[Cincinatus' Wife]

Diplomats Gain Little in Venezuela Talks With Chavez's Crass Administration***Government negotiators now say that opposition delegates at the OAS talks don't represent all sectors opposing Chavez and suggest the OAS-mediated talks be replaced by debate in the Chavez-dominated National Assembly. Lawmakers, they say, are better suited for the task because they were elected by the people, while the delegates at the OAS talks are chosen by political parties.

The six months of talks between Chavez's government and Venezuela's opposition have produced just an agreement in February to end verbal insults and political violence. And even that pact has been forgotten. The mudslinging reached a new low after an opposition general strike curbed Venezuelan oil production and cost the economy $6 billion but failed to oust Chavez.

When a protester was slain during an opposition May Day march, Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel blamed the opposition and said that government adversaries were obsessed with "necrophilia." Interior Minister Gen. Lucas Rincon told cadets at a police academy graduation that opposition leaders were "brain-damaged" because of excessive expectations on fighting crime. Carlos Ortega, a labor boss granted asylum in Costa Rica after leading the general strike, said Chavez was "not well in the head." Chavez routinely assails what he calls a "fascist," "terrorist" and "coup-plotting" opposition.***

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Kirkpatrick Was Right *** At the 1984 Republican National Convention, Jeane Kirkpatrick, then the Reagan administration's U.N. delegate, gave a speech on foreign policy that has stuck with me. She blasted the Democratic Party's approach to foreign affairs, repeating the phrase "the blame America first crowd." I hated the speech at the time, but have recently reread it. It has aged better than I have. ...........That same tendency to blame America for the moral shortcomings of others unfortunately permeates the left and the Democratic Party. I wish it were otherwise, but I got the first whiff of it after Sept. 11 when some people reacted to the terrorist attacks here by blaming U.S. policy -- in the Middle East specifically but around the world in general.

..........Had we not supported Israel, had we not backed the corrupt Saudi monarchy, had we not been buddies with Egypt, had we not been somehow complicit in Third World poverty, had we not developed blue jeans and T-shirts and rock music and premarital sex, the World Trade Center might still be standing and the Pentagon untouched. .......Below the surface of this reasoning seethes a perplexing animosity toward the United States -- not the people but the government and the economic system. Possibly it has its roots in the Great Depression, when capitalism seemed kaput and socialism so promising, and the government an adjunct of moneyed interests. At the same time, of course, governments on all levels -- federal, state and local -- were unabashedly racist.

Almost none of that still applies -- although money still talks. Yet the impulse to blame America first lingers, an atavistic reflex that jerks the knees of too many on the left and has cost the Democratic Party plenty over the years. Jeane Kirkpatrick, a former Democrat, put her finger on it 19 years ago. It's about time the Democrats listened to what she had to say.***