Fangs come out from right wing clerics...as usual

Pat Robertson has called for assassinating the Venezeulan president, Hugo Chavez, who, in addition to surviving an unpopular coup, has won two elections--including a referendum--in the past several years. And unlike a certain president in the US that Robertson supports, Chavez has maintained high poll ratings.

Robertson is afraid of Chavez because Chavez uses oil revenue to help people, unlike the Saudis, who do use oil as a weapon against the US. Chavez remains committed to selling oil to the US through Citgo oil stations, interestingly enough--though for some reason he's okay with selling a majority stake to the dreaded oil companies. To support this point, here is an interesting quote from a snarky and elitist article on KPBS' (San Diego public t.v.) web site on the 2004 election in Venezuela:

"Chavez has siphoned $1.7 billion dollars from the hulking, state-run Petroleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA as it is known worldwide, to pay for literacy programs, expanded educational programs, mobile clinics and subsidized markets for the country's poor, who make up more than 60 percent of the population. Cuba, meanwhile, has shipped thousands of medics to the country's hardscrabble barrios in return for cut-rate Venezuelan crude. As oil analyst Lawrence Goldstein, president of the New York-based Petroleum Industry Research Foundation, put it, 'Oil has allowed Chavez to be all things to all people.'"

The woman who wrote that ought to be ashamed. Cheney "siphons" money for himself and his company Haliburton. It is not siphoning when one uses oil proceeds to help an impoverished people. Notice also the quote from the president of the petrol industry foundation, attacking Chavez for having the audacity to use oil proceeds to benefit the people of Venezuela. "How dare he!?" these economic royalists (fascists?) cry.

Pat Robertson has essentially issued a "fatwa" no different than if he was a fundamentalist Muslim cleric. Birds of a feather...