President Chavez, and Why the Ayatollah Robertson Wants Him Dead

Hugo Chavez was elected President of Venezuela in 1998. In 2000, he and his party scheduled new elections, and he easily won a new, six year presidential term. In 2002, the Bush administration got caught encouraging Venezuelan generals to overthrow Chavez, and rushed to announce support for their coup d'etat as soon as they seized the palace, but the coup collapsed under a wave of pro-Chavez protests in a matter of days. In 2004, the Bush administration funded anti-Chavez groups' attempts to have him recalled by voter initiative, something that the Columbia constitution permits. He won the 2004 election, under international election monitoring, by a wider margin and with fewer voter irregularities than George Bush's re-election the same year.

What the heck has this been all about? Well, Hugo Chavez is a socialist. In Latin America, as I've explained before in other articles, what this means is that he's (a) not white, (b) supports reforms aimed at taking some of the country's most valuable land and assets away from the wealthy Spanish families that have controlled them since 16th century in order to give something to the descendants of the surviving natives and imported African slaves, and more importantly (c) wants to get elected to anything above being dog-catcher in a small town despite not being white, something that neither of the other main parties in Venezuela (or any other Latin American country), the rich white neo-royalist party nor the middle-class white technocratic party, have any interest in permitting. Also, being a socialist, he really doesn't give a rat's hindquarters about the US embargo of Cuba, and does business with Cuba rather openly, loudly, and colorfully -- unlike our allies in this hemisphere like Canada, who also ignore the embargo and do business in Cuba, but do so quietly and without open diplomatic support for the Castro government.

And he hates George Bush and holds him in total, utter contempt. Imagine someone with the same opinions as Michael Moore, in fact with almost exactly the same opinions as Michael Moore. Now imagine Michael Moore as a mestizo oil billionaire with his own political party, a seat in the UN, and a small army. Yes, oil. Venezuela is OPEC's most important member in the western hemisphere. The Bush administration may hate him, may have tried twice to overthrow him, and denounces him as another Fidel Castro -- but unlike Castro, we're not going to declare an embargo against him. On the contrary, he has at least once threatened to impose an embargo on us, to stop Venezuelan oil exports to punish the US for the coup attempt. As the president of an OPEC member nation and an important one at that, he knows who's got the upper hand in any contest of economic sanctions, so even the Bush administration knows better to than to even hint at threatening sanctions.

Pat Robertson, on the other hand, is one of the most senior leaders of what I call fake Christianity, the Christianity that stands in total opposition to almost everything in the Christian scriptures, let alone the preaching of Jesus Christ. He's one of the fake Christian leaders who sold their souls to the devil because they believed that only the Republicans could save them from being murdered by the world-wide communist conspiracy. Pat Robertson is a man who still fears, deep down in his heart, that some day there will be a Communist takeover of the United States, and that just as happened in China and North Korea after their communist takeovers 50 years ago, he believes that when that day comes every Christian in America will be tortured to death. And nothing will ever make him feel safe until the last communist, in fact until the last socialist, on earth is dead.

Anyway, because he has faithfully kept his side of his deal with the devil, we can very explicitly thank Pat Robertson for the presidency of George W. Bush. In the early 2000 Republican party primaries, John McCain was hammering Bush. Going into the South Carolina primaries, if Bush had lost one more time, his candidacy was through, and in the early polls, McCain had the state locked up. So Robertson extracted certain promises from Bush, including forcing him to shift his policies on social issues much farther to the right, and delivered the endorsement that tipped the polls and handed South Carolina's Republican vote to George Bush. He also participated in a very ugly, very slanderous smear campaign against John McCain, who never recovered from it politically. And at every opportunity since then, Robertson has echoed the Bush administration's line, declaring Bush's policies to be the only possible policies compatible with the word of God. Therefore you may reasonably assume that any enemy of George W. Bush is an enemy of Pat Robertson's. And if that enemy of George Bush also happens to be a friend of Fidel Castro and the head of a major oil-exporting nation, you may reasonably assume that he scares Pat Robertson beyond all rational thought.

Pat Robertson made his remarks in the context of a discussion of the War on Terror. Robertson believes that since Chavez opposes George Bush and doesn't give a crap about American efforts to reign him in, that sooner or later Chavez, despite being a staunch Catholic, will eventually cut a deal with al Qaeda just to strike back at Bush. At that point, Robertson believes that God's enemies will have yet another country to plan their attacks from, and this time a wealthy oil state in our own hemipshere, at that. Which means an even more dangerous, even more expensive war than our current war in Iraq, or our next war in Syria, or the war after that in Iran, or the war after that in North Korea. And that is why, in violation of every principle of US law and every principle of God's word, he advocated having the CIA assassinate Hugo Chavez. Because even Pat Robertson, as nuts as he is, knows that the United States can't afford five simultaneous wars of regime change.