Right-wing messianic Pat Robertson made like a good Christian last week, with the view that assassinating Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez was an idea filed in the top drawer of geopolitical sense. Bush then made him apologise. His comments are similar in vein and content to the open discussion on Israeli radio last year of the merits of assassinating Arafat. Indeed, the 700 Club man has received a number of awards and endorsements from Zionist extremists in the US and it's not beyond the realms of possibility that some comparative sessions have occurred between the Christian Broadcasting Network and his ultra Zionist allies (also, check out the shiteater's reasons for supporting Liberia's ex-dictator Charles Taylor).

Prat Rabdison is worthy of his own regular slot for Culling, but Venezuela is the bigger issue. Undoubtedly, he is just part of the ongoing (and depressingly familiar) campaign to manufacture public support for "doing something about" the recalcitrant major oil supplier (1.3 million barrels a day head for US refineries), so it matters not whether Rev Rabid was made to apologise for his comments, particularly as he simply reduced the threat to Chavez from murder to kidnap. Indeed, an ex-CIA headcase/apologist for the man's views was duly strapped into the Fox News chair to casually smear Chavez with even more dumb-founded comments. The last comments from this interview with ‘Wayne Simmons' are astonishing. 
 
Cull touched on this last year after Chavez won the recall vote, the second of his presidency. Here again, media organs such as the Heritage Foundation saw the situation through blind American eyes, as if this was the only perspective that matters. Reductio ad absurdum: You continue to pay more at the pumps, and it's his fault: that's an even better reason than invading Iraq. Result: the man in the red beret and friendship with Castro is to blame for domestic fuel prices (and millions of US citizens' relative poverty).
 
The major theatres of Afghanistan and Iraq are still putting on a satisfactory gorefest - with American insistence that the constitution be signed, sealed and delivered, forcing Iraqi politicians to make decisions on sectarian rather than ideological grounds. But it appears to Cull that any gap in the violence associated with the whore on terror will be easily filled by hawkish threats and more than covert action towards Chavez' regime from the Reich's Reich, eventually leading to an attack. Some of these links' reports suggest a familiar pattern in ‘media preparation' for such an outcome.

Z Mag Central American activist Toni Solo recently concluded: "The United States authorities are already planning how to cope without Venezuelan oil imports. That might just be sensible contingency planning. Equally, it might signal sinister preparations for some kind of military action against Venezuela once sufficient troops have been withdrawn from Iraq. In 2001 the US supplied detailed information for NATO forces war gaming a military intervention called Plan Balboa - the hypothetical target was a country identical to Venezuela."
 
So Chavez may be on borrowed time before the shocking awe of US invasion; they are bored with covert ops in their backyard; they want a full activity centre from P250 of Argos (military procurement section).
 
Domestically, the Chavez administration is a benevolent one that has to deal with an institutionally corrupt and violent police force that are, on the whole, affiliated to the state in name only. As in much of Latin America, the police are the tool of the totalitarian political elite. This demographic slither continues to control the vast majority of wealth in Venezuela, although Hugo is doing his best to take back in to public control these private monopolies. If Chavez can reform the police then he will have cleared a 38-foot-high hurdle in the journey toward creating a real citizen's democracy and removed a notorious threat from within.
 
President Chavez's successful efforts at increasing literacy and numeracy among the poor further exposes the widening socio-economic gulf and lack of state welfare provision in America. Chavez, aware of this aspect, then addressed American's underclasses with the message: "Come, buy my cheap gasoline."
 
Get in there Hugo. His visit to New York next month should be a hyped occasion.