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people
believed Chávez had merely verbalized what many other foreign leaders
thought about Bush but were afraid to say publicly. Like Chávez, they
were increasingly disturbed by the war in Iraq, the US government's
role in Israel, unfair trade practices, and the US cowboy-style domination
of the planet.
    If Chávez had not called Bush a devil, would as many people have
paid attention to him and his speech? As Washington Post columnist
Eugene Robinson wrote, "Can anyone name the last president of
Venezuela, or remember when a speech by any president of Venezuela
made such news?" Even some critics of Chávez acknowledged that the
speech won him political points around the world, if not in the United
States. "Chávez's speech achieved a great deal, and it is foolish to
pretend otherwise. He raised his own standing. He got the world to look
at him," former Reagan speechwriterPeggy Noonan wrote in The Wall Street Journal. "Everyone this weekend will be discussing what he said —
exactly what he said and how he said it. He shook things up . . . He broadened
his claimed base . . . He claimed as his constituency everyone
unhappy with the uni-polar world."
    At the time he spoke, Chávez was campaigning against the United
States for a nonpermanent seat on the UN Security Council. In the
end he failed to defeat the US candidate, Guatemala. Neither country
gained the two-thirds of votes required to secure the seat. Some interpreted
the results as a devastating loss for Chávez and evidence that
his comments at the United Nations were over the top. But there was
another way of looking at it: A Third World nation had battled the
world's only remaining superpower to a tie. Not bad.
    While Chávez's comments shocked many Americans, other US
leaders and public figures traded similar insults without provoking anywhere
near the same type of uproar. Rangel himself, the Democrat
from Harlem, had called Bush "Our Bull Connor," referring to the
infamous 1960s Alabama police chief who turned fire hoses and attack
dogs loose on civil rights marchers. Rangel also called the president
"a stone-cold alcoholic who found Jesus." In another case, during an
introduction of Senator Charles Schumer at a college commencement
in 2006, New York State controller Alan Hevesi said Schumer would
"put a bullet between the President's eyes if he could get away with it."
Hevesi quickly apologized, saying the comment was "beyond dumb."
In the 1990s right-wing radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh ridiculed
Chelsea Clinton, then thirteen, as the "White House dog." In 2001
he routinely referred to Democratic leader Tom Daschle, literally, as
"El Diablo" and carried on "at length about how Daschle may well be
Satan in soft-spoken disguise," according to the director of the media
watchdog group FAIR.
    If Chávez was taking off the gloves with Bush, and if he wasn't
apologizing, he had his reasons, no matter what the political cost in the
United States. The comments didn't come out of nowhere. The United
States was almost alone in the world inendorsing the 2002 coup to
overthrow him. Its support was so blatant that following Chávez's ouster
theUS ambassador to Venezuela, Charles Shapiro, had breakfast withPedro Carmona in the presidential palace on his first full day in office
after he eliminated the Congress, the Supreme Court, the constitution,
and every other vestige of democracy in the country. Declassified CIA
documents later revealed that the Bush administration had advance
knowledge of the coup but lied about the events, claimed it wasn't a
coup at all, and blamed Chávez for his own downfall. Documents also
disclosed that the US-funded National Endowment for Democracy, created
during the Reagan era, was pumping nearly $1 million a year into
Venezuela, largely to groups that supported or took part in the coup.
The money flow kept climbing, with new agencies such as USAID stepping
in with millions more, but the United States refused to divulge
where much of the