{"id":11549,"date":"2012-07-14T08:29:13","date_gmt":"2012-07-14T13:29:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=11549"},"modified":"2012-07-14T08:37:18","modified_gmt":"2012-07-14T13:37:18","slug":"chavez-venezuela-is-no-threat-obama-is-a-good-guy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2012\/07\/14\/chavez-venezuela-is-no-threat-obama-is-a-good-guy\/","title":{"rendered":"Chavez: Venezuela is no threat, Obama is a ‘good guy’"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Times of India<\/em> has the story Chavez: Venezuela is no threat, Obama is a ‘good guy’<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

There was a window to improve ties between Caracas and Washington after Obama took office in 2009 and promised more engagement with foes. Chavez toned down his tirades against the “Yankee empire” and shook hands with Obama at a summit.<\/p>\n

But within months, Chavez said the U.S. leader was disillusioning the world by following his predecessor George W. Bush’s foreign policies, and he cranked up his rhetoric again.<\/p>\n

On Friday, Chavez said Obama’s troubles began with that handshake. “They fell on him: saying he’s a socialist, a communist. … The personal war against Obama started, including looking for a way to get him out of office by any means.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In my previous post Romney Wants A War With Hugo Chavez<\/strong><\/a>, I quoted an “expert” who was downplaying the threat posed by Chavez.<\/p>\n

Experts in the region, though, called Obama\u2019s comments reasonable. Chavez is \u201ccertifiable,\u201d with a tremendous ego fueled by the power that comes from sitting on vast oil reserves \u2013 but he\u2019s not as dangerous as the leaders of other less friendly regimes, said Riordan Roett, the director of Latin American Studies Program at the School of Advanced International Studies at The John Hopkins University.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In response to that statement, I noted:<\/p>\n

Even the experts go overboard when they try to seem reasonable in comparison to the Republicans.\u00a0 Unless this expert means that Chavez is certifiably correct in his assessment of the United States.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the story noted in this blog post we have Chavez being more honest and candid about U.S. politics than Mitt Romney.\u00a0 You have to wonder who is actually “certifiable”, or what the meaning of “certifiable” really is.<\/p>\n

As for Chavez’s remark that Obama was “was disillusioning the world by following his predecessor George W. Bush’s foreign policies”, at the time he made those remarks he was exactly correct as far as identifying my disillusionment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Times of India has the story Chavez: Venezuela is no threat, Obama is a ‘good guy’. There was a window to improve ties between Caracas and Washington after Obama took office in 2009 and promised more engagement with foes. Chavez toned down his tirades against the “Yankee empire” and shook hands with Obama at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-11549","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11549"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11552,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11549\/revisions\/11552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}