El Busho = El Diablo?

It was kind of amazing to watch and hear the media reactions to President Chavez's speech at the UN as he stole the limelight from those other Presidents, Bush and Ahmadinejad.

I apologise of course for putting those two names, Bush and Ahmadinejad so close together as I know that Mr. Bush did his utmost to avoid meeting his counterpart at the UN. In fact, the Bush administration did all in its power to ensure that Mr. Ahmadinejad had little or no exposure to the American public through the mass media.

I, of course, applaud this effort! The American people have absolutely no need to hear Mr. Ahmadinejad speak with reporters or answer their questions. We've seen how tart and irritated Mr. Bush can be when he is confronted with pointed questions. Our reporters could very well have found a number of pertinent and even barbed questions they could have tossed to Mr. Ahmadinejad. This could have led to embarrassment, perhaps even an international crisis which could have led to Mr. Bush being forced to attack Iran before planned, that is to say, before the elections. That could have terrible consequences!

But I digress, the subject was supposed to have been Mr. Chavez saying that he smelled sulphur, called Mr. Bush "El Diablo" and even crossed himself! That was really out of order -- he should have let a priest do it properly and sprinkled holy water on the UN podium!

Frankly though, Mr. Bush, in his speeches about evil -- evil nations and national leaders -- has, in fact, opened up for this sort of rhetorical excess. By the way, Professor Cole wrote better about this than I ever could.

In all fairness, Mr. Chavez does have a few gripes about the Bush administration which perhaps may have colored his views somewhat. It is common knowledge that the US both supported and was in some ways responsible for the attempted coup against the Venezuelan president as well as funding attempts to oust him from his post in a recall referendum. For some reason the Venezuelan voters are both stupid and irresponsible and continue to elect Mr. Chavez. Almost the entire press and television media reflect the views of their owners and rail against him to no avail, the voters continue to give him a solid 60% majority of which even Mr. Bush could be envious. With a majority like that, who needs to fix elections!

What surprised me most about the whole brahouha was how little attention has been paid to Mr. Chavez's most pointed gripe -- that Mr. Bush acts as if he owns the world, that and his plug for Naom Chomsky's book, "Hegemony or Survival".

My personal bitch about the whole affair is how hard it was for me to find Chavez's money quote, the one that hit the nail on the damn head, "...the hegemonic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk the very survival of the human species." Excuse my French, but that is the fucking truth.


It is a fact that the great majority of people in the world see our President as an arrogant SOB*, and it is a pity that most Americans for some reason either are not aware of this or don't understand why people feel that way.

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* I meant of course, "Son of a Bush", and no real offense