Monday, October 26, 2009

Chavez goes for the double bogey...closes golf courses

Is this par for the course or a double bodey...I can't decide.

From Wall Street Journal

Scots must be shaking their heads. Fresh from nationalizing almost every capitalist enterprise that yields a profit (or used to anyway), Latin American strongman Hugo Chávez has found a new class enemy: golf. Declaring it a "bourgeois" sport, the Venezuelan leader has ordered the shut-down of some of the country's best-known golf courses.

For a socialist like Mr. Chávez, banning golf might be considered, ahem, par for the course, even if he is a bit late to the game. The likes of China, Russia and Cuba banned golf decades ago—although today they all enjoy practicing their swing. Perhaps this is exactly the historic precedent Mr. Chávez fears. The Soviet Union built its first golf course in 1988—and a year later the Berlin Wall fell.

Or maybe Mr. Chávez—known for his paranoia about alleged Western plots to overthrow him—has read up on Scottish history. In 1457, King James II of Scotland banned the game from the hills on which it was created. He argued that golf was a danger to national security as it distracted his soldiers from practicing their archery.

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