Every week, the leader of Venezuela goes on state-run television for informal chats with his people. These programs, which can run for hours, often involve Hugo Chavez denigrating his political opponents, who thanks to a media law enacted earlier this year usually cannot respond in kind. In January 2004, Mr. Chavez used his program to call Condoleezza Rice a “true illiterate,” and boasted that he could sexually seduce the former Stanford University dean – an insult that has yet to be met with a peep of protest from those having a nervous breakdown over the demarche of the Reverend Pat Robertson.

There is certainly a difference between endorsing a coup and slurring a high official in a foreign government, but then again, there is also a difference between a television minister and a head of state. Unlike Rev. Robertson, Mr. Chavez actually tried some time ago to topple an elected government. In February 1992, actually, he led a group of military officers who tried and failed to unseat the government of President Perez. While Rev. Robertson’s recommendation was discarded by the Bush administration, Mr. Chavez has never backed off of his transgressions. Indeed, he’s seeking an emergency summit to repair his country’s relationship with America.

It’s another case of how demagogues need external enemies to distract their people from their policies at home, particularly when, in the case of Mr. Chavez, he’s itching to join the axis of evil. In 2000, Mr. Chavez became the first world leader to break formally the United Nations sanctions against Iraq and personally visit Saddam Hussein, expressing solidarity with a man we now know was deliberately importing rotten food and spoiled medicine through the oil-for-food program. Venezuela’s president has also signed a strategic agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran and has said publicly that the country has a right to the nuclear fuel it enriched for so many years behind the back of the United Nations’ atomic watchdog. Hezbollah, one of the most feared terrorist organizations, is said to have established official offices in Caracas.

All of this foreign policy posturing – combined with Mr. Chavez’s praise for Castro – invites the question: If Mr. Chavez really wants to stick it to the gringos, why doesn’t he just stop selling his oil to them? The answer is he can’t. To stop exporting petroleum here would ruin Venezuela’s economy faster than it would ruin ours. And despite the recent trade agreements Caracas has signed with Beijing, it makes no economic sense for him to send barrels of his sweet crude halfway around the world when the American refineries off the Gulf of Mexico have been refining the stuff for decades without problems. This says nothing of the loss the Venezuelans would suffer from having to shutter their Citgo gas stations, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Venezuelan national oil company.

No one seems more aware of these facts than Mr. Chavez, who has pursued an energy policy at odds with his Bolivarian rhetoric. As the Washington Post’s Marcela Sanchez noted on August 25, Venezuela recently agreed to cover neighboring Ecuador’s oil export commitments to America after a strike nearly shut down the country’s wells. In 2003, Mr. Chavez awarded Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, and Conoco-Phillips exclusive contracts to develop 27,000 square kilometers of the Deltana gas fields. Mr. Chavez has been so good for American oil companies that one of their lobbyists, Jack Kemp, met in 2003 with the Wall Street Journal editorial board to persuade them to soften their line on the Venezuelan president.

At the time, the editorialists at the Journal rebuked the former GOP vice presidential candidate, as well they should have. While Mr. Chavez is in no position to punish the American people economically, he has waged a steady political war against his opposition. After sacking the board of his state-run oil company, PDVSA, Mr. Chavez closed newspapers and ordered his military to use violence in dispersing demonstrations that arose from a general strike in the fall of 2002.

Since then, he has stacked his country’s supreme court with loyalists that have allowed him to ram through a press law that makes it illegal to corrupt his country’s youth and slander the president. In November, a Venezuelan judge began hearing charges against Maria Corina Machado, the head of Sumate, one of the civic groups responsible for publicizing a referendum on the Chavez presidency last year that ultimately failed. Ms. Machado is being charged with treason because her organization received $31,000 from the National Endowment for Democracy.

Sadly, Rev. Robertson’s loose talk has distracted the world from this all-too-real story in Venezuela. The best course for the president would be to ignore the empty threats and overtures of the Venezuelan demagogue and never forget brave women like Ms. Machado, who suffer the most under his reign.