New Best Friend
By I think Tim Padgett is right; Pat Robertson couldn’t have come up with a better gift for Hugo Chavez if he had been trying:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has a new best friend this morning: television evangelist Pat Robertson. With his astonishing call for the left-wing leader’s assassination last night—”I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it…We have the ability to take him out”—Robertson will have surely made Chavez an even more popular anti-yanqui icon in Venezuela, Latin America and around the world. Like his mentor Fidel Castro, Chavez thrives on threats from the U.S., real or perceived. He has long insisted that his foes are plotting to kill him, and this summer had armed civilians training with the Venezuelan military to prepare for what he says is an imminent U.S. invasion. A public effort to whack him, offered from the right-wing Christian establishment so closely aligned with President Bush, is just what Chavez needs to keep his approval ratings soaring as high as the price of the Venezuelan oil he controls, the largest crude reserves in the hemisphere.
Hmm. Robertson is known for his close ties with certain semi-democratic strongmen; if I were Mickey Kaus, I’d be wondering if something was up. Of course, if I were Mickey Kaus, I . . . I don’t even want to think about that.