Worse than a bad movie

What can you say about a guy who tries to free hostages, a guy who brings affordable heating oil to poor people?

What can you say? What you can say about Hugo Chavez is that you are on to him.

A few weeks ago, the Venezuelan president mounted a media circus in neighboring Colombia, where he bragged that he was going to convince his left-wing comrades in the terrorist Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces -- known by its Spanish acronym FARC -- to release three hostages (including a 3-year-old child) that they have held for years.

Along for the ride were former Argentinean President (and current first husband) Nestor Kirchner, a Brazilian official with close ties to president Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva, the French and Cuban ambassadors in Caracas, and a pretty ugly American named Oliver Stone.

Yes, him. He was hoping, of course, to humbly be of help in Chavez's humanitarian gesture.

Besides, "I have no illusions about the FARC," he told reporters, "but it looks like they are a peasant army fighting for a decent living."

No illusions, mind you. Just a heroic army of the Little People fighting for what's right. Even if they kill, maim and kidnap a few thousand innocents. Sort of like al-Qaida, right? Didn't Oliver compare al-Qaida to the Minutemen of 1776? No? Oops, no, that was Michael Moore. Sorry, I sometimes confuse which Hollywood director who admires Fidel Castro said what about whom.

One thing is for sure, the celebs are not missing a beat as Fidel slowly makes his transition from this world to the other -- they are learning to heap praises on his disciple, Hugo.

A "great man," Stone called Chavez.

"One of the Earth's wisest people," he once said of Castro.

Here in the United States, Chavez's greatness is being sung by Joe Kennedy, son of Bobby, who is appearing in television and radio commercials thanking CITGO, the government owned Venezuelan oil company, for providing millions of barrels of discounted heating oil to impoverished Americans.

It's how Chavez sets himself up: the liberator of hostages, the provider of warmth. Freedom and security. What more could anybody want?

Maybe, "socialism or death."

That's the slogan in Chavez's Venezuela, as well as in Castro's Cuba. And they do not mean Euro-socialism, either. They mean hardline Marxism-Leninism. They are saying, in essence, that Cubans and Venezuelans either accept a one-party state without freedom of speech, or they die. It's an ideology Castro tried to spread through force of arms in the 1960s and 1970s, funding and training guerrilla movements to make the Andes into another Vietnam, in the words of Che Guevara.

FARC and another Colombian group, the ELN, are just about the last holdouts from that violent era.

Now Chavez is trying a different tactic: soft power. The discounted oil. The effort to free hostages.

Regional leaders of democracies like Kirchner and Lula are as blind to the danger as Oliver Stone. The difference is that the main harm Stone can do is make a bad movie.

- Roger Hernandez is a syndicated columnist and writer-in-residence at New Jersey Institute of Technology.