reluctant media. Here’s more:

Stone does address the troubling issue of human rights abuses in Venezuela – but only to remind viewers that Colombia has an even worse record and that because it’s an ally in the war on drugs, it basically gets a free pass.

Incredibly, though she was interviewing Stone, Hornaday never challenges that absurdly illogical rationalization to lionize a notorious human rights’ abuser like Chavez. 

Had I the stomach, I mean, the opportunity to interview the director of one of the worst movies ever made — Natural Born Killers -- I would have asked Stone why he thinks that Hugo Chavez is an underdog when he is in fact a brutal man who has squashed any legitimate opposition to his regime. This is a known fact to everyone outside the nouveau Babylon called Hollywood. 

Hornady writes a telling line about Stone that should have generated a host of heavy duty questions. She wrote: 

“Stone doesn’t interview Venezuelan dissidents, or anyone who disagrees with Chávez’s policies, which have recently included a bid to become president for life and revoking the license of television stations critical of his regime.” 

She also describes Stone’s “infatuation with the populist leader. “ 

Instead of challenging Stone with any of this – instead of demanding facts and sources for such statements — the WAPO reporter allows Stone to plug his homage documentary, “South of the Border” or as she puts it,”his polemical, personal, deeply passionate love letter to left-leaning movements that have recently taken hold in the region. 

I don’t know how old Ms. Hornaday is but Oliver Stone is 64 and if I can remember when Fidel Castro came to power and how liberals fawned over his rebel campaign then he should also recall the deaths and devastation that the 1959 Cuban Revolution brought to that beautiful island. Power to the people of Cuba, my eye. 

Chavez and Castro are fellow Marxists bent on eradicating democracy “south of the border” and useful idiot fawners like Oliver Stone and Sean Penn should not be given a platform in the mainstream media to promote their odious ideology.  

Whom am I kidding! The mainstream media fair and balanced?  Que! un chiste!

INTERVIEWER: For that ailment [altitude sickness], you appear onscreen chewing coca leaves. Is that high much different than having caffeine?

STONE: No, it’s a mild, mild stimulus. You’re at 12,000 feet, so you’re nauseous and it’s really hard to breathe. This opens the cells, you get better oxygen and you feel more relaxed. I was nauseous, and then I ended up playing soccer, that was sort of the point. They’ve been doing it for centuries down there. It’s a normal thing to do. By the way, I brought coca leaves back. It’s illegal in this country to have a coca leaf, but put it in a cup of tea and it’s better for your health than coffee. But of course, there’s more money for us in coffee as well as tobacco, so we’d rather do that for stimulation.

As a narco-journalist and documentary filmmaker myself, I too have been given the opportunity to smuggle contraband in and out of the United States. I’ve even been offered large sums of money to do it and can’t think of a single reason as to what would motivate me to agree. Putting coca leaves in your tea is like putting Crystal Meth in your orange juice — not a real smart move.

I guess Stone will get a pass on that. But I would hope that if anyone ever publicly bragged about smuggling illegal substances into the United States for whatever reason, that they would at least earn a cursory investigation by ICE or the DEA.

And naturally the American media Stone accuses of being so horribly biased isn’t interested in this story, either.

The Hollywood director is about to release a documentary entitled “South of the Border” that stars the leaders of South American countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and the island of Cuba. Let me be clear, I have not seen this film and therefore this is not criticism aimed at the actual production. But in the aforementioned article Stone says he was given high level access to the likes of Chavez and Castro because he agreed to “tell the truth” from their perspective.

Hey, Ollie—you found out they were human beings. Congratulations.

In my work, I’ve interviewed some of the most wanted drug lords in the Western Hemisphere and had unprecedented access to a couple of them. I’ve been to their homes, met their families and attended their children’s weddings and baptisms. I’ve seen the “human” side of a drug lord and I can tell you without hesitation that doesn’t make these men “misunderstood good guys.”

They are still pedaling death and destruction to my countrymen as well as their own and hardly a day goes by that they don’t send someone to their grave. Yes, they are husbands, sons and brothers, but that’s only one aspect of their persona—they’re also ruthless, cold-blooded killers with little or no regard for human life outside that inner circle.

Hugo Chavez wishes nothing but ill-will for the United States of America. He is out for the destruction of our nation and will aid anyone with similar motives in doing the same. He sponsors terrorists from Middle Eastern nations to come to Venezuela to learn the Spanish language and Latino customs so they can then be issued Venezuelan passports and enter into the U.S. from Mexico.

With all due respect, my advice to you Mr. Stone is to stick to what you know. Scripting your films allows you flexibility to make the outcome the way you want it and as you say in the article, “It’s more important to tell a story that people can enjoy.”

However, “based on a true story” does not mean it’s the truth.

Oh and one more thing: Stop smuggling!

I have been a journalist in some pretty unusual places that have more than a few security issues. I have investigated some unsavory people in places such as Romania, Uzbekistan,Cambodia and Uganda. I went undercover in Indonesia and ended up ensuring that one particularly cruel and crooked mother and daughter team received lengthy jail sentences in the other Jakarta Hilton.

