For reasonable people, this should be an easy one, but for the Bush gang it may have been a tough call — do you blast an ally who happens to be stark raving mad or do you tacitly support a foreign leader you’ve hated for years. In this case, we have TV preacher Pat Robertson in one corner and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez president in the other.<\/p>\n
What’s a conservative presidential administration to do? In light of Robertson’s use of the word “assassination,” he apparently got the short end of this stick<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Bush administration swiftly and unequivocally distanced itself Tuesday from a suggestion by religious broadcaster Pat Robertson that American agents assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a frequent target of U.S. foreign policy.<\/p>\n Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, appearing at a Pentagon news conference, said when asked: “Our department doesn’t do that kind of thing. It’s against the law. He’s a private citizen. Private citizens say all kinds of things all the time.”<\/p>\n Acknowledging differences with the Caracas government, and saying it should be promoting democracy in the Western Hemisphere, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack called Robertson’s remarks “inappropriate.”<\/p>\n “This is not the policy of the United States government. We do not share his views,” McCormack said in a flat refutation of Robertson’s suggestion that the United States “take out” Chavez to stop Venezuela from becoming a “launching pad for communist influence and Muslim extremism.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n