I watched the President’s State of the Union address with a French diplomat friend and my friend remarked that about 2/3 of Bush’s speech was on foreign policy, with a significant amount of it on democracy movements. “As it should be,” he added.

I thought there was a nuance to it, though, and it was a little painful. President Bush outlined with great precision the consequences of America’s addiction to imported oil, explaining how high oil prices were fueling dictators and undercutting freedoms abroad, the very freedoms we were fighting for in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But he named the wrong dictator.

Bush stressed that America must get off its dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

Middle Eastern!

Where just about every oil-rich country there is taking baby steps toward democracy. Sure, they are not moving fast enough, but they are moving in the right direction! We have seen moves toward democratic revolution in refinery-rich Bahrain, in oil-rich Kuwait (women’s rights), in oil king Saudi Arabia (muni elections), in several of Arabic peninsula fiefdoms. The Iraqi liberation has brought winds of freedom to their shores and however slowly they are moving, they are GAINING, not losing, freedoms.

Not so with the non-Arab countries. Iran, Russia, Nigeria, and above all, Venezuela are losing their freedoms based on the current oil windfall. They are going the the wrong way as oil prices rise and the temptation of dictatorship beckons.

America does not buy oil in any significant quantity from either Russia or Iran. The trouble in Nigeria is coming from outside the government with petty Islamofascist-quasi-Marxist/populist groups seeking oil largesse – or well, just oil – as their means of seizing power.

The one nation where our oil-buying habit is directly, explicitly undercutting democracy is in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. Why didn’t Bush, not once, bring up Venezuela as the region’s trouble spot for the U.S.’s habit of imported oil?

He studiously left out Venezuela from his speech, perhaps not wanting to give Hugo Chavez the attention he so desperately craves. (It was also nice to see photoshopping Code Pink’s Cindy Sheehan, fresh from a trip to Venezuela, thrown out of the Congressional gallery for trying to make the president’s State of the Union speech all about her and Chavez.)

But at the same time, it does need attention. America’s imported oil habit is directly undermining democracy in Venezuela.

Last week, a Mexican cabinet-level official told me the only means to ending the dictatorship of Chavez: ‘Don’t buy Venezuelan oil.’

It’s sad but Bush shouldn’t have pointed the finger at the Middle East on this hideous oil-dependency-dictatorship dynamic. I would have rather he just said ‘dependency on imported oil’ instead of threw in the Middle East. Venezuela’s democratic revolutionaries (and Hugo Chavez) would have known what the elephant in the living room was by that. He dropped the ball there.

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Bush made one other group of points that I really hope was potent with meaning: He militantly defended immigration and derided his anti-immigration critics. He strongly hinted that some of these immigrants needed to be legalized.

There is one group of immigrants who fit squarely into this category: our good friends the Central Americans, who have stood by us in thick and thin, expending blood and treasure in the Iraq war and standing by us at the UN. They deserve to have their nationals in this country on temporary protected status – due to wars, hurricanes, mudslides, guerrillas, all kinds of problems – given full and permanent status in the U.S.. They are praying that Bush will do it. They are our relatives! They are our friends! It would be insane to insult and undermine our friends, giving more leeway for influence for Hugo Chavez in the region! Insane!

The scuttlebutt on Capitol Hill is that Bush was going to just let the temporary protected status expire quietly. But this isn’t going to be quiet for the Central Americans, who are so strategic to our interests. (They are so strategic that we fought a decades-long war for democracy in their region in the 1980s under the great Ronald Reagan.) This is a huge deal for them, this is everything for them. They already were insulted by the fence, but I doubt that is going to be stopped.

I get the feeling, based on what Bush said, that he was priming Americans for his eventual permanentization of legal status in the U.S. for Central Americans here temporarily.

If it’s so, I will be so happy.