Monday morning amusing reading

Maria Anastasia O'Grady went through the pain of duly trashing "the open veins of Latin America". This way none of you will feel under any obligation to read that considerably outdated pamphlet. But this blog ever helpful will post below the two last paragraphs, just in case your patience with Chavez idiotic antics do not go as far as reading what you already know, or suspect, even under O'Grady slicing prose (my emphasis).

The Galeano book was not a present to Mr. Obama, though it was hyped as such. After all it was in Spanish, a language Mr. Obama does not read -- and Cuban and Venezuelan military intelligence surely would have advised Mr. Chávez of that fact. Its purpose was instead a way for the resentful Venezuelan to shove his anticapitalist, anti-American prejudices in Mr. Obama's face before rows of television cameras.

Yet, unwittingly, Mr. Chávez's gag gift served another purpose. If there has been any doubt about how he has run his oil-rich country into the ground during a decade of booming petroleum prices, the mystery is now solved. Mr. Galeano's book is Mr. Chávez's bible.

-The end-