Oh, stop it already with that frantic Latin American alarm stuff. Stop it, willyuh? Just STOP IT!

This morning’s headlines shout with alarm that Hugo Chavez is leading in Venezuela’s presidential elections.

Yeah, yeah, I know. He’s not only a populist and a nationalist but maybe even a Marxist. Even worse – horror of horrors – he branded President Bush with the mark of Satan, declaring Bush to be “the devil” and telling the UN back in September, “I smell sulfur.”
http://www.boston.com/news/world/latinamerica/articles/2006/09/22/
venezuelan_chavez_wants_to_be_worlds_anti_us_voice/

What’s the best way to deal with the Chavez anti-United States stance?

Nobody in the present regime in Washington is going to listen to this, but the best ploy is to reach down and give Chavez a great big bear hug. Love him to ruination.

As we finally learned in Viet Nam after a war that wasted thousands of American lives… as we finally learned in China, to which we now go to finance President Bush’s regime of financial mismanagement…nations busy gobbling up wealth at the groaning board of commerce have no time to plunge full time into Marxist dialectic and major league repression.

And they’re certainly not going to bite the hand that feeds them.

The quickest way to undo Fidel Castro’s form of Marxism would have been to trade with him and readdict Cuba to U.S. price supports for sugar. Similarly, Chavez's economy ought to get force fed by us like a Strassbourg goose. Ditto a roomful of Latin American nations whose poverty and inequities of wealth feed their anti-Uncle-Sam-ism.

Of course, just as it has elsewhere, the Bush administration will go in exactly the wrong direction on Chavez. I wouldn’t be completely taken by surprise if some White House directed agency attempts the overthrow or assassination of Chavez, once again aping James Bond and the Russian secret police.

No no, guys. Believe me. You don’t want to off Chavez. You want to seduce him.

But what to I know compared to that genius, Boy George?

Addendum:

Our last post had Russian Colonel Alexander Litvinenko lying ill in a London hospital after having been poisoned – presumably by Russian agents – with thallium.

Litvinenko died yesterday. And the poison, whatever it was, turned out not to be thallium after all. Nobody seems to know what it was. Livinenko’s final words: “The bastards got me, but they won’t get everybody.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aFmK1K3mzIV8&refer=home