The Handshake That Brought Down A Nation

Obama-Chavez Handshake

Bush in bed with the Saudis, holding hands and kissing them even. Good stuff.

Reagan smiling and palling around with Gorbachev in the preamble to the shutting down of the Cold War. Good stuff.

Nixon heading off to Beijing in 1972 and hanging out with Mao. Good stuff.

Obama shaking hands with Hugo Chavez at the Americas summit. Naive and dangerous behaviour by an inexperienced president.

Or so say the right wing talking heads. I wonder what former House Speaker Newt Gingrich thinks about it all.

“Everywhere in Latin America, enemies of America are going to use the picture of Chavez smiling and being with the president as proof that Chavez is now legitimate that he is acceptable.”

In a wonderful piece in Vanity Fair, James Walcott had this to say about Newt.

“Only within the Beltway popcorn popper could Gingrich, whose serpent tongue and ogre ego did so much to polarize discourse in the 1990s and abort reform, be considered a foxy catch. Only in Washington, D.C., could Gingrich, a magpie of futurist jargon and a bumptious opportunist, pass himself off as an iconoclastic force and centrifuge of ideas, a cross between Buckminster Fuller and Che Guevara leading a commando raid on the buffet table. And only within the punditocracy could “hyper-bipartisan” be bandied about as an aphrodisiac.”

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Comments

Debbie says:

April 20, 2009 at 1:36 pm

Khrushchev and Kennedy… now that was a big one for americans…

Very good illustration! Love it! Thanks for sharing your work with us.
obamaman says:

April 20, 2009 at 2:12 pm

Okay. Let’s dispense with the exaggeration. Let’s dispense with living in the past and address the present.

President Obama makes amiable overtures to Chavez. Chavez has made many disparaging remarks about this President, the former President and our country, including recently calling President Obama an “ignoramus”.

Chavez returns President Obama’s gestures of friendship by giving him an outdated book criticizing and admonishing American Policy and Actions.

I’m not sure I understand the “up side” of this.

As for whatever it is that Walcott is trying to say, it has been theorized that people that tend to use an over abundance of big words are insecure! :-)
mario says:

April 20, 2009 at 2:17 pm

It’s not “living” in the past. It’s “learning” from the past.

When you understand that you might then understand the “up side”
Debbie says:

April 20, 2009 at 2:53 pm

Exactly “learning” from the past is the name of the game personally and as a nation!

If not, then we might as well take away the history classes in schools and burn all the history books and tell historians to zip it!
obamaman says:

April 20, 2009 at 3:00 pm

My interpretation of your image, using past actions of President’s as “good” while juxtaposing it with Obama and stating “bad” constitutes “living in the past” in order to try to make a disparaging statement about the opinion that possibly cozying up to Chavez may not be universally considered a good thing.

As with Reagan and Bush, the “up side” will be determined in the future. It’s time for these people to step up and reciprocate. Something that has not happened so far.

In fact, if anything, the hand of friendship extended to Ahmadinejad has been pretty much slapped. And Chavez has used it as an opportunity to enhance his realistically unimportant position. President Obama is going to need to understand the line between willingness to dialog and simply playing into the hands of these people, furthering the image that the US is weak.

The fact that I do not agree with much of anything you represent has no impact on my ability to understand and comprehend.