President Bush ended many New Yorkers' gridlock nightmares by leaving the city yesterday, but he - and the rest of the U.S. delgation to the United Nations - missed Venezulan President Hugo Chavez's speech. And what a speech it was: Chavez called Bush "the devil," said it smelled of sulfur (since Bush had stood there), and showed said Americans should be reading Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance instead of "watching Superman and Batman movies." Yeah, a big F-U to Bush and Hollywood! The NY Times reported laughs and gasps during his speech, because the General Assembly is normally a staid crowd. (The NY Times also reported how Chavez's regret was that he never met Chomsky before he died, pointing out that Chomsky is actually alive.) And, to think, people were worried about what Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would say (though Chavez didn't deny the Holocaust happened in his speech.)
Our government wasn't very amused - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Chavez's speech was "not becoming for a head of state" while U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton said that a "junior note-taker" was present for the U.S., because that how the U.S. rolls "when governments like that speak."
Chavez ended his day at Cooper Union, where he called himself a "friend" of the U.S. and, as the Hamilton Spectator reports, he "compared the Bush administration's actions to those of the Nazis and said the U-S president should be brought before an international tribunal."
Photograph of Chavez speaking at the United Nations by Julie Jacobsen/AP
