The Americanistas

If you live in a glass house don’t throw stones. It’s interesting that Republican guru Newt Gingrich has gone on an instant media tour to denounce Obama’s handshake with Hugo Chávez. Gingrich has a history of blocking inquiries into the sanguinary actions of right-wing Latin American dictatorships. It appears dictatorships only earn Gingrich’s P.R. help if they’re right wing and former White House allies.

Not only that, but it appears he’s all for celebrating democracy and its results (Chávez can be accused of many things, but not of failing to win elections), but only as long as the results are to his liking.

In the mid-1990s, Rep. Gingrich tried to limit inquiries into the U.S. role in funding and feeding intelligence to Guatemala’s murderous military dictatorship, which was behind the deaths of dozens of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans during that country’s Civil War.

After Obama’s inauguration, Gingrich eagerly jumped on the Obama bandwagon, writing that the ceremony sent a powerful message to dictators everywhere:

The message sent by the Obama inauguration, Gingrich wrote, “was aimed straight at the heart of all the dictators, theocrats, oligarchs and military strongmen who rationalize their tyranny with the excuse that their people aren’t ‘ready’ for democracy: In the course of a single generation, the son of an immigrant from a poor country in Africa rose in America to be the leader of the free world.

Well apparently Gingrich believes Venezuela’s people aren’t ‘ready’ for democracy. They’ve voted for Hugo Chávez in 1998, 2000, and 2006. When criticizing Obama for engaging Chávez, Republicans should be ready to defend their own woeful records on human rights abroad. Chávez has been undemocratic in his handling of many issues within Venezuela, and his record on basic freedoms is at least shaky, but he’s no Gen. Augusto Pinochet.