Venezuela’s Marxist strongman Hugo Chavez is the kind of anti-American that certain kinds of American leftists swoon over. In September 2006, he stood before the United Nations General Assembly in New York City to insult President George W. Bush, who had stood at the same podium the day before. He called Bush “the Devil” and made the sign of the cross, adding “and it smells of sulfur still today.” Chavez held up Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, a book by the famous linguist Noam Chomsky, a radical critic of U.S. foreign policy, and urged his audience to read it. Within days the book had jumped to the top 10 in sales at the Amazon and Barnes & Noble websites, and its publisher, Henry Holt, ordered a reprinting.
