Stuck On Stupid

President Bush may have been loath to reply to last week’s U.N. speech by the sulfur-tongued Hugo Chavez, but the American public wasn’t. Its boycott of Venezuela’s Citgo gas has set off alarms in Caracas.

The big blow came Wednesday when 7-Eleven announced it would not renew a 20-year contract with Venezuelan-owned gas supplier Citgo. Instead, it would start selling its own brand, to be supplied by three U.S. oil firms.

7-Eleven admitted Chavez was a public relations disaster for the firm after his United Nations speech, denouncing President Bush as "the devil," and affected its decision.

"Regardless of politics, we sympathize with many Americans’ concern over derogatory comments about our country and its leadership recently made by Venezuela’s president," said a 7-Eleven spokeswoman, who’d obviously been hearing from the public. "Chavez’s position and statements over the past year or so didn’t tempt us to stay with Citgo."

That’s about 2,100 gas stations off the books for Citgo, cutting total outlets to 11,000.

The rest are likely to remain targets of the infuriated American public’s wildcat boycott of Venezuelan crude. If so, it would be the first time in modern memory a spontaneous consumer boycott had such a commercial impact.

Watching from Caracas, Rafael Ramirez, Venezuela’s energy minister, said he was stunned at the "brusque" tone of 7-Eleven’s announcement, calling it "bitter to swallow."

…