Mario may be right that Chavez has now made an enemy of the Brazilian Congress but closing down RCTV has made Hugo plenty of friends in the United Kingdom. A bunch of eminences – including several members of parliament, a former cabinet minister and the Aussie journalist John Pilger – wrote to The Guardian to support the move:

We believe that the decision of the Venezuelan government not to renew the broadcasting licence of RCTV when it expires on May 27 (Chávez silences critical TV station, May 23; Comment and Letters, May 25) is legitimate given that RCTV has used its access to the public airwaves to repeatedly call for the overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Hugo Chávez.

In other words, Chavez’s role as Numero Uno snook-cocker at the Great Satan still overrides other considerations. The Belmont Club has more on Chavismo’s cheerleaders, including a number of Internet commentators prone to strangely synchronized comparisons of RCTV to Aaron Burr and Tim McVeigh.

Do you remember George Galloway’s barnstormer of a speech in Damascus two years ago? “Hundreds of thousands are ready to fight the Americans in the Middle East, and in Latin America there is revolution everywhere,” he raved. “In Venezuela, the hero Hugo Chavez has stood against them over and over and over again.”

I remember thinking that a Chavismo-Islamist alliance sounded like the bus-&-truck production of the Hitler-Stalin pact. But at least some western lefties checked out of that one.