A smart gas station owner from Wadsworth, Illinois has given up his Citgo franchise and re-opened as a Shell station. To celebrate he posted a sign that gives Hugo Chavez a wonderful sendoff. “Adios Chavez,” it reads.

For the last five years I have personally boycotted any Citgo gas station. Citgo, you see, is wholly owned by Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., which itself is wholly owned by Venezuela’s despotic President Hugo Chavez and his puppet government. I have written several times in the past about this fact (here, and here) and have wondered why more Americans haven’t talked about boycotting this foreign hatemonger’s gas stations?

After all, Hugo Chavez has called the U.S. any manner of names and has centered the U.S. as the chief villain of his paranoid delusions of persecution anyway, so why not let him stew by refusing to do business with this half-witted, half-pint dictator?

So, today I am happy to report that Randy Whitmore’s gas station at Delany and York House roads in Wadsworth, Illinois has done just that. He’s flipped the tin-potted Chavez the bird and gone back to being a Shell man.

Whitmore joins two other stations in northern Illinois that have gone from Citgo to Shell, one in Mundelein and one in Libertyville, both near suburbs to Chicago.

Good on these three stations for dumping a brand owned by an enemy and good for them not doing business that benefits our self-professed enemy, Hugo Chavez. Now, let’s hope more Americans boycott the remaining Citgo stations causing others to make the switch.

And for those of you whining that we are only hurting the American businessmen that own these locally owned stations, I say you are darn right we are. Maybe if they hurt enough, they will do business with a respectable franchise and stop aiding and abetting our enemies. Such putatively American businessmen deserve to be hurt.