McCain exemplified a great degree of hypocrisy on Tuesday when he tore into Obama for shaking hands with Cuban President Raul Castro at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service in South Africa. The brother of infamous dictator Fidel Castro stood first in a line of world leaders as Obama approached to deliver his impassioned speech at the podium, making the meeting with Castro inevitable and unavoidable.
“It just gives Raul some propaganda to continue to prop up his dictatorial brutal regime,” McCain told Public Radio International. And then the money quote: “Neville Chamberlain shook hands with Hitler.”
Almost all political pundits knew that Obama would take some heat for shaking hands with Castro the moment it happened. But the level of vitriol from McCain took many by surprise.
First of all, McCain used the most ludicrous analogy in modern foreign policy — Chamberlain ceding the Sudetenland to mass murderer Adolf Hitler with a handshake — to haul off on Obama on a simple gesture that didn’t involve negotiations or concessions in any form. It was merely a quick handshake and a greeting at a memorial service for a late world leader, not a handshake before a global summit designed to amend Cuban sanctions.
Besides, American presidents and dignitaries have shaken hands with enemies for decades, if not centuries:
- President Bill Clinton shook hands with Fidel Castro when they crossed paths at a United Nations event in 2000, yet somehow the U.S. embargo on Cuban goods survived intact and the Castros didn’t take it as a signal to invade Florida.
- President Franklin Roosevelt shook hands with another mass murderer, Joseph Stalin, during World War II and yet not a single inch of the American soil or interest was conceded.
- President Ronald Reagan shook hands with Cold War enemy, Russian president Mikhail Gorbechev on multiple occasions. But it was the Berlin Wall that came down, not American sovereignty.
- President Richard Nixon shook hands with Raul Castro’s big brother, Fidel, during his presidency.
- And, most of all, McCain shook hands with former Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, back in 2009, which makes McCain’s current hissy fit totally inappropriate and ridiculous.
Obama actually indirectly fired shots at Castro’s policies during his Mandela memorial speech when he said it was a contradiction for “leaders who claim solidarity with Madiba’s struggle for freedom, but do not tolerate dissent from their own people.”
McCain, it must be noted, knows better than anyone that diplomacy sometimes means shaking hands with repressive autocrats. Take, for example, former Libyan dictator Gaddafi.
McCain visited Gaddafi in Tripoli with other lawmakers on a diplomatic mission in 2009 for an “interesting” trip he described on Twitter.
Interesting man??? The man who tortured his own people and fed prisoners to his lions and leopards in his dungeon is “interesting?”
Darn social media. In light of McCain’s tweet, how can McCain fix his lips to excoriate Obama for merely running across Raul Castro?
