Boy, this guy really gets to you Tom. You have real estate holdings there?

I'm not saying he's not a thug and a creep. That's a given. Just why is what he does so important to you other than holding him up as this shining light of the threat of global communism?

See, that's your thing. Gotta have a boogeyman cause you know that Chavez, if he's left to fester and bluster on his own probably just continues to lose relevance in the future and eventually he'll go down like all common criminals and people reveling in political excess. However, if you make him an enemy of the free world you keep him in the spotlight and stir up the nationalism in his country that keeps him at the reins, you give yourself this thing you can throw in the face of anyone left of you, this unstoppable path we're all headed down.

Just imagine if Castro had been left to flounder in his poverty ridden country without us and the Russians making him a player in the Cold War. It's the only thing that protected him from an assassin's bullet over all those years. The nationalism that was stirred up with him thumbing his nose at the superpower to the North made him a martyr to his struggling people. Had we simply yawned and laughed at him, his 15 minutes of fame would have dimmed quickly.

Art