At a memorial service for Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg Tuesday, President Barack Obama said:
“It took a man like Madiba to free not just the prisoner, but the jailer as well, to show that you must trust others so that they may trust you; to teach that reconciliation is not a matter of ignoring a cruel past, but a means of confronting it with inclusion and generosity and truth. He changed laws, but he also changed hearts.”
But Martha MacCallum hints that Foxaganda is not happy that Obama shook hands with Cuban President Raúl Castro at the memorial service. Bill Hemmer at Fox criticized the handshake. At Breitbart, John Nolte noted:
For those who believe in human rights and liberty, the sight of our president bounding up some stairs to energetically shake hands with Raul Castro, dictator of Cuba, was more than a little unsettling -- regardless of the circumstance. But that's what President Obama seemed to go out of his way to do at Nelson Mandela's memorial service Tuesday. Although Castro has imprisoned American Alan Gross for four years now, CNN alternately applauded and made excuses for the handshake.
And, of course, there were reminders that Obama had also shaken hands with the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
Because shaking hands and otherwise making nice with dictators is, of course something that Republicans would never, ever do.
Dwight Eisenhower with Francisco Franco
Dwight Eisenhower with Nikita Khruschev
Henry Kissinger and Augusto Pinochet
Leonid Brezhnev sweet-talks Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon with Mao Zedong
George H.W. Bush with Manuel Noriega
Richard Nixon and Nicolae Ceausescu
George H.W. Bush and Hugo Chávez
George W. Bush with Kazakhstan
President Nursultan Nazarbayev
Ronald Reagan with Mikhail Gorbachev
Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein
Dick Cheney with Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev