It has to be tough to be a Republican candidate for president this year. As the recent debate showed, you not only have to run against the Democrats, you have to speak out against the Bush administration. For Republicans, that's unnatural behavior, as the Congress demonstrated the past six years.
Their problem is that the administration is running on vapors, almost out of gas. George Bush's comfort circle of Texans has shrunk to the size of a cookie. The intellectual firepower of people like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, who spearheaded the invasion of Iraq, is gone. The war drags on in the desert, and the Democrats in Congress are getting more uppity by the day. Scooter's headed for the lock-up. Even Condi has stashed the dominatrix outfit. The zip is gone, gone, gone.
All is not lost; the administration has a choice. It can drift along into irrelevant ennui for the next couple of years, or it can revitalize, rejuvenate and reinvigorate not only itself, but also the rest of the Republican Party along with it. As the great philosopher Lawrence Peter Berra once said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."
The way forward is blindingly simple, and can be done by applying a tried and true formula. Only two ingredients are needed: (1) An evildoer. (2) Oil. The best combination is an evildoer sitting on a big pot of oil, and luckily enough, we have one. No, not that one. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, is irrelevant to this discussion. America has had enough of the Middle East, and the Sunnis and the Shiites and the Kurds. Members of Congress can't tell them apart; how can regular Americans be expected to. We need a change of scenery.
No, our resident evildoer is one Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela. Here's a "modest proposal." It's time to pay Senor Chavez a little house call, 82nd Airborne style.
Just the other day, our Condi got into it with Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro. She couldn't wait for the Organization of American States (OAS) meeting to start. She started talking to reporters on the way to Panama about how bad it was that Chavez had shut down a TV station broadcasting things he didn't like. "I do not see how closing down an opposition (TV station), literally because they have taken you on and taken on your policies, can be seen as anything but anti-democratic." She urged an official OAS investigation. You go, girl.
Maduro responded: "The speech by the representative of the United States of America constitutes an unacceptable interventionism ... and we reject it." He thinks that Condi's speech is interventionism? Just you wait, boyo. You will see interventionism. Your boss deserves it. He nationalized big oil fields, taking money out of our multinational companies' pockets. He nationalized the telecommunications companies, pinching Verizon's earnings. He's helped pinch American consumers, too. Venezuela owns Citgo gas stations and is a big member of OPEC.
He's been a pain in the butt since he was elected in 1998. He's consorted with known guerilla leaders. He is building up his arms cache, making Brazil and Colombia very nervous. He reportedly has aided Middle Eastern terrorists. He got his pet legislature to grant him absolute power for 18 months. And, he insulted our president. He told the United Nations, "The devil came here yesterday," referring to Bush, who had spoken the day before, adding: "And it smells of sulfur still today."
Did we mention the oil? Venezuela is the fifth-largest oil producer in the world, the biggest in this hemisphere. They are sitting on 78 billion barrels of regular oil and an estimated 235 billion barrels of heavy crude oil in the Orinoco region southwest of Caracas. The reserves could rival Saudi Arabia's. We buy 60 percent of his oil now, but Chavez is looking to diversify his customer base, which could hurt us.
The case is clear. He's clearly an evildoer, a buddy and socialist acolyte of Fidel Castro and supporter of revolution around the continent. Nobody except Fidel would care. We'd be doing his people and the rest of the regional leaders a favor. Real democracy could flourish in Venezuela and be a model for the world.
The military logistics would be simpler than in Iraq. The supply lines would be lots shorter. Heck, they speak Spanish in Venezuela. We could land whole Spanish-speaking National Guard battalions over there while we clear out from Iraq and leave the Iraqis to slaughter each other. A corollary benefit is that we wouldn't have to worry about kicking out those gay Arabic speakers from the military that we need at the moment. We wouldn't need them.
Did we mention the oil?
This is an ideal time to get going on the project so that it will be ready by fall, following the marketing timetable set by Andy Card, president Bush's former chief of staff before we went into Iraq. By fall, President Bush will be energized, Democrats will be on the defensive, and our troops will be greeted in the streets of Caracas as heroes and liberators. It worked once, and you don't mess with success.
UPDATE: Today, the Times today ran an op-ed piece calling Chavez a "destablizing influence" on Latin America.