Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the hemisphere’s idiot, kept the heat up and bolstered his domestic street creds by refusing to accept Larry Palmer as our U.S. ambassador. Palmer is the White House nominee for ambassador who is awaiting Senate confirmation.
In response, the Obama administration revoked the visa of the Venezuelan ambassador to the U.S. Bernardo Alvarez who was out of the country at the time. Great move by the State Department and the President. What we have down there in Venezuela, aside from a maniacal communist dictator, is another Kim Jong Ill of the West that is building his political career on hating the United States and supporting all sorts of things that can ultimately bring harm to the United States.
Both sides have shown firmly entrenched stances and no willingness to compromise in the past week as the U.S. government revoked the Venezuelan ambassador’s visa in response to Chavez’s refusal to accept the chosen U.S. envoy.
“Much of the cooperation between the United States and Venezuela in recent years has involved lower-level and lower-profile individuals and agencies than the ambassadors, so the immediate fallout will be limited,” said Shannon O’Neil, a fellow for Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
“But this latest round of escalating tensions ends any hope for calmer relations or more expansive cooperation. Demonizing the United States remains too important a political foil for Chavez,” O’Neil said.
This news account does not say what input Sec. of State Clinton had in the decision, but I’m reminded of a James Carville quote, when he said ‘if Hillary gave [Obama] one of her balls, they’d both have two.’ Regardless of how it came about, Obama did the right thing.
