Chavez v. Bush – Round 1 to Chavez

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, whom as you may recall I have posted about before, is throwing a wrench into the Bush administration’s energy plans by offering cheap oil to America’s poor.

According to the New York Daily News, Chavez first said "If you want to eliminate poverty, you have to empower the poor, not treat them as beggars", but later added on a somewhat different note that “Americans must reorder their style of life" because "this planet cannot sustain" our "irrational" consumption, especially when it comes to oil.

So just what is Chavez getting at here? The odds of him offering cheap oil to poor Americans out of the goodness of his heart seem to me to be about the same as the odds of President Bush resigning his office tomorrow. I think Chavez is using his position as a supplier of oil to very brilliantly expose the notion of American invulnerability as the myth that it is. He is showing the rest of the world that the leaders of the United States do not control everything, can, in fact, be opposed successfully and that we Americans are not above accepting aid from a third world country in order to feed our addiction.

Tags: politics environment