while we're sittin' here reading the new yorker together

[click image]

Let's dance some sugarplums around in our heads....

Within a single soliloquy, he comes up with rhymes, breaks into song, riffs on his own words, gets angry, cracks jokes, and loops back to where he started. His speeches can be highly entertaining, but it is sometimes difficult to know if he means what he says or has simply been carried away by his own oratory.
...

(Chávez has called Putin one of his “buenos amigos”)...

...Chávez has been one of the few people outside Castro’s immediate family who are allowed to see him. He has taken it upon himself to visit the Old Man regularly and to cheer him up.

“For me, Fidel is like a father. Like a beacon. Fidel is, I believe, irreplaceable,” Chávez told me. “He is a giant of the twentieth century, and, just as he entered its history, he has also entered into that of the twenty-first. And there he is, even now, doing everything he can to keep on fighting what he calls the battle of ideas, until his last breath.”

...

In official circles in Caracas, I found a near-total disconnect with the mood in Colombia. Venezuela’s Foreign Minister, Nicolás Maduro, dismissed the public’s support for Uribe as the product of “a media dictatorship, with the means of communication in the hands of the most rancid, racist, retrograde oligarchy on the continent.”

...

[Venezuelan Interior Minister] Rodríguez Chacín said that the FARC wanted peace, “but a different kind of peace from what Colombia’s oligarchy has in mind.” Colombia, he said, was the United States’ “last bastion, practically the last secure beachhead it has in Latin America. So the real enemy, behind this whole circumstance, even more so than the Colombian oligarchy, is the Empire.” (In Bolivarian Venezuela, “the Empire” is the United States.)

I just love it.