SORRY, HUGO CHAVEZ WAS COMPLETELY CORRECT

My favorite Satan is the gay one, always wracked with doubts and always second-guessing himself, from South Park. Personally, I don't believe in a red guy with cloven hooves and horns, stinking of sulfur, running around with a pitchfork. The concept of a physical Hell-after-death is pretty childish and primitive (for the kinds of people possessing intellects that find Karl Rove's vision of the world reasonable). There's a more subtle and nuanced concept of an allegorical Hell but... well, you know where allegory, symbolism and nuanced gets you in America.

So the other day, the wildly popular-- popular with poor folks, not with plutocrats and oligarchs and the kind of people from Venezuela a Bush would have any contact with-- populist president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, comes to the UN and complains about the acrid stench of sulfur up at the podium where Bush has been previously. He's pretty funny and dramatic and calls Bush "el diablo," a devil. The corporate media went bonkers. You would have thought Chavez, who barely escaped with his life from a Bush-backed military coup against him a couple of years ago, had just threatened to bomb the Empire State Building or... to cut off oil exports.

How dare he call our dear leader such an awful thing-- and from the very same podium from which our dear leader let lose with his Axis of Evil shtick before invading Iraq (under demonstrably false pretenses, proving a good deal of the substance of what Chavez actually said about him. Of course the substance isn't what corporate media bothered to cover.)

Now about that substance. Stephen Lendman at the San Francisco Independent Media Center had a lot more to say about it than a Hannity or a Limbaugh or any of the garbage. He mentioned how Chavez held up a Noam Chomsky book. It wasn't one of the books on Bush's summer reading list-- the one with the 3 Shakespeares and Camus. "Hugo Chavez delivered an impassioned speech yesterday to the assembled delegates who came to hear him. It's one likely to be favorably remembered many years from now. At its end, the delegates showed their appreciation and support by giving him a standing ovation (the longest one of all the leaders addressing the Assembly) in contrast to the cool and polite reception given George Bush the previous day who chose not to attend to hear the Venezuelan leader. Too bad he didn't as he might have learned from it if he stayed alert and paid attention. Citing the language in Chomsky's book in his hand, Chavez said: 'The hegemonistic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk the very existence of the human species (and) We appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our head.' He went on to explain that earlier the President of the US attended an Organization of American States meeting and proposed a NAFTA-type trade agreement in both regions that is the 'fundamental cause of the great evils and the great tragedies currently suffered by our people. Neoliberal capitalism, the Washington Consensus....has generated... a high degree of misery, inequality and infinite tragedy for all the peoples on (this) continent.'"


Why go into all this conceptual stuff when you can just report that Chavez called Bush a devil and crossed himself? Is it possible to expect anything more from the corporate media? And from the Democratic opposition? They were tripping all over themselves to run to the microphones to denounce Chavez... not even the regular suspects like Lieberheadupbushsass, but progressives who absolutely say far worse things about Bush and know he's a criminal and a traitor to all the good that America stands for. I mean Charlie Rangel?? The man who is famously quoted as having said that Bush is the living embodiment, the absolutely proof, that white racial superiority is a myth whose time has ended? Politicians are so... political. There was Nancy Pelosi making believe that Bush is a legitimate and respectable leader of a democratic country instead of... what he really is and what she knows he really is.

Markos said the whole thing isn't even worth talking about, an opinion I shared, until the media/Democrats/even bloggers anti-Chavez pile on began. Today The L.A. Times carries an opinion piece by Professor Todd Gitlin entitled "Renouncing Bush's Failures Is a Start." It's a far better frame than denouncing Hugo Chavez' hyperbole about the most hated man in the entire world, more hated, I am certain, than Osama bin-Laden, dead or alive. Gitlin doesn't say it the same way Chavez did-- but of course, Gitlin was never the victim of a Bush-sponsored coup attempt-- but he gets the point across. "Perhaps he is not a conservative at all but a deficit-mongering big-government advocate, a world-changing radical in disguise and a cultivator of global anti-Americanism. Perhaps, from Baghdad to Kabul to New Orleans, bungling is not the exception but the rule because he and his inner circle hold planning, the law, diplomacy and even reason in contempt."

Like Chavez, and like all the mealy-mouthed Democrats who strutted up to the microphones to wave the flag and attack him, I hold Bush in contempt. Sooner or later Amato will have the scene in Jesus Camp up on Crooks and Liars where all the little zombie children are being instructed by their neo-Nazi pastor how to worship a cardboard cutout of Bush. These are the only people with any excuse for not holding Bush in contempt-- since they have none of that reason stuff the Republicans are dead set on doing away with-- before it does away with them. Less than 7 weeks to voting time.