After Chavez photo, Ortega rant, Republicans say Obama acting like pushover to dictators

Bad enough, in conservative thinking, that President Obama appeared to bow to Saudi King Abdullah during the G-20 meetings in Europe earlier this month.

Now, Republican critics are pouncing on the president for his charm offensive at the just-concluded Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago. The charge: He let Venezuela dictator Hugo Chavez maneuver him into a smiling one-on-one photo, and he failed to answer Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega's 50-minute anti-American rant.

"Ortega disrespected America," fumed conservative commentator Pat Buchanan on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" today. Recalling that President Reagan rebutted Soviet leaders who trashed America, Buchanan said Obama should have responded to the rant.

And former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the onetime Republican back-bencher from Georgia who is eyeing Obama's job, said on NBC's "Today Show" that the president's openness to talking to anti-American leaders like Chavez speaks to "a shallowness about how they analyze things."

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For his part, Obama has defended his outreach-to-enemies approach to foreign policy, something he promised during the campaign. Before leaving the summit Sunday, he responded to the uproar over the Chavez photo, saying, "It's unlikely as a consequence of my shaking hands or having a polite conversation with Mr. Chavez that we are endangering the national security interests of the United States."

Just for the record: that book Chavez gave Obama? "Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent" by Eduardo Galeano started the weekend on amazon.com with a ranking of 54,295 and is now at No. 2.

But the truly amazing thing is that the book, written in 1971, is also increasing in cost. Yep, Chavez and Ortega, those bad-boy Marxists of Latin America, have provoked a good old-fashioned, capitalistic, supply-and-demand price war.

Is this a great hemisphere or what?

-- Johanna Neuman

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Photo: Alfonso Ocando / EPA

Comments

[Carl Wiley]

And what was he supposed to do? Push past another Head of State like he doesn't exist? we have better relations with Russia than we do with Cuba and Venezuela? Why is that? You can get more out of people and relationships if you treat others with dignity and respect, regardless if you don't agree with their methods. It is called communication and some folks from the right should learn how to use it.

Author
The Ring of Knowledge

[Alan MacDonald]

Where, oh where, do guys like Chavez, Morales, and Ortega 'get off' with painting the US as a militarist, 'corporate-financial Empire' that tortures powerless people in its oil territories, and economically oppresses its own 'working class' citizens?

Oh, that's right, they 'get off' with it because they see it directly and know the truth ---- of which the American people are blinded by the 'Vichy' facade of democracy that this ruling-elite global 'corporate financial Empire' hides behind (with the help of an equally 'Vichy' corporate media) while the guileful EMPIRE hides in our kitchen of faux democracy and mis-uses the US super-power military to abuse the rest of the world!

There may be some method to Obama's madness in allowing others to inform the American people about the global corporate empire in which we really live.

My bet? That not only all the other Western Hemisphere states will deliver this message today, but that all the European and other real, sustainable, and functioning 'social democracy' (post-WWII, and post-Empire) nations of Europe and Japan will start telling America this "inconvenient truth" ---- which will make Obama's job as the reforming leader of our country more possible in bringing America from EMPIRE back to the democratic Republic that 99% of Americans thought we were and want to be again.

Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine

[steve rodriguez]

Obama you are being played for a fool!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[george o.]

I think that Newt Gingrich's mouth is the worst enemy that America has at present time.
He probably misses that moron of a president that just left this great country in the biggest mess since the depression.