February 16, 2012 2:05PM 

# Chavez Launches Smears against His Opponent 

By [David Boaz](https://www.cato.org/people/david-boaz) 

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I write [on the Huffington Post](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-boaz/chavez-anti-americanism_b_1281702.html) that Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez is reaching into the age-old bag of anti-liberal smears to savage his newly nominated political opponent:

> All of these epithets — homosexual, Jewish, bourgeoisie, and more recently, “American” — have been staples of illiberal rhetoric for centuries. Liberals — advocates of democracy, free speech, religious freedom, and market freedoms — have been tarred as “cosmopolitan” and somehow alien to the people, the Volk, the faithful, the fatherland, the heartland.

[Read it all](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-boaz/chavez-anti-americanism_b_1281702.html).

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