President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela blew into New York this week to deliver a windy diatribe to the U.N. General Assembly in which he compared President Bush to the Devil. Then he told reporters that the American people should be reading Noam Chomsky’s writings on foreign policy instead of watching Superman movies.

Mr. Chavez’ goodwill visit to this country wound up with an appearance in Harlem where he called President Bush an alcoholic and a “sick man with a lot of hang-ups.”

Chavez so far transgressed against the rules of ordinary politeness that some of President Bush’s fiercest Democratic critics – Representatives Charles Rangel and Nancy Pelosi – felt obliged to defend him from the Venezuelan’s rhetorical thuggery.

One may well ask how the head of a civilized nation could make such a complete fool of himself in public.

My guess is that it’s because he’s had a lot of practice.

Reading the accounts of Hurricane Hugo reminded me of an occasion a few years ago when I was a speechwriter for ConocoPhillips. The company had just completed a joint venture with Venezuela’s state-owned oil company to build a major project in that country. It was a plant to convert tar-like heavy crude, which Venezuela possesses in abundance, into a synthetic light crude that can be used to produce petroleum products.

President Chavez attended the opening of the new plant, and beamed like a little boy when his American partners from Houston presented him with a cowboy hat.

Unfortunately, the experience went to his head. Shortly thereafter, he went on Venezuelan television to deliver one of his notorious harangues (he is known to speak for hours at a time) on the importance of the new venture to his country.

Playing Mr. Wizard with a Spanish accent, he took out a chemistry set and proceeded to demonstrate in miniature how the refining process worked. He then went on to lecture the country’s media for not devoting more coverage to this latest triumph of his administration. As I recall, he was particularly displeased that they had not shown more pictures of him wearing his cowboy hat.

So I was not surprised by Mr. Chavez’s boorish behavior in New York this week. He was not going out of his way to be offensive – he was just being himself.

There is a story of how Count Galeazzo Ciano, Italy’s foreign minister and Mussolini’s son-in-law, was made a captive audience to one of Adolf Hitler’s interminable monologues. As best I can remember, Ciano later said of the experience, “The Germans, poor people, have to put up with this every day. I am sure there isn’t a phrase, gesture or pause that they don’t know by heart.”