Have any fellow Dopers heard anything about Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez insulting German Chancellor Angela Merkle? (My apologies if I spelled her last name wrong.)
Supposedly, (according to a report from AP), he insulted her by saying something to the effect that her political party “shared the ideals of Adolph Hitler”.
He’s taking up the left-wing, populist, anti-Western country position that was abandoned after Castro lost support from the Soviets. By strategically antagonizing some people he gains the support of others, the group that opposes the “establishment”. Notice that he only goes after “Old Europe” and the United States.
It’s posturing, nothing more. It gets him in the papers and keeps his face on the TV.
It’s Merkel, incidentally (As a fellow Hamburger by birth I’d like to that to call her Merkle would be painting her as a Swabian, an insult if there ever was one (spoken as a Hamburger living in Swabia ))
It’s a very minor foreign news item here in Germany, and Mrs. Merkel seems to have decided not to make an issue of it (Chávez is considered a clown here anyway)
I chuckle every time I see the Heating Oil ads around Brooklyn. 1-800-Joe-4-Oil. It’s laughable that a country that can’t take care of it’s own people should give aid to the richest nation on the planet. Chavez is running his nation into the dirt, squandering record profits. It’s a damn shame, but I can’t help but chuckle when I see those ads.
The Joe-4-Oil phone number is for a subsidized oil program supported by Citgo, the state-owned Venezuelan oil company. In other words, the government of Venezuela is providing aid to poor(er) Americans. Many view this as a bit of political theater by Hugo Chavez, intended to make the U.S. look bad.
It’s not bad per se. I don’t think that this particular policy is hurting the Venezuelan economy. The thing is that there is this bit of political theater while Chavez’s policies in general are running his country into the ground.