But out of all these places and scenarios I can honestly say that Caracas is the scariest place I have ever been.

It feels and is lawless. The people have the despair of those who know their lives should be better but are beaten down by the everyday misery of watching their savings and futures disappear. Murders and kidnappings are endemic. There is a small area of Caracas that is safe for foreigners during the day. At night you have to be careful everywhere. Poverty and high prices seem to increase along with the oil revenues that are kept or misspent by the government.

Whilst I was there Hugo Chavez, the country’s president, did one of his regular Sunday broadcasts. These 4 hour homages to himself are a feature of life in Venezuela, that and shortages of things like milk, bottled water and toilet paper. During the broadcast Chavez is seen walking through an old part of Caracas with the local mayor. His red-shirted entourage surround him. He points to a jewelry shop and asks what it is. When he is told he immediately shouts, Expropriate! Expropriate! He goes on to repeat this action on a number of other small jewelry shops in the area before moving on and reminding his audience of how great he is.

The only TV channel in the country that questions the president was also the only TV channel to interview the devastated owners of the jewelry shops that had just been seized by the government. Shell-shocked, the owners told how they had been operating for 30 and 40 years and now had nothing. Last week the owner of this TV station had to flee the country because an arrest warrant was issued claiming that a car dealership he ran was “hoarding cars.”

We went to a wedding whilst in Venezuela. At our beach hotel we woke up one morning to find the army/police had taken up positions and were talking to the owner. His crime was to complain that government-backed squatters had taken over buildings he had set up so that locals could sell their produces and crafts to tourists. After he complained to the local judge the police arrived demanding to see his papers.

In Hollywood ownership is a really big deal. Stealing other people’s ideas or films or scripts or songs is not appreciated, people do try but it’s not legal. How strange then that artists such as Sean Penn and Oliver Stone love Hugo Chavez. Indeed Stone has just directed a documentary South of the Border which opens in the U.S. this week. According to the advance publicity it examines 5 “progressive” governments in South America.

According to Stone “Hugo Chávez is an extremely dynamic and charismatic figure. He’s open and warmhearted and big, and a fascinating character. But as Mr. Stone notes, his view is not widely held in the US:‪ “When I go back to the States I keep hearing these horror stories about ‘dictator,’ ‘bad guy,’ ‘menace to American society.’” Well Mr. Stone you don’t have to go to America to find unfavorable opinions of Hugo Chavez. He is no dictator – he was elected and even lost a recent referendum, but he is a bad guy who is a major menace for the poor of Venezuela.

If Mr. Stone had taken his camera on to the streets of Caracas he would very quickly have found lots of people who think Chavez is a menace whos seizes property on a whim and gives it to his cronies. He arrests people for “committing acts of journalism” – you know Mr. Stone, like you are pretending to do in your documentary.

‬There would be an interesting documentary about how a country with so many natural resources could be so poor. There could also be an interesting documentary made about how democratic elected leaders in the region drift towards tyranny with no respect for the rule of law. These documentaries could also look at why elites from the U.S. and Europe seem to suspend their morals and believe that the people of these countries don’t deserve democracy or basic human rights. These would all be interesting documentaries but they are unlikely to be made Mr. Stone anytime soon.

[Ed. Note: According to Variety, Stone's South of the Border "sunk like a rock at the Venezuelan box office."]

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I thought Obama put an end to all this ugly America’s empiring? Or is Oliver Stone the last remaining critic of this country yet to receive a Presidential bow?

Anyway, here’s a glimpse of Oliver Stone’s pal:

Venezuela has asked Interpol to arrest the owner of the only TV station still openly critical of leftist President Hugo Chavez, the government announced Friday. ….

Zuloaga was previously detained in March, when he was accused of criticizing the government during a public forum outside the country.

International human rights groups have criticized the legal action against Zuloaga and other Chavez critics, calling such actions an attempt to silence them.

And here’s a glimpse of how much affection Chavez’s own people hold for him:

The crème de la crème of the Hollywood Left would have unquestionably flocked to help with an epic depiction of this monster’s life, best recorded by Jung Chang but most certainly put back into “balance” by a Hollywood Left, with Oliver Stone most likely leading the revisionists’ jury.

Piling increasingly bizarre tributes on the head of that Mini-Mao, Hugo Chavez, Stone need only find enough Maoist money to make more cinematic history with his “in-depth” examination of the “much-misunderstood” Founding Father of Modern Hollywood Left and Maoism.

I’m sure the Far Left Actor, Sean Penn, is willing to leave his post in Haiti for such a challenge.

Both he and Stone are big admirers of Hugo Chavez and one would assume, Mao Zedong.

Weren’t most of my generation as impressionable as John F. Kennedy, thinking that Fidel Castro was sincerely committed to a healthier, happier Cuba?

Then, of course, we learned the truth.

It became a Castro-ized Cuba not unlike the Obama-tized America we are now obliged to deal with.

