Hugo Chavez: “The Stupid People From Fox News”

Hugo Chavez, the fiery leftist president of Venezuela, had a run-in with Fox News yesterday in which he called the network confused and “stupid.” It’s hard to come up with a minute-and-a-half soundbite that could be so thoroughly satisfying to both halves of the American electorate, but Chavez managed to do it.

In some respects, the interview plays like a conservative’s fantasy of How the World Works: Chavez, the head of the United Socialist Party, deflects a question about his friendship with Ahmadinejad by saying, on the advice of his other friend Sean Penn, that the network is stupid. “Sean Penn told me about you — the stupid people from Fox News,” he sneeringly says through an interpreter. “Not you, of course.”All Chavez needs to complete the picture is a supervillain costume with axises stitched to the sides.

But while it’s not politically expedient for anyone to the right of Sean Penn to really be into Chavez, there’s a lot to his comments that many progressives might agree with, even if they’d rather not admit it given the source. Chavez says that Fox’s “mind is confused” and spins into a media criticism lecture: Fox focuses on bogeymen like Ahmadinejad (and, for that matter, Hugo Chavez), but ignores the war in Iraq. Fox “supported President Bush, but criticizes Obama because he is black.” And that’s why “[Fox's] mind is filled with poison.” No word on whether Fox smells of sulfur.

Here’s the video:

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