The “Why Don’t You Shut Up!” Sensation

Who woulda thunk it?  The recent outburst by Spain’s King to the Venezuelan dictator Chavez has become a sensation:

When the Spanish king Juan Carlos turned to Hugo Chavez and said to him, a touch irritably, “Why don’t you shut up?”, little did he know that his breach of diplomatic protocol would become a smash hit across the country.

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An estimated 500,000 people have already downloaded the ringtone, generating around €1.5m (£1m), but many companies have circumvented any potential problems over rights by using an actor’s voice instead of the king’s.

Over 700 videos have appeared on YouTube, with parodies ranging from a Benny Hill sketch to a Nike advert featuring the Brazilian star Ronaldinho, which ends: “Juan do it. Just shut up.”

Meanwhile, the Peña brothers, who run a small T-shirt company, have found themselves overwhelmed with orders for their design inspired by the king. They normally expect to sell 800 T-shirts in a year, but in the week of the king’s outburst their orders reached over 1,000.

While I applauded the fact that someone, anyone, finally told the idiot to shut the hell up, the fact that it has spawned such bad singing such as this is not a good thing:

Meanwhile, on a serious note, Jackson Diehl wonders why more world leaders haven’t told the idiot the same thing:

Crude and clownish, si, but also disturbingly effective. Borrowing the
tried-and-true tactics of his mentor Fidel Castro, Chávez has found another way
to energize his political base: by portraying himself as at war with foreign
colonialists and imperialists. Even better, he has distracted the attention of
the international press — or at least the fraction of it that bothers to cover
Venezuela — from the real story in his country at a critical moment.

In 13 days, abetted by intimidation and overt violence that has included the
gunning down of student protesters, Chávez will become the presumptive
president-for-life of a new autocracy, created by a massive revision of his own
constitution. Venezuela will join Cuba as one of two formally “socialist”
nations in the Western hemisphere. This “revolution” will be ratified by a Dec.
2 referendum that Chávez fully expects to win despite multiple polls showing
that only about a third of Venezuelans support it. Many people will abstain from
voting rather than risk the retaliation of a regime that has systematically
persecuted those who turned out against Chávez in the past.

Venezuelans are not giving up their freedom without a fight. Tens of
thousands of students have been marching in the streets of Caracas, and the few
independent media outlets that still exist have been trying to combat the
unrelenting propaganda campaign being waged on state-controlled television. Some
of Chávez’s longtime supporters have defected, including the recently retired
defense minister, Gen. Raúl Isaías Baduel, who calls the constitutional rewrite
“a coup d’etat.” The president’s response was to publicly lead a chant about
Baduel that promised he “will end up before a firing squad.”

You would think the human rights organizations would be all aghast at whats going on in Venezuela, but we hear nada.  Silence from the left in this country also.  Seeing as how their base is pro-Chavez, just as they are pro-Che….this should surprise no one. Tyrannical dictators they love.  Leaders spreading Democracy they hate.

Curt

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