“Anything is possible.”

That’s what I wrote on Monday morning following the “narrow” win by the NO! forces in the Venezuelan referendum on granting President Hugo Chavez enormous and unprecedented powers. My speculation seemed wild at the time but was based on reports coming from Venezuelan bloggers who turned out to be pretty damn reliable in the end.

Most pre-election polls had NO! winning by 55% or greater. For those on the left who are sneering about the fact that Chavez didn’t try and rig the election, I would suggest you wait a day or two. There certainly were some strange things going on at CNE headquarters in the wee hours of the morning.

And one rumor is the final margin of victory for the opposition was actually negotiated between the two sides so that Chavez could save face with a razor thin loss rather than the 57%-58% that some polls were showing prior to the vote. That particular rumor seems wildly off base – until you remember we’re talking about Chavez’s Venezuela where after the last presidential election, half full ballot boxes disappeared for hours only to turn up later stuffed to the brim with votes for Chavez.

As it turns out, the NO! vote was indeed a landslide and Chavez was in the process of rigging the election in his favor when the Army came a-calling and told him if he cheated, he’d be gone:

Most of Latin America’s leaders breathed a sigh of relief earlier this week, after Venezuelan voters rejected President Hugo Chávez’s constitutional amendment referendum. In private they were undoubtedly relieved that Chávez lost, and in public they expressed delight that he accepted defeat and did not steal the election. But by midweek enough information had emerged to conclude that Chávez did, in fact, try to overturn the results. As reported in El Nacional, and confirmed to me by an intelligence source, the Venezuelan military high command virtually threatened him with a coup d’état if he insisted on doing so. Finally, after a late-night phone call from Raúl Isaías Baduel, a budding opposition leader and former Chávez comrade in arms, the president conceded—but with one condition: he demanded his margin of defeat be reduced to a bare minimum in official tallies, so he could save face and appear as a magnanimous democrat in the eyes of the world.

I also reported the role of General Baduel in heading Chavez off at the pass by going on TV and demanding that the vote – already held up several hours by the CNE - be released. Either shortly before or after he made that appearance, he placed his call to Chavez telling him the jig was up.

There are so many lefties with egg on their faces this morning that the liberal blogosphere could very well be mistaken for an omelet chef blog burst in progress. Praise for that great “democrat” Chavez and comparing him favorably to Bush was laughable at the time and now, simply priceless – one of those moments in blog history that can be trotted out time and time again whenever some lefty gets a little too large for their suspenders.

Just for fun, let’s review what some on the left had to say about their buddy Hugo and how he was a superior democrat to American leaders:

“I would be the last to claim that Hugo Chavez is a saint, or even a politician worth emulating. But I do find it interesting that when faced with the will of the people, Bush ignored that will and Chavez bowed to it. One we are told, is a vile threat to the freedom of his nation because of his incessant power grabs and disdain for democratic process. The other is a great leader of men, fully committed to democracy in his home country and abroad. If I hadn’t attached names to this story, could you tell which was supposed to be which?

This is one of my favorites:

Before the vote began, Venezuela’s government had agreed to randomly open 30% of the ballot boxes to monitors in order to assure a fair election. Upon receipt of the result, President Hugo Chavez—the putative dictator in waiting for Venezuela—announced simply, “I congratulate my adversaries for this victory. For now, we could not do it.”

The Venezuelan and American press—both enormously and dishonestly hostile to Venezuela’s Bolivarian transformation—had spun the article dropping term limits as a bid to become “President for Life,” though there was no provision to ever stop presidential elections that put that decision into the hands of Venezuelan voters. We shall now see if a single mea culpa is expressed by any of the media in the wake of the Chavez government’s quick and gracious acceptance of the referendum result. I doubt it.

The author never mentioned that the agreement to “randomly open 30% of the ballot boxes” went by the wayside that night – as did every other agreement Chavez made prior to the election about independent electoral observers, opposition access to the raw vote count, and anything else that would have prevented Chavez from stealing the vote.

And as far as shenanigans that occurred during voting, here’s a few of dozens of irregularities from this revealing letter sent by two International Observers to the Venezuelan recall vote in 2004 to Members of Congress:

• We were threatened on several occasions, at least once with pistols concealed under the shirts of Chavistas who yelled threats and showed us their weapons.

• When we went into the 23 de Enero barrio, Chavistas working in the voting area turned into rabble-rousers and tried to stir the crowd into attacking us. The Plan República troops did nothing to stop them, and when our safety was in question, they escorted us out. We could no longer observe the many irregularities in the area.

• We r eceived first hand reports from witnesses who saw armed Comando Maisanta and Circulos Bolivarianos posted outside voting centers, threatening the people who tried to vote SI.

• We witnessed military officers prohibiting the vote of people in the opposition areas because they were “wearing shorts”, a violation of the constitution and their human rights.

• Thousands of voters who voted SI, were physically assaulted at the voting centers.

• In some voting centers, the review process was started without the presence of Opposition witnesses to guarantee transparency.

• Opposition witnesses and table members were physically removed from voting centers or blocked from entering and guaranteeing transparency.

This is the election Jimmy Carter guaranteed as fair and open.

Of course, the biggest omelet on the face goes to Roger Cohen for this lights-out slice of schadenfreud:

I salute you, Hugo Chávez.

If Roger had stopped there, people would have only thought him crazy, not an idiot:

And yet, there was a glum Chávez declaring in the unadorned language no totalitarian system can abide that: “The people’s decision will be upheld in respect of the basic rule of democracy: the winning option is the one that gets most votes.”

The United States might ponder those words — not just because of what happened in the presidential election of 2000; not just because the arithmetic of voting has proved unpalatable in Palestine; not just because of the past U.S.-abetted trampling of elected Latin American leaders in Chile and elsewhere — but because democracy was alive and vital in Venezuela on Sunday in a way foreign to President Bush’s America.

As I said in my American Thinker blog post, “Thank God for that.” And I might have added, thank God Cohen only writes for the Times and not a real newspaper:

But his honoring of democracy’s brittle wonders still merits a salute. Above all, however, I salute the Venezuelan people. Chávez said before the referendum that a “no” vote equaled a vote for Bush. Unperturbed, Venezuelans went ahead. And they gave a civic example from which Bush’s battered and blathering democracy can learn.

Bush’s “blathering” democracy apparently doesn’t need to negotiate with the opposition his margin of defeat. What say ye, Roger? Up for eating a little crow?

It’s childish, of course, to gloat so. But when people are constantly throwing mud in your face, it’s sometimes nice to return the favor by tossing a banana cream pie and hitting them right in the kisser.