Things are heating up between the United States and Venezuela. Hugo Chavez threatened to stop exporting Venezuelan oil to the U.S. (Venezuela is the 5th largest oil producer in the world, exporting 1.3 million barrels per day to the U.S. alone). Meanwhile, Venezuela is building a large-scale satellite tevelision channel that will present Latin America as it really is, not the way that CNN and other biased U.S.-based news agencies choose to portray it, so the people of Latin America will start to see the reality of Latin America, not a sugary, watered-down version from U.S. media. And the US State Department is all bent out of shape because religious fanatic Pat Robertson broadcast that the United States should assassinate Chavez. Right or wrong, folks in Venezuelan are obviously unhappy about this, and the State Department is scurrying to condemn Robertson for being an outspoken idiot. Robertson's actual words were, "We don't need another $200bn war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with." I'm not saying Chavez is a great guy or anything (apparently he's not), but there are certain things a high-profile radio broadcaster should avoid talking about, and one of them is discussing which world leaders the US military should assassinate.

And now that everyone is paying attention, Pat Robertson has come forward to say, "I didn't say 'assassination', I said our special forces could take him out. Take him out could be a number of things including kidnapping. There are a number of ways of taking out a dictator from power besides killing him. I was misinterpreted." So did he really mean we should send special forces down to Venezuela to kidnap Chavez? Or did he actually mean we should devise a scheme to assassinate the leader? Personally, I think it's nothing short of expected that Robertson would tell everyone he did not mean assassination, especially since it's a crime in the United States to assassinate the leader of any other country.