Pat Robertson, the founder of the Christian Coalition, called for the government of the United States to murder the democratically elected president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, the Associated Press reports. The AP story is being picked up by major media all over the U.S. and the world.

“We have the ability to take him (Chavez) out,” Robertson declared on his television program The 700 Club, “and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability,’ In apparent reference to the war in Iraq, he also said he considers assassination by covert operatives to be “cheaper” than a “$200 billion war” and “I don’t think any oil shipments will stop.” Robertson claims that Chavez “has destroyed the Venezuelan economy, and he’s going to make that a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism all over the continent.”

Media Matters for America has the video and transcript.

Some people will be tempted to say that Robertson is nuts and should not be taken seriously. But in fact, Robertson is one of the leading religious broadcasters in the world and one of the top leaders of the Republican Party, and has been for a generation. Pat Robertson is so much part of the Republican mainstream, and associating with him is so considered so respectable, that even former Attorney General John Ashcroft now teaches at Robertson’s Regent University, a graduate school in Virginia Beach.

I wonder if his fellow televangelists and Republican members of Congress will follow Robertson’s lead in calling for the assassination of democratically elected foreign leaders?