Last fall, Hugo Chavez stood before the United Nations and accused America of being an empire and charged President Bush with being the Devil incarnate (source). Many Americans wrote off Chavez’s rant as the raving of a crackpot dictator. What many people don’t know is that Chavez’s tirade against “American imperialism” reflects a mainstream view among many people both within and outside of the United States.

A must-read piece appears in Sunday’s Washington Post. It’s written by Muslin writer Mohsin Hamid. During a recent trip to Dallas, a man in a bookstore asked Hamid, “Why do they hate us?” The Dallas man was asking why the Islamic world hates the United States so much. The rest of the article is an answer to that question. The answer boils down to this:

I’ve written too much on this story over the last two years not to mention this new (final?) development. From the Washington Post: “A federal judge yesterday dismissed a lawsuit filed by former CIA officer Valerie Plame and her husband against Vice President Cheney and other top officials over the Bush administration’s disclosure of Plame’s name and covert status to the media.” But perhaps the most important line from the story: “No one was charged with the crime of intentionally disclosing Plame’s covert identity.” Whether or not this will be the end of the so-called “Plame Game” remains to be seen. But it needs to be.

Rudy Giuliani says today that he won’t use Abortion as a litmus test in appointing judges to the federal bench. The Associated Press quotes Giuliani: “Abortion is not a litmus test. Roe v. Wade is not a litmus test. No particular case is a litmus test. That’s not the way to appoint Supreme Court justices or any judge.”