With delivery trucks under constant attack, the nation’s food is now transported under armed guard. Soldiers stand watch over bakeries. The police fire rubber bullets at desperate mobs storming grocery stores, pharmacies and butcher shops. A 4-year-old girl was shot to death as street gangs fought over food.

Venezuelans are starving and desperately ransacking supermarkets and food delivery trucks in order to avoid death. The consequences of socialism are grim indeed, and the New York Times is wringing its hands over the human misery just across the Caribbean from the United States. It’s Sunday edition report on the situation was full of pathos:

Venezuela is convulsing from hunger.

Yet, oddly enough, in over 1,500 words on the situation, there is no mention whatsoever of socialism as a root cause. Instead, low oil prices are blamed, and the only mention of a word related to socialism was this:

[1989 riots in Caracas] seared the memory of a future president, Hugo Chávez, who said the country’s inability to provide for its people, and the state’s repression of the uprising, were the reasons Venezuela needed a socialist revolution.

Beyond that, there is no mention of the price controls, the demonization of business owners, the seizures of businesses, the decline in oil production thanks to state management, or any of the other socialist policies that make Venezuela the only oil producer in the world to see mass starvation in the wake of the oil price decline (that, incidentally, has reversed course of late).

Quite clearly, the leftist media are busily engaged in covering up the evils perpetrated by socialism, just as assiduously as the Obama administration is covering up Islam’s root cause role in global violent jihad terrorism.