Hey, Nicolás Maduro! Hey, Ilhan Omar! 

Guess who's jetting over to the Colombian border city of Cucuta now that the Venezuelan dictatorship has blocked all those truckloads of U.S. foreign aid!

Image credit: Hardo Müller via Flickr, detail,CC BY-SA 2.0.

Sure enough, Richard Branson!  Blocking foreign aid is a very good way for a busy dictator get a visit from this guy.

The bleeding-heart British liberal billionaire, whose pet causes up until now have been global warming, starving Africans, AIDS, homelessness, animal rights, and a heaping helping of Obama-love, is now focused on...starving Venezuelans.  He's putting on a big LIVE AID-style extravaganza concert on Feb. 22, featuring superstars such as Shakira, Juanes, Peter Gabriel, and tons of others.  It's going to get global press and will be live-streamed for all the Millennials to watch, join in, and make their donations.  Branson says he's going to raise $100 million.  According to the English-language Bogotá-based City Paper:

The concert will be held near the overland crossing with Venezuela which was barricaded this week by security forces loyal to the regime of President Nicolás Maduro after he gave orders not let in any humanitarian aid from the U.S using Colombian soil as transit.  "The world can no longer close its eyes to this unacceptable situation," said Branson, adding that audiences around the world will be able to watch the concert via live streaming at: www.venezuelaaidlive.com

Branson's charity concert recalls the original Live Aid of 1985, organized by Bob Geldof (spelling fixed –ed) and Midge Ure, to raise awareness of the famine in Ethiopia, and featured in the film Bohemian Rhapsody.

This one will be big like that, too, and here he comes...

To the rest of the civilized world, whether one is conservative or liberal, it's good news.

This concert, by a guy who has nothing to do with President Trump and probably doesn't like him, represents a sea change in the sentiment from the fashionable left, championing all those millions and millions of Venezuelans who have sought international support as they seek to restore their democracy.  It's frankly a beautiful thing.  That ugly emblematic picture of blocked aid along with the news photos of Venezuelans digging in garbage for food, eating zoo animals, and flooding the Colombian border to flee seems to have done the job to move even the establishment liberals. Branson shows that the liberals are onboard. 

That should tighten the noose just a little harder on the Venezuelan dictatorship, now that these fashionable liberals are storming the beaches.  Venezuela's democrats have stated adamantly that they welcome support of all sides of the spectrum from abroad as elements of the Russian propaganda machine try to paint anyone supporting Venezuela's democrats as "far-right."

Nope, not with stylin' Richard Branson slathering his oleaginous "concern" onto the Venezuelans now.

And what a change it represents from those days when Hollywood celebrities would make political pilgrimages to the socialist "sea of happiness" of Hugo Chávez's Venezuela.  Sean Penn, Naomi Campbell, Oliver Stone, Dial-Joe-4-Oil Kennedy, eat your hearts out.  (But defectors are welcome.)

Will the money be wasted?  Who knows?  At a minimum, it probably won't all be, and Branson's name has never been associated with aid fraud, so points for him.  What's even more important is that Venezuela's quest for democracy and food has now become the respectable and mainstream "narrative."  Madonna might soon be adopting a Venezuelan kid.  Will these lefties co-opt the Venezuelan democracy movement?  Don't think so — the Venezuelans have held pretty firm control over how they want their democracy revolution to go, and yes, there are left-liberal types among them, such as these bloggers, as well as the late great newspaper editor Teodoro Petkoff.  Everyone is welcome. 

What matters is that the dictatorship gets smaller and smaller, less powerful, less influential, more pariah-like, as detested abroad as it is at home, culminating in either a Ceaușescu scenario, a Noriega scenario, or a comfortable exile in some hellhole like Cuba for Maduro and his cronies.

Just as important, a concert like this encompassing a huge chunk of the mainstream left outside President Trump is absolute poison to the Russian propaganda machine, which has sought to paint Venezuela's democrats "far-right" and full of death squads.

The people who are going come out of this smelling like skunks are the Venezuela late-stage socialism-defenders, such as socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and socialist Rep. Ilhan Omar, who have loudly defended the Maduro dictatorship and blared the Russian propaganda talking points about the far right and U.S. "intervention" with a smiling malevolent Omar slimily seeking to discredit honorable U.S. officials taking the initiative to support the Venezuelans as Ocasio-Cortez cheered her on.  Neither cared in the least about the Venezuelans.  And with Branson oozing compassion, suddenly, they look very un-hip, like creeps, actually, in bed with Russian trolls and puppeting away for them.

If they don't backtrack, Branson's big concert and all his Millennials grooving along ought to finish this pair and maybe Bernie Sanders, too, off politically.

It helps a lot that Branson has joined the Venezuelans.  Thanks, Richie.

Image credit: Hardo Müller via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.