Posted on 04/22/2009 5:01:28 PM PDT by kellynla
The picture of the president of the United States smiling broadly as he met President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela startled me. Our president is a nice guy. Chavez is anything but.
The State Department maintains that Chávez has attacked democratic traditions and has put Venezuelan democracy on life support with unchecked concentration of power, political persecution, and intimidation. Foreign Affairs magazine says that Chávez is a power-hungry dictator with autocratic and megalomaniacal tendencies whose authoritarian vision and policies are a serious threat to his people. In testimony before the US Senate, the South American project director for the Center for Strategic International Studies said that Chavez's government engages in "arresting opposition leaders, torturing some members of the opposition (according to human rights organizations) and encouraging, if not directing, its squads of Bolivarian Circles to beat up members of Congress and intimidate voters-all with impunity."
In spite of a presidential term limit of six years, Chávez has suggested that he would like to remain in power for 25 years. Hmmm. An autocratic dictator who abuses human rights and undermines democracy being warmly embraced by the American president. There's something wrong with that picture.
Then there was the incident of President Barack Obama seeming to bow before King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at the G-20 summit in London. The president's people denied it was a bow, but it certainly was a sign of great deference from the American president to the dictator of a country who just six weeks ago sentenced a 75-year-old woman to 40 lashes for having been secluded with her nephew after he delivered bread to her home. This is the same Abdullah whom, when asked why Saudi Arabia prohibits the public practice of religions other than Islam, said, "It is absurd to impose on an individual or a society rights that are alien to its beliefs or principles."
Obama is also pursuing a renewed relationship with Cuba, a country which engages in systemic human rights abuses, including torture, arbitrary imprisonment, unfair trials and extrajudicial executions. Censorship is so extensive that Cubans face five-year prison sentences for connecting to the Internet illegally. And not only is emigration illegal, but even discussing it carries a six-month prison sentence.
WATCHING ALL THIS, I was wondering what the new standards were. How oppressive must a leader be before we determine that he has not merited a hug by the democratic standard-bearer of the free world, the president of the United States? Yes, I get it. We have to speak to our enemies, and America has to push "reset" on its relationship with many of these countries. We should try and change them through charm. But who said the president himself, rather than a lower-level diplomat, must do so?
And if Obama feels that he has to be the one to greet a man like Chavez, must it be with the kind of ear-to-ear grin that one might show girl scouts selling cookies? It must surely be disheartening for those who suffer oppression in countries like Venezuela, Cuba and Saudi Arabia to see the American president backslapping their oppressors when these victims have always looked up to the United States as their champions.
In Turkey, Obama boldly declared that "the United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam." But the person who was at war with Islam, Saddam Hussein, the man who killed nearly one million Muslims, was removed by a country which has already paid with the lives of 4,500 of its servicemen and women. The same is true of the Taliban, another group whom the Obama administration is considering talking to, who beat Muslim women in the streets of Afghanistan. Yet the president seems reluctant to publicly identify these real enemies of Islam.
LIKE MANY AMERICANS, I have been awed by our president's capacity to draw those who hate us near. He is a man of considerable charm and grace. But I have to admit that I am increasingly troubled by his seeming inability to call out rogue dictators.
While he was campaigning for the presidency, Obama promised, "As president I will recognize the Armenian genocide." But in a press conference in Ankara with President Abdullah Gul, he refused to use the word "genocide" when challenged by a reporter on the issue. Yet, it was Obama's early foreign policy adviser Samantha Power of Harvard who wrote A Problem from Hell, the definitive book on the American non-intervention in repeated 20th-century genocides, beginning with the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks which killed 1.5 million between the years of 1915 and 1923. When I read the book it changed my life.
As a Jew who does not want the world to forget the Holocaust, I can only imagine the pain of the Armenian community as it struggles to have modern Turkey acknowledge the crime. And why should modern Turkey not oblige? No one is blaming it for something that happened 90 years ago. It is not today's generation which is at fault. But nations must come to terms with their own history. Could any of us imagine what kind of country the US would be if it denied that it was ever responsible for the abomination of African-American slavery and segregation?
ALL THIS LEADS to one important question. Suppose Obama succeeds in building friendships with Chavez, Castro, Ahmadinejad and the Taliban. What then? Does America still get to feel that it stands for something? Will we still be the beacon of liberty and freedom to the rest of the world, or will we have sold out in the name of political expediency? And do any of us seriously believe that presidential friendship is going to get a megalomaniac like Hugo Chavez to ease up on the levers of power, or are we just feeding his ego by showing him he can be a tyrant and still have a beer with the president of the United States? Will the Iranians really stop enriching uranium through diplomacy rather than economic sanctions?
I know that the Bush administration made many mistakes, and I am a fan of President Obama precisely because of his sunny optimism. But Bush was not, as Chavez once called him, the devil, and it could just be that his emphasis on America being the great champion of democracy and freedom, a mantle that was most eloquently articulated by president Kennedy in his inaugural address, is a legacy that ought to belong to Obama as much as it did to his predecessor.
To answer the question, 0bama is a knucklehead.
No he isn't.
He's among friends.
Why? Admiration. He admires that they have gotten beyond those silly elections.
After all, he’s a communist traitor mole. Why wouldn’t he smile at his mentors?
They're not just friends. They're colleagues, soul brothers. He has more in common with them than with the average American.
When my baby
When my baby smiles at me I go to Rio
De Janeiro, my-oh-me-oh
I go wild and then I have to do the Samba
And La Bamba
Obama is nice to dictators because he likes what he sees. People naturally ingratiate themselves to someone they want to emulate.
We have 3+ long years ahead where we have to fight this clown's attack on our republic.
“They’re not just friends. They’re colleagues, soul brothers. He has more in common with them than with the average American.”
I didn’t see him smile that brightly with PM Brown and other western leaders. He craves commie dictator love.
” And if Obama feels that he has to be the one to greet a man like Chavez,
must it be with the kind of ear-to-ear grin that one might show girl scouts selling cookies? “
He smiles like that because he’s meeting his heroes.
I’m surprised he doesn’t throw his panties at them and mouth “ Call me !”
Well, no. They all laugh at him behind his back, and many of them have responded to his smiles with public contempt. Castro just made fun of him today.
In fact, he and his administration have managed to offend a record number of foreign governments. Yesterday it was England, France, and Poland. Today it was Canada. And he just refused to meet with Netanyahu.
Among bipedal primates, including humans, smiling is a gesture rooted in feelings of submission.
With Obambi, he naturally feels submissive among his idols and mentors.
Quite simple, really.
I woul love to have a bonafide body language expert answer this question, but I believe I am correct.
New high mark on the stupidity meter.
because he wants to be the daddy of dictators
“...meet it is I set it down
“That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”
...Hamlet, as written by William Shakespeare.
You take a swipe at one ally, it’s odd. Twice and you take notice. But 3 times makes a straight line in any plane. The only logical conclusion is that this is all intentional, from alienating and insulting our allies, yucking it up with tinpot dicators, and bowing either figuratively or in fact to our enemies.
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