Chavez and David Horowitz

Over the last few hours I have seen two different ends of the political spectrum on C-Span2 watching Hugo Chavez address the Opec delegations in the OPEC meeting on the left, and David Horowitz address a hostile audience at Duke University on the right.

The Chavez speech was completely disorganized and sophomoric, and frequent pans across his listening audience displayed total boredom and indifference until he starting raving about the US and called for cutting production to raise prices to punish the United States. The audience reaction: smirks of contempt,

The Horowitz talk was greeted with catcalls and jeers by a claque in the auditorium. Unfortunately David is not good at under-the-gun situations. Whereas Christopher Hitchens would demolish his opponents [as he did to George Galloway in the Arsenal in NYC some months back] because of the Oxford tradition of training in political debate, Horowitz appeared in low dudgeon and disconcerted at the hostility. His points were delivered in a staccato manner when he did not seem thrown off his game, which is when he began to stammer a bit and occasionally search for the right word or the name of an author or professor.

Chavez's brand of populism is patently ridiculous when translated to the international arena---and Bolivian doctors are protesting and are on strike because of the Cuban doctors foisted on Morales by Fidel Castro through Venezuelan funding. Alan Garcia in Peru has called the nutty colonel Chavez a "meddling midget" because of the open support Hugo is giving Humala, Garcia's opponent, who in turn asked Chavez to allow him to run his own campaign against Garcia. I doubt if Chavez is smart enough to catch the hint of sarcasm.

Horowitz has a terrific writing style derived from his student days at Columbia. But even though his arguments against entrenched faculties of Black Studies, Feminist Studies, and other fake scholarly rackets are very on point, his saeva indignatio does occasionally intrude on the very rational point of view he is presenting. Too many you knows, uhs, and other lapses in his attention span.

He makes very good polemical arguments, but his anger keeps popping up. He did demolish a hostile questioner who dislikes Ann Coulter by noting that she is a "great satirist," a riposte that got a lot of applause.

But his book on 101 Professors who are totally off-base hits home, and his remarks that there are 50,000 professors dedicated to getting on search committees to further alienate the academy from any pretense to scholarship and turn whole departments into propaganda agencies.