Some of your writers are just so naive. They think that being an actor or model so occupies your attention that any other thoughts - and god forbid, politics! - could enter their mind is impossible. And on this assumption, which is just stupid as well as naive, they begin their rants. I'm not sure essays that merely posit the values of celebrities as gleaned by the authors through telepathy ought to be published at all, because they contribute nothing to public discourse. The jerk who wrote this - if I may indulge his habit - is thinking, oh, I'm going to get published in Slate and people will think I'm a loyal American (even though I would happily deny these folks the dignity of their own intellect uninterpreted by me). Hugo Chavez came to be viewed as an enemy of the state - by the oil company executives who are America's President and Vice President, at any rate - when he took over oil company holdings whose rapacious use of Venezuela's resources left an entire nation in poverty. Why not take them over? What did they ever do for anyone but themselves? I would like to see the US nationalize the oil companies under a national security order so that our energy future cannot ever again be in doubt, and so that the countless billions earned by these companies from humanity's natural resources may remain in the pockets of ordinary Americans now paying $3+ for a gallon of gas. I think we'd find safe ways to drill wherever we need to if theat money was going to stay in our own pocket. When I was a kid, a lot of oil came from oil wells in West Texas, and in my Oklahoma town in 1963, I was paying 14 cents a gallon. ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco - are you kidding me? These giant conglomerates are extranational, supranational, antinational and ought to belong to America.

Uh, before you sit down next time and rattle off whatever's on your mind, get the facts straight first. The Venezuelan oil industry was essentially in the hands of the multinational oil companies until 1976. In 1977 It was nationalized, and the sole stockholder became the Republic of Venezuela. Within 20 years the new, nationalized oil company (PdVSA) had acquired the reputation of being the most efficient, transparent and productive state-owned oil company in the world. The rest is history. Look it up. You'll find that since Chavez fired some 20,000 PdVSA/state employees in 2002 and 2003 production has fallen by half, and the payroll has doubled (it's "21st century socialism," remember?). You're just one of many, many naive people out there who have fallen for the political line that Chavez's Goebbelsian propaganda machine has been churning out for the past 5 years. Sloganeering is easier than reading history, but if you read a little history you wouldn't be regurgitating nonsense.