Will Venezuelan voters stand up to Hugo Chavez?

Dan Calabrese: A forerunner of America's expected electoral tidal wave could occur on Sunday in Venezuela. The presidency is not on the line, so Marxist dictator thug Hugo Chavez is safe for now. But he needs a two-thirds majority of the legislative assembly to maintain the absolute power with which he is so swiftly destroying the country.

Venezuelans appear poised to take it away from him -- if everything is on the up-and-up. Manny Lopez, my colleague at The Michigan View, is of Venezuelan descent, and recently visited the homeland for some interesting discussions about what may be coming:

Fortunately, Venezuelans are interested in change again -- only this time to get rid of the socialistic and totalitarian rules that have been imposed on the nation by a president who not only openly flaunts the law, he creates his own.

"Who is going to stop me?" Chavez said recently when questioned about campaigning illegally for candidates, according to Dow Jones Newswires.

Hopefully, more than 11,000 young people who have organized to monitor Sunday's elections to the national assembly as well as the millions more freedom and democracy loving people in Venezuela will do their part to keep him from intimidating voters, fomenting violence or flat-out altering results.

People around the world need to pay attention, too.

Chavez' socialists hold 137 of the 167 national assembly seats, but an energized opposition is poised to retake many of those and eliminate the two-thirds majority he needs to keep his dictatorial rule in place.

"The good thing is that the opposition has finally gotten the message and is consolidated (somewhat) and organized. They feel like if they get enough people at the polls to monitor, they can combat some of the fraud," Jon Perdue, director of Latin American Programs at The Fund for American Studies, told me Tuesday. But as Manny points out, a key to this potential success will be to keep Jimmy Carter out.

The self-proclaimed greatest former President alive showed up in Venezuela in 2004 to "certify" the election of Chavez, as if this tool has the authority to certify anything, completely ignoring all kinds of voting irregularities. In the process, he gave the international media an excuse for putting some bizarre imprimatur of legitimacy on the so-called results.

Chavez is more than just an irritating Marxist operating in our hemisphere, like, say, the Castro brothers -- who lost most of their strategic relevance when the Soviet Union collapsed. Venezuela is America's largest supplier of oil, and while Chavez has not been stupid enough to cut off supplies to his biggest customer (with thuggish Marxists, there's always a self-interested capitalist in there somewhere), he's been quite brazen about flaunting his position to cozy up to U.S. enemies like Iran.

And needless to say, Chavez has been a disaster for the people of Venezuela. Their economy is in tatters, crime is exploding and political right have virtually disappeared. For a guy who simply seizes control of TV stations who don't do his bidding, you'd think the U.S. media would be a bit more up in arms over it all. But that presumes some sort of intellectual honesty on the part of the U.S. media, and you'll never go hungry betting against that.

Hopefully, on Sunday, we can bet on the wisdom of the Venezuelan electorate -- as well as their ability to keep things clean and honest. It would be the sort of smackdown that would create hope for an entire region, and maybe provide a preview of an even sweeter one to come in November.