President Barack Obama extended a hand to America’s hemispheric neighbors on Saturday at a summit where he offered a new beginning for U.S.-Cuba relations and greeted Venezuela’s fiery, leftist president who gave him a book about Latin America’s exploitation by foreign powers.
U.S. relations with Havana and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez took center stage at the Summit of the Americas in this island capital. Obama signaled he was ready to accept Cuban President Raul Castro’s proposal of talks on issues once off-limits for Cuba, including the scores of political prisoners held by the communist government.
Obama shook hands with Chavez, a leader who once likened former President George W. Bush to the devil, and casually exclaimed, “Como estas?”
“I think it was a good moment,” Chavez said, describing his first grip and grin with Obama. “I think President Obama is an intelligent man, compared to the previous U.S. president.”
The United States will soon lose its place as leader of the world, and the United Nations is a broken organization that is beyond repair, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Wednesday.
“The United States empire is on its way down and it will be finished in the near future, inshallah,” Chavez told reporters, ending the statement with the Arabic phrase for “God willing.”
Chavez said that the United Nations is a “deceased” organization because it was formed to bridge the differences between the United States and Russia, and a brand new international organization would have to be formed to replace it.
Earlier, Chavez initiated a verbal assault on President Bush, calling him “the devil” during an insult-riddled address to world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly.
“The devil came here yesterday,” Chavez said, gesturing to where Bush had stood during his speech on Tuesday. “He came here talking as if he were the owner of the world.”He later said he was referring to President Bush when he spoke of the devil.
I think we were better off with a president that Chavez disapproved of, considering that Hugo wants to get rid of term limits, pays no attention to democracy when it is inconvenient for him, tends to be a raving authoritarian, has been known to use torture and beatings as political persuasion, keeps ministers who have no official training at all (but are spectacular suck-ups), has been accused of numerous human rights violations, threw out the Human Rights Watch, shut down news stations that criticized him, made private radio and television part of the state, killed Venezuela’s economy between his nationalization policies and the corruption they create, has created one of the most generally corrupt nations in the world, and has lead a country with skyrocketing crime rates (including a murder rate that has tripled).
Yeah, he sounds like just the guy for our glorious President to be befriending… and just the guy to decide who is a good American President and who is not.
chicken come home to roost
So the situation in Honduras has gotten… interesting. Most of the news sources out there are decrying it as an “illegal coup”, and even our Glorious President has come out condemning the individuals and groups who (peacefully) overthrew the previous…