"I'd rather live under Chavez than Bush", Cindy Sheehan once famously quipped. Currently, Chavez seems intent on arresting people who would disagree their shared point of view.

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez threatened on Saturday to imprison his main political rival, intensifying a campaign against a man he calls a crime boss just a month before he faces tough regional elections.

Opposition leader Manuel Rosales, who lost to Chavez in the 2006 presidential vote, is governor of the oil producing state of Zulia and is running for mayor of its capital Maracaibo.

"I am determined to put Manuel Rosales behind bars. A swine like that has to be in prison," Chavez said.... Chavez provided no specific evidence for the charges...

I used to wonder about this phenomenon: Fill a room full of people, place one nascent dictator among them, and then have people like Oliver Stone, Jimmy Carter, or Cindy Sheehan vet them and ask who they like the most. It seems invariably that the Hollywood travelers will be most attracted to the future dictator. Do they just have spectacularly (indeed, almost presciently) bad character judgment? Or is that they're really, down deep, made of the same stuff?

Meanwhile...

The Miami trial of a Venezuelan entrepreneur who grew rich doing business with President Hugo Chávez's populist administration has exposed how some top government officials have profited from a corrosive web of corruption in the oil-rich country.

Kickbacks, bribes and secret payoffs have become a feature in the socialist administration, which had claimed a break from the past but instead has seen several officials implicated in multimillion-dollar corruption schemes, according to testimony and conversations taped by the FBI. The trial has also revealed the Chávez government's determination to funnel state funds to its allies in Latin America and the lengths it will go to to keep the aid secret.

The left rails against "corporate greed": but greed is present in governments, too. Men like Castro and Chavez are, in a sense, mega-CEOs, who treat everything in the entire country as their personal property. As long as a pretense is made of "caring for the poor", that's enough for some, I guess.