King Hugo

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Look, it's our amusing photo of the day: "Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez waves to the crowd during a military parade to commemorate a failed coup attempt he led in 1992," as the Globe puts it.

Although there's nothing amusing about Chavez's tyranny. And there's nothing amusing about Chavez's support for Colombian narco-terrorist groups like the FARC and ELN -- as Robert Kaplan explains in Imperial Grunts, an exceptional book about the frontlines of the American Empire that I'm currently reading. And there's nothing amusing about anyone who still thinks that Chavez is anything other than a terrorism-enabling tyrant -- although there are leftist apologists who continue to look past his tyranny and embrace his anti-American radicalism (any enemy of America is a friend of theirs, so the tyranny-apologizing reasoning goes).

So why is this amusing? Perhaps it isn't. Or perhaps what's amusing, in an ironic sort of way, is the charade of Venezuelan democracy. This photo, it seems to me, captures that charade in action.