Mocking and Belittling... Pat Robertson

When submarine news is slow, I fall back on the secondary purpose of this blog -- mocking and belittling general foolishness. Normally, my barbs are directed at those on the left, because they're usually the ones saying the stupid things. But the stupidest comment I saw today comes from none other than Pat Robertson, who thinks we should look into assassinating Venezualean President Hugo Chavez.
"You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it," Robertson said. "It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war ... and I don't think any oil shipments will stop."

Now, don't get me wrong -- Chavez is an idiot, and has the chance of causing some real problems in Latin America and the Caribbean basin. The thing is, with the notable exception of Cuba, Latin American tinpot dictators tend to get "taken care of" by their own armed forces, usually sooner rather than later. I expect that this will happen with Chavez within a year or two (or earlier if he tries something really stupid.) I don't normally care how the "non-aligned" portion of the world views U.S. motives, since I'm pretty sure I know our underlying motivation: If you don't attack us or our friends, or steal our stuff, we'll pretty much leave you alone. (I understand that it wasn't like that as little as 40 years ago, but we've evolved a little; otherwise, one could claim that France is about to occupy Algeria and Vietnam because they did those things fairly recently.) What we don't need, though, is someone who probably has some influence with certain people in the White House saying stupid things like this... it's just tacky.

Going deep...

Update 1334 24 Aug: It appears that Pat thinks he was misinterpreted:

"I said our special forces could take him out. Take him out could be a number of things including kidnapping," Robertson said on his "The 700 Club" television program.
"There are a number of ways of taking out a dictator from power besides killing him. I was misinterpreted," Robertson added.

Well, Pat, maybe the fact that you said, "If he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it" as part of the same train of thought that got most of us confused. Now that I see what you really meant, though, I guess I should take back what I said earlier -- you're not tacky, you're a full blown loon. If that's the best you can come up with after two days, you're further out of touch with reality than I thought.