Any Enemy Of My Country Is A Friend Of Mine

A article in today Wall Street Journal (subscribe already, won't ya?) details how Hugo Chavez has become The New Icon Of Radical Chic:

Hugo Chávez, the fiery president of Venezuela, has called President Bush a "donkey," a "coward," a "drunkard," and, most famously, "Mr. Danger." Such statements win him few friends in Washington, but they recently brought together a dozen ardent supporters here.

Over a cramped conference table in a Chinatown loft, the group, including several engineers, a student, a nurse and couple of full-time activists, met to plot their next move. They'd helped lead a pro-Chávez demonstration in Washington just a few weeks earlier. And a pro-Chávez movie night seemed old hat.

Jorge Marin, a Boston engineer, had a different idea: a birthday party for Mr. Chávez's idol, Simón Bolívar, who helped liberate South America from Spanish rule. They quickly started planning a "Boogie for Bolívar" party, complete with a birthday cake, on July 24, when "the Liberator" would have turned 223. Two young women also pushed for a dance band.

It's hard to say what the most pathetic aspect of these losers is, their insipid political beliefs or the vast wasteland of their social lives.

To a slice of the American left, Mr. Chávez has become a revolutionary hero nearly on a par with Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. The 51-year-old Venezuelan president has used his nation's oil riches to prop up Mr. Castro's regime and improve the education and health care of Venezuela's poor. His dream is to spread the Venezuelan brand of socialism across Latin America.

Human-rights groups and the Bush administration warn that he is also dangerously centralizing power, emasculating Venezuela's judiciary and threatening press freedoms. Chavistas wave off those complaints as the ravings of the anti-Chávez U.S. media.

"My political belief is that the U.S. is a horrendous empire that needs to end," says Jake Irwin, a Chávez supporter at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., which is pretty much what Mr. Chávez argues. Every time Mr. Chávez clashes with Mr. Bush -- most recently over the Venezuelan's torpedoing of a U.S. effort to create a hemispheric free-trade agreement -- his stock rises with the amalgam of college students, antiglobalization protesters and graying allies of Central American rebels.

But don't you dare call them unpatriotic.