At UN, a smiling, joking, "crossing" Chavez calls Bush a devil...

...and in the US, some folks have freaked out. But for crying out loud, Bush calls people "evil," I mean, capital-E "Evil" on a regular basis. Don't dish it out if you can't (etc.), Bush-baby. Anyway, other folks in the US have calmly reported the event. Check out Democracy Now!'s appraisal, including a long video/audio clip of Chavez's speech, which begins very well, with obvious humour and irony, much to the delight of many in the General Assembly. I guess it all comes down to this: If you have to have it explained to you, you'll never understand. I suppose that all us meat-eaters would probably resent how talking cows would talk about us, too.

Here's a partial transcript courtesy of DN!:

"...the American empire is doing all it can to consolidate its hegemonic system of domination, and we cannot allow them to do that. We cannot allow world dictatorship to be consolidated. The world tyrant’s statement -- cynical, hypocritical, full of this imperial hypocrisy, from the need they have to control everything -- they say they want to impose a democratic model, but that's their democratic model. It's the false democracy of elites, and I would say a very original democracy that's imposed by weapons and bombs and firing weapons. What a strange democracy. Aristotle might not recognize it, or others who are at the root of democracy. What type of democracy do you impose with marines and bombs?

"The President of the United States yesterday said to us right here in this room, and I’m quoting, 'Anywhere you look, you hear extremists telling you you can escape from poverty and recover your dignity through violence, terror, and martyrdom.' Wherever he looks, he sees extremists. And you, my brother, he looks at your color, and he says, ‘Oh, there’s an extremist.’

"Evo Morales, the worthy president of Bolivia, looks like an extremist to him. The imperialists see extremists everywhere. It's not that we are extremists. It's that the world is waking up. It's waking up all over, and people are standing up. I have the feeling, dear world dictator, that you are going to live the rest of your days as a nightmare, because the rest of us are standing up, all those of us who are rising up against American imperialism, who are shouting for equality, for respect, for the sovereignty of nations. Yes, you can call us extremists, but we are rising up against the empire, against the model of domination.

"The President then -- and this he said himself -- he said, 'I have come to speak directly to the populations in the Middle East to tell them that my country wants peace.' That's true. If we walk in the streets of the Bronx, if we walk around New York, Washington, San Diego, in any city, San Antonio, San Francisco, and we ask individuals, the citizens of the United States, 'What does this country want? Does it want peace?' They will say, 'Yes.' But the government doesn’t want peace. The government of the United States doesn't want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war. It wants peace, but what’s happening in Iraq? What happened in Lebanon? Palestine? What's happening? What's happened over the last hundred years in Latin America and in the world? And now threatening Venezuela. New threats against Venezuela, against Iran.

"He spoke to the people of Lebanon: 'Many of you,' he said, 'have seen how your homes and communities were caught in the crossfire.' How cynical can you get? What a capacity to lie shamefacedly. The bombs in Beirut? With millimetric precision? This is crossfire? He's thinking of a western, when people would shoot from the hip and somebody would be caught in the crossfire. This is a imperialist fire, fascist, assassin, genocidal. The empire and Israel firing on the people of Palestine and Lebanon, that is what happened. And now we hear we're suffering, because we see the homes destroyed."