Oh, Hugo Chavez is not the only leftist headache for Bush and Cheney, not by far, as Nikolas Kozloff (author of Hugo Chavez: Oil Politics, and the Challenge to the U.S." ) shows us. While Bush and Cheney have been trying to continue pursuing their Middle Eastern war for oil (that has lasted longer than WW II), South America has generally returned to democracy (Colombia and its Bush puppet leader is one exception).

And democracy has generally evolved into the election of leftist leaders as heads of state in many of the key nations in South America.

Because of its vast oil reserves (including their potentional offshore heavy oil fields), Venezuela will continue to be a specific target of White House efforts to undermine Chavez's "Bolivarian Revolution."

But meanwhile, as Kozloff relates, South America (in part through Chavez's financial largesse) is starting to gel as a continent, with incipient efforts to create something akin to a South American common market.

Moreover, from north to south, the countries of South America are taking on American corporations and, in the case of Ecuador, the presence of the American military.

The revolution in South America is politically not as radical as Salvador Allende tried to undertake in Chile, but it is revolutionary in the sense that national sovereignty is being reasserted by most of the continent's nations, independent of puppet strings from D.C.

And clearly, democracy has returned to most of the continent. Evo Morales was elected president in Bolivia only because the vote of a peasant coca leaf worker counted as much as the vote of an aristocrat living in La Paz.

And Morales came to prominence as head of the coca growers union.

Yes, times are a changing in South America.

Perhaps the only positive outcome of the Iraq War is that Bush and Cheney didn't have the resources to reinstall military governments as a way of keeping the people of South America under the U.S. umbrella, forcefully.