In Defense of Hugo Chávez’s Outburst

By Colman McCarthy

Bless Hugo Chavez. In a mid-September speech at the United Nations, the president of Venezuela called George W. Bush a devil—and a malodorous one at that, who left a smell of sulfur on the speaker’s podium where the previous day he declared his love of peace.

For speaking undiplomatically among the diplomats, Chavez was pummeled. “He’s an everyday thug,” said Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat’s leading lady in the House. John Boehner, the Republican House majority leader, labeled Chavez “a power hungry autocrat.” CBS News assessed him as “a blowhard.” Brit Hume, Fox’s slanter, spread fear as recklessly as the Bush administration he so admires by speculating that Chavez has so much oil money that “he can give it to terrorists” and “maybe he’s doing it.” Chavez “would be much more effective if he would say something that’s true,” said Truth-teller Bill (“I did not have sex with that woman”) Clinton.

Critics of Hugo Chavez’s devil comment might have a case if Bush were not presiding over the hell of secret CIA dungeons these past years. They would have a case if uncharged and lawyerless prisoners were not rotting in the hell of Guantanamo since 2001. They would have a case if the Bush presidency had not turned much of Iraq into a living hell for its citizens. They would have a case if Bush had not spent much of September pressing Congress to let him continue to flout the Geneva Conventions and Constitution by allowing the CIA to torture people on the suspect list.

If hell, as Christian theologians insist, is where the devil does his torturing, then Chavez is close to having it right metaphorically and possibly literally: the president’s devilish policies have created hell on earth for those trapped in dungeons and doomed in war zones.

I don’t remember an outcry from the Chavez critics when Bush demonized the Venezuelan president as a tyrant and dictator. They found it acceptable after 9/11 for Bush to label people “evil doers” and turn loose American pilots to recklessly and lawlessly bomb the Afghanistan countryside in wild hopes of killing them. It was fine for Bush to degrade whole countries in his “axis of evil” speech. Why does Bush get a pass when he smears his enemies as “Islamic-fascists”?

Could it be that Chavez was giving his fellow president a large dose of his own sour medicine? Or merely counter-attacking Bush’s earlier attacks against him?

Instead of blasting the Venezuelan, his critics should have been thanking him profusely for his generosity to low-income Americans. Through Citgo, the Houston-based energy company that is owned by Chavez’s government, he is expanding his heating oil program to help poor families. Teamed with Citizen’s Energy, the Boston non-profit run by former Congressman Joseph Kennedy, more than 40 million gallons of home heating oil were supplied last year. This year, it is 100 million—from 180,000 families to 459,000 families.

How many poor families has the profit-rich Exxon similarly helped? Or Chevron? Or BP?

The Chavez speech to the UN, which received strong applause, was another reminder that America’s foreign policies are held in contempt by much of the world, especially by the victims of the policies. The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice-Powell-Wolfowtiz invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, funded by Congress, stands before the world as both a political disaster and a moral horror.

The candor of President Chavez should be celebrated, not derided.