Obama and the dictators

There is something discomforting about the video of President Obama grinning broadly and clasping the arm of Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez. Yet, in fairness, Obama clearly gives Chavez the brush-off when Chavez approaches Obama and hands him a copy of Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. (Full disclosure: thanks to Pat Buchanan's latest column for the title; otherwise, I wouldn't have had the foggiest.)

Sidenote: I run the risk of being accused of repetitiveness, citing Buchanan again today, after doing so in my last post on Friday. So be it. Buchanan has never written better, and with more scintillating analysis than he does today. He is iconoclastic and not afraid to speak the truth as he sees it. Usually, he is right.

I just watched Buchanan, on "Morning Joe", reiterate what he writes about in today's column, "The Apologists." He told a humorous story on Scarborough's show that he doesn't relate in the column, about personally keeping Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega away from President Reagan at a UN reception so that Reagan would not have to decide how Ortega should be greeted...or snubbed. In the receiving line, however, Reagan did shake Ortega's hand since Nicaragua was the host country of that particular UN assembly.

It is a thorny thing. Our leaders must, from time to time, interact with foreign heads of state who do not share our views, who persecute their people and who do not champion human rights. It has always been so. Certainly, there should be some differentiation between those who are at least partially supportive of America and could be referred to as our allies and those who reject our ideals completely. I am reminded of what FDR is rumored to have said when questioned about a certain foreign leader, perhaps Yugoslavia's Tito: "He may be a son of a b----, but at least he's OUR son of a b----!"

Buchanan feels that the issue really is not about who the President does and does not allow to shake his hand, but rather involves the insults that a President allows to stand unanswered. Such diatribes have been rather profuse in recent years, and when Obama only apologizes for America's "imperialism" (not that he used that exact word, but it, I believe, fairly characterizes how Obama would view past actions by America) and does not stand up for America's positive intervention in Central American affairs at their own request (Exhibit A: Grenada and Exhibit B: the Nicaraguan Contras), it allows an image to stand that should be negated.

But I can't say I'm surprised. Troubled, yes, but hardly shocked. When the President's wife revealed last year that she was "for the first time in my adult lifetime...really proud of my country" for no less than nominating her husband, she disclosed more than perhaps she intended about the worldview that animates the vision of the Obamas and their fellow members of the anointed elite.