Starving, socialist Venezuela has held another "election." Like every single election there I have followed, since around 2004, it was a fraudy affair .

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is celebrating his re-election in an energized speech inviting his defeated challengers to join him for a dialogue about the country's future. Maduro spoke late Sunday to a crowd of cheering supporters at Venezuela's presidential palace in the capital of Caracas. Election officials say he won nearly 68 percent of the votes, beating nearest challenger Henri Falcon by more than 40 points. The election gives Maduro a second six-year term amid the oil-rich country's deepening economic crisis that has many Venezuelans struggling to afford food and medicine.

File under "barf alert."

Yes, it's another fraudy election. This one, though, stood out. The ruling socialists this time didn't even try to make it seem legitimate, not in the least. They threw in jail or else disqualified every potential candidate except their own in a hastily announced vote. The opposition mostly held together in boycotting the vote, while a little quisling named Henri Falcon ran to make it all look capiche. There were no election observers (probably because they couldn't get any, not even Jimmy Carter, who's been servicing them on that for years). Even their tainted voting machine company, Smartmatic, pulled out, not wanting to be associated with this one. Most of the country's neighbors pre-announced that the election was garbage and they wouldn't recognize it. The U.S. refused to give it the time of day.

If there was ever a case for the textbooks on how to run a fraudy election, well, here we have it.

The new question is what to do about it. The international community, even the United Nations, has condemned the fraud and ought to sanction the country right out the gate for its gross mockery of democracy, but the U.N. won't do that.

The U.S., however, still has a few cards to play.

Up until now, the U.S. has avoided wholesale sanctions on that hellhole because of the sense that the country would starve and there would be a humanitarian catastrophe. It wasn't that we needed their oil. The fracking revolution has made them buyers of our oil, actually. Yet we were being big about it, thinking of the humanitarian implications, despite our loathing the socialist regime.

Well, a humanitarian disaster happened anyway, without U.S. sanctions, so the only thing sanctions would do now is take money out of the hands of the ruling Chavista elites.

Analysts are now propounding the idea, and some think it will happen, such as this one here:

The U.S. is almost certainly preparing to impose targeted crude sanctions against Venezuela, analysts told CNBC on Monday, in a move likely to constitute a "devastating" blow for the oil-dependent state. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro won re-election to another six-year term on Sunday, despite widespread anger over the South American country's crushing economic and social crises. The vote was marred by low voter turnout, allegations of vote-rigging and an opposition boycott. "The next step is sanctions against the oil sector," Diego Moya-Ocampos, principal political analyst for Latin America at IHS Markit, told CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe" on Monday. "This is crucial because (Venezuela's) oil sector represents 25 percent of GDP (gross domestic product), 50 percent of fiscal revenues and 97 percent of revenue from foreign exchange… So, obviously, sanctions on the oil sector in Venezuela will be a game changer."

It couldn't happen soon enough. This regime has been starving its own people, taking the international community for a ride, dealing drugs, supporting terrorists, consorting with regional troublemakers such as Iran and Russia, and generally making itself a plague on the hemisphere. How wonderful it would all be without them and their creepy Cuban masters running most of their government.

Slam them hard with sanctions, President Trump. Tin-pot regimes everywhere will take note, and the effect will reverberate. These revolting, despicable, starvation-creating socialists have had it coming for years.