Recalling an Ambassador

I remember when "recalling an ambassador" was just idiosyncratic slang for ending an ill-considered romance, but it turns out Mexico and Venezuela are doing just that. Recalling their ambassadors, I mean.

BBC News's handy sidebar of related (and genuinely relevant) stories, "Venezuela Under Chavez," paints him, as the Brits might say, as a bit of a nutter. He's ejecting US missionaries from the inland tribal regions, accelerating controversial "land reforms" where "idle" ranches and firms can be seized by the government, revoking immunity for U.S. drug agents in his country, and preparing civilian militias/"loyal reserve" to defend his government against a U.S. backed invasion or coup. Admittedly, there's no "Mexico Under Fox" sidebar for us to go tit-for-unstable-tat, but I'm willing to bet that Chavez might be the one who's stepped over the line on this one.

If only we could buy our gasoline from Canada. I mean, do oil wealth and paranoid, totalitarian insanity just go hand-in-hand, or is it only a historical accident?

(A: If anything, paranoid totalitarian insanity far outstrips oil wealth, so by the sheer weight of odds, the world's oil fields were bound to end up in the hands of kooks.)