However, not many people were taken off guard by Hugo Chavez … except, perhaps, a few of Hollywood’s Far Left.

Now these bright lights of American film must see to it that Chavez stays in power at least as long as Fidel Castro did in Cuba.

Otherwise the Oliver Stone and Sean Penn bets of full support for Chavez might appear to be “ill-considered” if not downright naïve for two such sophisticated men of the world.

Compassion for the Bad Boys is at least one common denominator throughout Hollywood Left.

However, sympathy for the Unsuccessfully Bad Boys is a true embarrassment.

Even the neo Soviet, Vladimir Putin’s nostalgia for the Old, Pure Soviet Days looks pathetic.

Warren Beatty began the boldest exploration in American film of seriously making bad boys and girls fashionable with Bonnie and Clyde, leading him all the way to Bugsy.

This, of course, led to the totally female side of such outré self-indulgence with Thelma and Louise.

Love of anti-heroes is still so French and now European Union-ey and, yes, auteur-isty, that we forget how Hollywood used to treat the eager victims of the Bugsy Siegel world.

No, in that era, they didn’t romanticize the Natural Born Killers’ joy rides and the Thelma and Louise, off-the-cliff suicide.

By only mild contrast, however, Beatty’s film Reds is a defense of American Communists and the Russian Revolution in general, showing us just how human and in love these ideological supremacists can be.

Hmmm … Oliver Stone, in an interesting way, is still not as bold nor as frankly honest about his Communist sympathies as Beatty proved himself to be.

One must admit that Bonnie and Clyde predated the mad romp of Stone’s Natural Born Killers by almost thirty years.

Can you imagine Oliver Stone having to admit he’s in debt to the likes of Warren Beatty?

Having briefly, very briefly encountered them both, Beatty on the phone, I can’t.

Why?

Perhaps the two of them are Hollywood symbols of the Great Leftist Schism now happening within the Far Left Democratic Party.

The Soldiers, Stone and Penn, versus The Elitists, Beatty and Obama.

Regardless, such company, both sides, appear increasingly desperate or, in Beatty’s case, remarkably silent for such a Revolutionary Era promising a “fundamental transformation of the United States of America.”

Where or what is Warren Beatty?

Now he appears to be irrelevant.

Eventually so might President Barack Obama.

This is now time for The Soldiers.

The real Bad Boys!

That doesn’t bode well for The Elitists, whom The Soldiers look down on.

Even such a Rhodes, Teflon and Super Elite escape artist as Bill Clinton appears to be playing the fool.

So it’s obviously time for The Soldiers!

Communism has only endured under a military dictatorship.

Mao and Castro were active soldiers long before they became their countries’ Chairmen.

The intellectuals never fair well under the likes of either Mao or, for that matter, under Pol Pot, who lived out his disgusting life under the safe protection of former General, then Chairman Mao.

Therefore the long term problem for the illuminated likes of Kissinger, Clinton and Obama is that their undeniably Marxist concept for the New World Order would still demand a Soldier, not an Elitist, to enforce it.

It’s not hard to predict which kind of Communist would remain on top.

Elitist or Soldier?

Under Communism, The Soldier has always out-survived The Elitist.

The last great soldier America had as President was Dwight D. Eisenhower.

This World War II, Military Great, in profoundly American style, warned his own nation about its “military/industrial complex”.

America, particularly the over-intellectualized America of the Kissinger/Clinton/Obama Ivy League variety, cannot seem to find a Communist Military Dictator in any of the services: Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines.

The Elitists’ armchair and intellectualized daydreams of a New World Order America will invariably fall short if West Point has yet to come up with a Marxist Douglas MacArthur.

With that in mind, think of what a different world this would be if President Harry Truman had let MacArthur invade North Korea, all the way up to and including an invasion of the newly Communist China of Mao Zedong.

Mao certainly made a fool out of Chiang Kai Shek!

However, an American Warrior like MacArthur?!

If Mao had been obliged to face MacArthur, I do believe The Greatest Chairman would have become something beyond a forgotten nightmare by now.

At best, Mao’s name would have become Low Mandarin for some disgusting dish served in the filthiest corners of a China that would have, no doubt, exploded into a nation even more swiftly prosperous than MacArthur’s post-war Japan.

China would have so adored a victorious MacArthur, the Sino-Japanese prejudices against one another might have ended.

Both China and Japan would have shared pride in a mutually shared liberation from tyranny.

MacArthur, had Truman not been owned and run by underground Progressives, might indeed have become the George Washington of both Japan and mainland China.

There would have been the beginning of a New World Order of Individual Freedom For All of Mankind that could last.

What The Elitists are creating, now known as their Progressive New World Order, will last about as long as the Paris Peace Treaty that Kissinger cooked up for Nixon.

However, it won’t be the NVA and Viet Cong subsequently capturing Saigon.

It will, once Obama has lost his next election, be individual freedom infecting Beijing to at last liberate it from the undeniably evil legacy and obligatorily enforced worship of a butcher named Mao Zedong.