"Anti-Bush, and Mincing No Words:

Q & A with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez"

Lally Weymouth, Washington Post

Controversy and intrigue have swirled around Venezuela's Hugo Chavez
ever since he was elected president seven years ago and established himself
as a leftist force. Chavez's rising influence in Latin American politics,
his country's role as a major supplier of crude oil for U.S. refiners and
his close ties to Cuba's Fidel Castro have alarmed policymakers in the Bush
administration.

Last month, on his television show, the Rev. Pat Robertson
actually went so far as to suggest the United States should assassinate the
51-year-old Chavez. (Robertson later apologized.)

While Chavez was in New York last week for the gathering of world
leaders at the United Nations, he sat down with Newsweek–Washington Post's
Lally Weymouth. He spelled his dislike for the Bush administration and
described himself as a revolutionary. Dressed in a bright red shirt, he
noted that he was planning to stop in Havana on his way home so that he
could spend several hours talking with Castro.

Excerpts:

Q: The opposition in Venezuela feels that it has no space. The leaders of
Sumate [a group that supported a referendum vote on Chavez two years ago]
say you indicted them for receiving money from the U.S. National Endowment
for Democracy. Why?

Chavez: You cannot forget that this very opposition governed Venezuela between
1958 and 1998. If they feel like they have no space, it is because they have
been cooked in their own sauce. Between 1958 and 1998, Venezuela fell apart.
We ended the 20th century with poverty as we have never seen it. The economy
was totally destroyed. . . . Millions of Venezuelans were without education,
health care, jobs, housing. So if they feel they do not have any room to
act, it's their own fault.

But they have many rights: the right to demonstrate, the right to
participate in elections. The opposition is utterly divided. The
revolutionary forces are totally united. Recently, we had elections. We won
90 percent.

"Someone Tell the President the War Is Over"

Frank Rich, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/opinion/14rich.html">The New York Times

Like the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J Day, President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. "We will stay the course," he insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you mean we, white man?

A president can't stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own allies) won't stay with him. The approval rate for Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq plunged to 34 percent in last weekend's Newsweek poll — a match for the 32 percent that approved L.B.J.'s handling of Vietnam in early March 1968. (The two presidents' overall approval ratings have also converged: 41 percent for Johnson then, 42 percent for Bush now.) On March 31, 1968, as L.B.J.'s ratings plummeted further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election, commencing our long extrication from that quagmire.