Taking Pics with a DICTATOR?! (GASP) And SMILING?!?

There's an old joke in political circles that starts out "What's the difference between a 'terrorist' and a 'freedom fighter'? a 'terrorist' is someone who kills, loots, rapes, plunders and pillages for a cause we don't like. A 'FREEDOM FIGHTER' on the other hand is someone who loots, rapes, plunders and pillages for a cause we DO like."
Over simplified? Perhaps. Black humor? Of course, but it does illustrate an interesting point. How we define geopolitics in the 70's and 80's was relatively simple. We had one litmus test. Is he/she communist? If the answer to that question was yes then it was accepted that they were evil and all of their citizens were either:

a. mindless drones
b. brain washed idiots
c. godless atheist

or my personal favorite

d. oppressed people who long to breath the sweet air of freedom but are suffering under the brutal regime of an evil totalitarian.

If one WASN'T a communist the wholesale butchery of your populace, rigging of elections and having political dissidents "eliminated" by your secret police were completely ignored by your friend of friends the United States of America. It's the reason why Pol Pot and Daniel Ortega will burn in hell, but we ignored Agusto Pinochet, the Shah of Iran, Manuel Norriega and Saddam Hussein for the bulk of his reign.

President Barack Obama was recently photographed shaking hands with Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez and the bulk of American conservatives had a collective heart attack and immediately went on the offensive. He was called everything from "naive" to "socialist" to flat out "communist." Why because he met the leader of another country, shook the man's hand and smiled while exchanging pleasantries.
Initially I couldn't see what the big deal was, but a conservative whom I work with as well as a friend of mine informed me that shaking hands with a dictator like Chavez undermined both Obama AND the authority of the United States. Something about that didn't seem quite right. Being a student of history I knew this couldn't have been the first time an American president shook hands with a dictator. To jump start my memory I found some old photographs which backed up something which my gut had been telling me and sure enough I found pictures of former American presidents shaking hands with dictators.

I found a treasure trove of former presidents shaking hands with men who were the poster boys for dictatorship. There were multiple shots of Reagan shaking hands with former Russian premier Gorbachev. Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Reagan call Russia an "Evil Empire?" I could have sworn that during the cold war the Russians had intercontinental ballistic missiles pointed at every major city in the United States poised to wipe us off the map. Gorbachev's Russian oversaw a Gulag system that still sent political dissidents to Siberia and funded wars in Central America and Southeast Asia. Where was the conservative anger when "Ronnie" shook hands with this 'evil' commie? I guess George Will was busy that day.


I saw pictures of Bill Clinton George Herbert Walker Bush, Ronald Reagan AND Jimmy Carter with Yassar Arafat leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The United States has LONG considered the PLO a terrorist organization. Where was the uproar?

When Nixon recognized China and made his historic trip with Secretary of State Kissinger and took a now famous photo with Chairman Mao Tse Tung. pardon me, but wasn't Mao the guy who sent Chinese troops at American troops in human waves on the 38th parallel at the Yalu River during the Korean war? Didn't he also start the "cultural revolution" and send millions to death and work camps? I could have sworn he did yet there was no uproar when Nixon shook hands with him.
And Franklin Delano Roosevelt not only shook hands with Josef Stalin, but brought the Soviets into World War Two as our allies. Josef Stalin was possibly one of the worst totalitarian butchers in the history of the world. Stalin killed tens of millions MORE of his own people than Hitler and the 3rd Reich. His secret police rounded his enemies up in the middle of the night to be executed or shipped to Siberia. He ruled his country with an iron hand, reduced human life to numbers on a chart and had history books rewritten to cover the full extent of his crimes against the world.

Do I mean to minimize any wrong that Hugo Chavez may have done or may STILL be doing? Of course not. Do I think Mr. Chavez to be relatively sane? Not really. But in the grand scheme of things, Chavez isn't funding terrorist to attack us and isn't pointing thermonuclear weapons at us, hence I don't see him as a threat? What I find puzzling is that despite George W. Bush declaring that Chavez was an evil dictator we didn't cease buying oil from Venezuela or impose an embargo on products from them. Chavez nationalized his country's oil supply and effectively angered foreign oil companies who were making a fortune in his country and the 2% of Venezuela's population who control all of it's wealth. Translation? This crazy guy wants to control his country's natural resources, build schools, roads and hospitals and stop the poor in his country from taking to the streets with guns to over throw whomever's in charge. HOW DARE HE!?!
Chavez routinely sends brutal police to attack demonstrators and is far from being the "man of the people" he would like to be seen as. He censors newspapers and imprisons those who disagree with him. He IS a dictator and should be seen and treated as such, but on that same token, an American president should NOT be unfairly demonized for simply extending a social pleasantry. I wager that had President Obama openly criticized Chavez or punched him in the face the same conservatives who are still in an uproar about this handshake would be chastising him for being "uncouth" and "un presidential." If one is determined to see something with enough zeal, eventually he or she will see it.