From ABC
News Australia

Blame Bush if anything happens to me:
Chavez

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says President George W Bush would be to
blame if anything happened to him, after an American evangelist said the US
should assassinate the democratically-elected, leftist leader.

Mr Chavez, a former soldier who often accuses the United States of plotting
to kill him, was reacting to conservative evangelist Pat Robertson who said on
Monday that US officials should execute the Venezuelan president.

Mr Robertson later apologised, but his comments have illustrated the deep
political gulf that has opened up between the United States and one of its
biggest oil suppliers since Mr Chavez was elected in 1998.

“He was expressing the wishes of the US elite… If anything happens to me
then the man responsible will be George W Bush. He will be the assassin,” Mr
Chavez said at a public event.

“This is pure terrorism.”

Mr Robertson, the founder of the Christian Coalition and a leader of the
Christian right that has backed Mr Bush, said that if Mr Chavez “thinks we’re
trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do
it.”

He retracted his comments on Wednesday, saying he spoke in frustration over
Mr Chavez’s constant accusations that Washington was plotting against him.

The White House has kept quiet despite calls by Venezuela and religious
leaders for Mr Bush to repudiate Mr Robertson’s remarks.

The US State Department said that Mr Robertson spoke as a “private citizen”
and called the remarks “inappropriate.”

“The White House is aware of the electoral importance of preachers like
Robertson, who command millions of dollars and millions of voters,” said
Riordan Roett, professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced
International Studies.

“Robertson’s comments represent a conservative sector of the American
public that is highly nationalistic and at times bombastic,” Roett said.

Mr Robertson is close to Bush’s Republican Party and ran as a presidential
primary candidate in 1988.

In apologising, Mr Robertson could not resist a final dig: “When faced with
the threat of a … dictator in our own hemisphere, would it not be wiser to
wage war against one person rather than finding ourselves down the road locked
in a bitter struggle with a whole nation?”

Relations between Caracas and Washington have soured since Mr Chavez
survived a brief 2002 coup, which he says was planned and funded by the US.

-Reuters/AFP

Now we see how the few words uttered by one of our own religious fanatics can
affect the nation as a whole. Robertson has publicly laid claim to getting Bush
elected in 2000 and 2004 and Bush never denies the impact Robertson has had in
motivating the Christian right in voting for him. Now Bush will not come out and
denounce the words of Robertson, most likely because of his “loyalty”. Loyalty
is a great thing but ties must be severed when one party goes to the extreme.

Casey Sheehan was loyal to his country and went to Iraq to fight and he paid
the ultimate price for his loyalty by dying. George Bush won’t honor that
loyalty by talking to Cindy Sheehan now, so he apparently only uses loyalty as a
crutch when it benefits him. That’s not loyalty, that is greed.