And how badly has he run the country? Where would you place him in a list of Venezuelan leaders over the last 50 years? How about against the leaders of the top oil exporters e.g. Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, Nigeria and Algeria? If we imagine a scale of leaders with Churchill, Lincoln, FDR at the top and Hitler, Pol Pot and that guy from Rwanda at the bottom and with someone neutral in the middle - let's say a monkey, where is Chavez? I place him in the top half - above the monkey (guess where Bush is).

Not to be a "Buttinski"...but I would say that Chavez and Castro are tied (ohhhh...let's say down around the 75th percentile) and the monkey is much smarter than both of them put together..