Oh sure, they’re all smiles until they talk about
the cost of the rust proofing.

Whenever there is a comical right-wing point to be made, MSNBC doesn’t have a galaxy of wanks like FoxNews. No, they’ve got Scarborough and his besweatered co-dependent and they’ve got Pat Buchanan. Pat lives somewhere at the studio, in a previously used glass-booth.

Yesterday, the oft-published Hitler apologist expressed outrage that Barack Obama shook the hand of Hugo Chavez.

Buchanan: Barack Obama allowed himself to be disrespected. Now if that’s the way he wants to do it personally, that’s personal. But he’s the President of the United States, and his country was savaged and smeared down there, and he grinned all the way through it.

Which is interesting when noting that Pat’s original boss smiled and shook hands with the likes of Chairman Mao and Leonid Brezhnev while the latter had thousands of nuclear warheads focused on the United States. And further, as Lawrence O’Donnell noted:

Nixon remembers giving a Lincoln Continental to Brezhnev at Camp David. Brezhnev’s eyes shone when he saw the car. Without warning, he waved Nixon into the front seat, took the wheel and roared off as Secret Service men looked on aghast.

And they went to the drive-in together and Brezhnev did the hole in the box of popcorn trick. But OMG, Obama shook a guy’s hand!