Chavez Bashes Romney, Says Obama's a 'Good Guy'

Well here's an endorsement President Obama almost certainly didn't want. Hugo Chavez likened his current election rival, Henrique Capriles, to Mitt Romney on Saturday, saying that Capriles isn't truly a friend to the poor. "I believe the person to best explain the loser's agenda isn't Barack Obama but rather Romney, because it's the extreme right-wing agenda that borders on the fascism of the United States," he said.

The remark seems to indicate that Chavez prefers Obama; indeed, in an earlier interview he said that Obama "deep down is a good guy, if you remove him from the context of being president of an empire," the AP reports. Obama has had a few seemingly kind words for Chavez, too; Romney has been criticizing Obama for a statement he made a few weeks ago in which he declared that his "overall sense is that what Mr. Chavez has done over the past several years has not had a serious national security impact on us," a view Romney called "simply naïve." (More Hugo Chavez stories.)