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.”

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.

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: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