Bush vs. Chavez: The Imperial President and the Bolivarian Democrat

Bush's woes just keep piling up on him. The summit of hemispheric leaders he attended in Argentina was a total embarrassment, revealing the emperor has no clothes. Bush did manage to avoid shaking hands with his main adversary at the summit, Hugo Chavez. But the president of Venezuela stole the show, drawing 35,000 to hear him speak at a packed stadium. In Bush's only comment on the massive demonstrations against his stay in Argentina, he lamely joked with the country's president, Nestor Kirchner, "It's particularly not easy to host, perhaps, me."

Declaring “I will of course be polite” in the presence of Chavez, Bush waited until he flew off to Brazil to levy a savage attack on the leader of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela: "Ensuring social justice for the Americas requires choosing between two competing visions," he proclaimed at a banquet. "One offers a vision of hope. It is founded on representative government, integration in the world community, and a faith in the transformative power of freedom in individual lives...the other seeks to roll back the democratic progress...by playing to fear, pitting neighbor against neighbor, and blaming others for their own failures to provide for their people."

This Orwellian declaration upended the realities of Chavez's Venezuela and Bush's America. Elected to the presidency in 1998, Chavez received 56 percent of the vote, while as the world knows Bush in the 2000 elections lost the popular vote to his Democratic opponent.