Privatizing Power & Prestige

Sometimes is video is worth a fifty-five gallon drum of vomit:

Sometimes the follow-up that confirms what nauseated you the first time brings insatiable waves of the dry heaves:

And sometimes somebody has to vacuum up all that barf, attach the shop vac to a fire hose, and blast it square into Red Barry's grinning rictus:

Beats me who the Chosen One thinks he's fooling.  Personally I don't think he "made a mistake" by "stumbling into" the Castroid dictator and grinningly pressing that pudgy demonic flesh while Uncle Hugo scored a huge propaganda coup and insulted B.O. to his face with that "literary" purple elephant gag gift at the same time (Hey, after Gordon Brown's DVDs that he can't watch and Queen Elizabeth's I-Pod, Lucifer can't exactly say much about tacky gifts, much less ones he just HAS to be in agreement with).  I think he deliberately sought out that photo-op because he was gaggingly eager to play the stooge to Chavez.  It's a campaign promise he's actually keeping, and the one you knew would be kept.

Otto Reich, former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela and special envoy and diplomat under President Reagan and both Presidents Bush, tells us why this putrid stunt was bad for America:

[I]n Venezuela Hugo Chavez said last night this is the greatest triumph in Venezuelan diplomacy ever. Because what he is trying to do is to portray this as an endorsement of his policies, which he calls 21st century socialism but which is really just retread 20th-century fascism.”

Chavez is seeking to “portray this warm handshake, and a slap on the back which came later, as an endorsement of Chavez, which I’m sure President Obama did not intend,” Reich said.

I'm sure he intended precisely to portray that, because his policies are no different from Uncle Hugo's apart from the latter's decade head start.  And that point is being made quite a ways above my pay grade:

For that diehard Obamunist lurker out there - and you know who you are - that wants to scrape enough decorum and skullsweat together to actually try to construct a coherent argument no less pathetic for the effort in Godbama's defense, the Summit of the Americas did have a consistent baseline.  Anybody beholding the Golden Child clasping the claw with Chavista could not possibly be taken aback by the Chicago Cherubim sitting there quietly nodding during Daniel Ortega's hour-long America-trashing like it was one of Jeremiah Wright's sermons - which it probably was.

Bear this weekend in mind when Russian strategic bomber bases in Venezuela go online and Iranian nuclear missiles are stationed on the northern shore of Latin America and a triumphant Axis of Evil shakes hands for real and with gleeful bluster issues its list of demands to the American president who, in Uncle Hugo's words, "stinks scarcely less than George Bush".

They won't have far to look, because he'll be up on the platform with them, trying to get their autograph on Chavez's "gift".