"Once you define 'capitalism' as "things they don't control",..."

"...Their hatred makes perfect sense."

So said a commenter at Hit&Run's post about Hugo Chavez' big speech at Smokenhagen yesterday.

Then President Chavez brought the house down.

When he said the process in Copenhagen was “not democratic, it is not inclusive, but isn’t that the reality of our world, the world is really and imperial dictatorship…down with imperial dictatorships” he got a rousing round of applause.

When he said there was a “silent and terrible ghost in the room” and that ghost was called capitalism, the applause was deafening.

But then he wound up to his grand conclusion – 20 minutes after his 5 minute speaking time was supposed to have ended and after quoting everyone from Karl Marx to Jesus Christ - “our revolution seeks to help all people…socialism, the other ghost that is probably wandering around this room, that’s the way to save the planet, capitalism is the road to hell....let’s fight against capitalism and make it obey us.” He won a standing ovation.

Let's break this down for a moment: The fact that he was even there is perplexing. Hugo Chavez is suddenly a hero to the Warmists? How'd that happen? The only thing Venezuela under the current regime does more feverishly than try to reanimate the dry, shrunken corpse of World Socialism is pump oil and bulldoze rain forests. So if there's an obvious fit here, it's not obvious to me.

But okay; let's assume he crashed the party. He's allotted five minutes and talks for either twenty-five or forty, depending on which account you read, which if really unplanned would have had backstage organizers committing sepukku en masse. If unplanned, that alone would most certainly have made him the most unpopular man at the convention; they should have torn him down as if in the middle of the rant he'd ripped off his Chavez mask and revealed his true identity as Lee Iaccoca. Then the whole dumbass speech consists of creaky warmed-over "nasty ol' capitalism" nostrums that have lulled Cubans to sleep for generations, as if Chavez' brand of socialism had this great environmental record to brag about. By any conceivable metric this speech should have been a disaster. Instead he gets a standing O.

So yeah, I don't think we're drifting too far into tinfoil-hat territory when we suggest that, whatever that was all about, it wasn't about AGW. Which, with this crowd, pretty much only leaves one thing.

Meet the new boss! Same as the old boss!