TOBY PETZOLD

Steve Chapman at Reason magazine has put up a great post on the Democratic Presidential candidates’ withdrawal of support for one of Bill Clinton’s greatest achievements: the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Even Hillary Clinton can’t bring herself to defend the deal her husband pushed through. Asked during a recent debate if she thought it was a mistake, she did everything but deny she’d ever met the man.

“All I can remember from that is a bunch of charts,” she chortled, in possibly the least believable statement of the 2008 campaign. “That, sort of, is a vague memory.” In the end, though, Clinton declared that “NAFTA was a mistake to the extent that it did not deliver on what we had hoped it would.”

I think Hillary’s joke is a reference to Ross Perot, whose low-tech slideshow explanation for why he disliked NAFTA was no match for the wit of Al Gore, as memorably demonstrated in their 1993 debate on Larry King’s CNN program. Remember that? Remember when the Gorebot was a New Democrat and Americans didn’t have to be ashamed of voting Democrat anymore? Ah, yes. The Good Old Days.

Some NAFTA supporters thought it might generate enough growth in Mexico to keep Mexican workers at home. When the tide of illegal immigrants grew, it bred resentment here.

That reaction partly helps to explain the Democratic retreat. By denouncing NAFTA, the presidential candidates can appeal to Americans alarmed about our porous borders without offending Hispanic voters.

I think that’s exactly right. The Democrats have done everything they can to avoid taking responsibility for their part in illegal immigration —and have obviously been abetted in this by Big Media as they do. Trashing up NAFTA only now, in service of whatever retarded protectionist agenda now before them as a party, is still something of a surprise, though.

Both parties are guilty on illegal immigration. And the word is guilty. Whichever one of them who can make the most sense on it is going to win in 2008.

Hugo Chavez, the wretched communist who runs Venezuela, had lots of fun at the expense of our President this past week, but he’s not exactly up on his current events:

At a news conference after his spirited address to the United Nations on Wednesday, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela expressed one regret: not having met that icon of the American left, the linguist Noam Chomsky, before his death.

Yesterday, a call to Mr. Chomsky’s house found him very much alive. In fact, he was struggling through “10,000 e-mails” he had received since the remarks by Mr. Chávez, who urged Americans to read one of Mr. Chomsky’s books instead of watching Superman and Batman movies, which he said “make people stupid.”

Is this a joke? Is Chavez so ignorant that he would fail to know such a vital statistic about a person whose book he very conspicuously waved around and praised during his outrageous address to the General Assembly?

Though, perhaps, it’s not so hard to understand, after all: most of the people Chavez reveres are either dead (e.g., Marx, Stalin, Guevara) or dying (e.g., Castro). Why shouldn’t the America-hating Chomsky be dead, too?

Check out Publius Pundit and how Hugo Chavez likes to spend time with his fellow countrymen comrades:

Oh man, this is disgusting. You know how Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez likes to break into all the television channels on occasion, with long Castro-style speeches, just to hear his own voice? Well, as All Venezuela has stood by, mesmerized at the World Cup on TV, he’s decided that this would be the perfect opportunity to break into the soccer games to issue his multi-hour political diatribes, called ‘cadenas.’

When a cadena is on, you can’t flip the channel. All you get is him, no matter what channel you flip to. Chavez is known to be jealous of attention the World Cup holds on Venezuelans and wants it for himself. So, he decided to show them all who was boss.

Hmmm. That’s the stuff of revoluciones.

Did you hear about this?

Drug traffickers launched a wave of coordinated attacks on police in Sao Paulo at the weekend, leaving at least 50 people dead in one of the most violent chapters in recent Brazilian history.

In at least 100 separate attacks on Friday, Saturday and yesterday, groups of criminals brandishing hand grenades and automatic weapons swept across the metropolis, gunning down members of the security forces as they worked. At least two bystanders died in the crossfire.

Simultaneous rebellions broke out in 51 of the state’s prisons, where more than 240 prison guards were being held hostage yesterday.

Last night, the police death toll stood at 35, with 32 seriously injured. At least 14 gang members were killed.

Walter Maierovitch, head of the Giovanni Falconi institute of criminal studies, described the incidents to one local paper as “a night of Baghdad”.

Holy crap! Sounds like al-Qaeda’s signature of simultaneous terror attacks has been forged right there in Lula’s backyard.

Sao Paulo’s governor, Claudio Lembo, blamed the attacks on a drug faction known as the First Command of the Capital (PCC). Founded in 1993 by prisoners at the Taubate penitentiary in Sao Paulo, it is one of the most powerful drug factions in the country. Mr Lembo said the attacks were a response to the transfer of 765 prisoners to a maximum security unit in the interior of the state. The group reportedly included eight PCC members who were placed in solitary confinement to isolate them from gang members outside the prison.

Why isn’t this being discussed on my TV as a major terrorist event?