Chill, Chavez

Hugo Chavez is starting to grate everyone's nerves, and that is in Latin America, according to this article in the NYT.
One good corollary of this is that the lefty candidate for the Mexican presidency, Jose Manuel Lopez Obrador, mayor of Mexico City and overall pest, has lost his lead in the polls because people are afraid of his Chavez-style populism. Chavez may have done some good things for the poor people of his country, but increasingly he's turning into a nutcase and he's insulting and interfering in the internal affairs of his Latin American neighbors. Even with the pathetic admiration for tyrants like Fidel Castro that still runs rampant among Latin America's leftists, most people are realists (when they are not being morons) and they probably do not like the prospect of a megalomaniac clown in fatigues as a leader of their country.