Alo El Presidente! posted by Richard Seymour

You've got to love Chavez. He comes to London, much maligned, calls Bush a terrorist, promises cheap oil for poor Europeans, tells an ITN journalist not to be so stupid (for asking why he didn't meet Blair), supports Brian Haw, converts the FT to some befuddled racial theory about Latinos, quotes Rosa Luxemburg, forces the BBC to cave in through a network of Chavistaz and has dinner with Ken Livingstone - all without being shot.

Here's Livingstone interviewed about it on Radio 4. Here's Pilger on the topic, and here's a very biased segment on Jeremy Vine's show in which Vine carefully manages the show on behalf of the coup advocate and multifarious blogger, Aleksander Boyd, "calling from Millbank", against the criticisms of John Rees. Mr Boyd, who has been given plenty of space in The Times and elsewhere to explain his crackpot views, wonders how "democracy can be protected from itself", and concludes "violence is the only recourse left". Not on the radio segment, of course - he's a better PR man for the oligarchy than that. Here. Likewise, coup supporter Maria Corina Machado. Time was, supporters of the Nicaraguan death squads were being puffed by the US as democracy activists. How Washington must yearn for those days...