Chavez? Never heard of him.

Classic. Daily Kos is being contacted by the press to explain the outpouring of support for Hugo Chavez on his website? His first instinct: Deny it exists:

I’m on the road, so perhaps I had missed some outpouring of pro-Chavez blogging on the left. But a look at my RSS reader doesn’t show much of anything, and I’ve got about 80 blogs on it. The feeds don’t always update regularly, so perhaps something was missed.

Next step: minimize it:

But really, this is much ado about nothing. So Chavez said mean things about Bush. Bush and his administration has said mean things about Chavez and about lots of other world leaders.

Who gives a s--- what Venezuela thinks about the United States? I swear, for a country that goes around invading countries it doesn’t like, it sure has a thin skin. Republicans, Democrats, and the media are all freaking out.

Because the president of f------ Venezuela doesn’t like Bush.

Sigh...

With Kos, there is always a mirror reality: What he writes and its intended effect. Pathos is all.

In other words, Kos may have a point, but, come on.

He’s writing this because he knows what Chavez said hurts Democrats. Democrats now must spend valuable air time denouncing this guy and defending President Bush, and they’d rather eat bark.

With the compromise on interrogation, signed off by John McCain (who one week ago was the libs’ unimpeachable source); with gas falling to two bucks a gallon; with Senator Menendez imploding in New Jersey (and the Dems can’t take back the Senate if they lose a single seat); with the stock market at record highs–with all this, President Bush enjoyed a pretty good week. The Dems would like nothing better than to go after Bush this weekend (and there’s a lot to choose from, believe me). Now they have this blowhard with his Satan this and sulphur that, completely closing off that option and forcing them to denounce Chavez.

The only other option is to say, “Who cares?”, however disingenuously, and Kos took it.