The traveling road show that is Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez made its stop in New York Wednesday.

Booked initially to speak before the delegates of the United Nations General Assembly - a body famously compared by Rush Limbaugh to the bar room scene in the first Star Wars movie - Chavez did not disappoint. He found a receptive audience chuckling with amusement at his reference to the president of the United States as, among other things, the "devil," and comment that the "smell of sulfur" lingered in the chamber from the "devil’s" recent appearance. The captivated audience greeted the conclusion of his speech with loud applause.

This applause evidently still ringing in his ears, Mr. Chavez appeared today in Harlem, where he called Mr. Bush was an "ex-alcoholic," and a "cowboy," and acting like John Wayne.

Since a large percentage of the delegates of the United Nations General Assembly are representatives of dictatorial, thug regimes for which the smell of sulfur is the sweet aroma associated with killing the opposition, Chavez was largely preaching to the choir. Harlem, while officially American territory, is represented in Congress by that most liberal of Democrats, Charles Rangel, who has made plenty of his own incendiary remarks about President Bush. If the Harlem audience was not the "choir" the U.N. General Assembly represented, it certainly fit the description as a friendly "congregation." (In fairness, Representative Rangel has condemned Mr. Chavez’s statements.)

 What is striking is the comfort level of Mr. Chavez and others who vomit out these insults against President Bush.   Mr. Chavez has calculated that the United States is unable to inflict adverse consequences against him due to our dependence of Venezuelan oil; our preoccupation with Iraq and the threats posed by Iran and South Korea, and our domestic internal divisions. In this he seems entirely correct. The poisonous partisan domestic atmosphere which has grown in this nation since 2000 has witnessed the most vicious remarks against President Bush, and the collapse of any semblance of limits in the use of personal invective to attack the president has bled over into the international arena.   In 2006 it now seems to be acceptable (or at least tolerated) discourse in international and domestic debate to vilify the president of the United States in terms and adjectives which no one would dream of uttering across the backyard fence or in the neighborhood bar for fear of a quick, violent reaction.   Fortunately, however, this collapse of civility has not yet corrupted the feelings of average Americans, and perhaps this explains the dynamic difference in the reaction to Chavez’s remarks by the professional diplomats (even our own) and the average American.

Outside the confines of the east side of Manhattan, the San Francisco peninsula and the U.S. State Department, there is simmering and growing anger among the American people at the continuing calumny and vitriol directed against the American president and by extension, the United States. The vast majority of Americans do not see their country as evil or corrupt, as oppressive and imperialistic, or view the president as an agent for such purposes, nor do we believe we occupy territory stolen from Native Americans, Mexicans or anyone else.   We see an America which has extended vast sums of blood and treasure to assist the peoples of other lands better their lives and secure their freedom, asking for nothing return more than a small bit of land to bury our honored dead.   Our patience is at an end with ethical lectures from foreign leaders who hold power by terror and murder, stealing the freedom and property of their people for their own selfish ends.   Americans do not understand the reticence of our State Department in replying to bloodsuckers such as Hugo Chavez by branding them the bottom crawling despots and thugs that they are.    As it is our reluctance to verbally mix it up with Chavez and his ilk allows them to enhance their prestige at home and in many nations aboard after each outrageous insult ignored by us.    For John Bolton and the State Department to sniff that Chavez’s comments don’t merit a reply may please the striped pants crowd at tea time, but such a lack of reaction ignores the impact such comments have in audiences overseas, the very market that Chavez is playing to.

Dictators and bullies are not defeated by ignoring them or their insults. Words are said to have consequences - we must start ensuring that they do.