You may be familiar with Hugo Chavez. He's the democratically-elected president of Venezuela. He's also a socialist and doesn't like the United States very much. Oh, and he's bosom buddies with Fidel Castro.

The United States doesn't like Hugo Chavez much, either. Back in the early days of the Bush Administration, before we believed in crap like democracy and freedom, we wholeheartedly endorsed an illegal coup that replaced Chavez with someone who wasn't democratically elected. Rather than deride the action as undemocratic and demand that Chavez be re-instated, we formally recognized the new government hours after the takeover!

Memory hole? What's that?

Anyway, we don't like Hugo Chavez very much. And Pat Robertson really doesn't like him. Pat Robertson is a televangelist and founder of The Christian Broadcasting Network. He's an evangelical Protestant and is best friends with such notable asshats as Jerry Falwell. In the tradition of loving one's neighbor and turning the other cheek to your enemy, here's what good Christian Pat Robertson had to say yesterday about Hugo Chavez:

We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. [...] We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with. [...] 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. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war ... and I don't think any oil shipments will stop.

You know, Pat, you're right. Jesus would have assassinated Hugo Chavez. Because Jesus hates commies, as the Cold War proved beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Don't forget that on September 13, Robertson suggested on his show The 700 Club that September 11 was a punishment from God because America had fallen into sin:

The ACLU has got to take a lot of blame for this. And I know I'll hear from them for this, but throwing God ... successfully with the help of the federal court system ... throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad...I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America ... I point the thing in their face and say you helped this happen.

For encouraging the murder of a democratically-elected president because he didn't agree with his politics, and also for suggesting that 3,000 people were killed on September 11 because of the homo-gays and the ACLU (of which I am now a card-carrying member; I actually got my card just now), Pat Robertson is a long-overdue SEDHE Villain of the Forever.