Re: Obama meeting Chavez and actually shaking his hand!!!!!, no one is better at the straight-faced takedown of Fox News talking points than Daniel Larison:

What is imperative and much more important than emphasizing U.S. weakness is manufacturing foreign threats, which Obama then supposedly “fails” to confront and overcome. Having cooked up the Venezuelan menace where no significant threat exists, Obama’s critics will then decry his “appeasement” of this menace, by which they will mean that for the most part Obama does not seem interested in hysterical alarmism in the conduct of foreign affairs.

Actually, watching the right pretend that Chavez constitutes some sort of actual threat to the U.S. has been pretty amusing - as one of Larison’s commenters note, right-wingers seem to think they can post a picture of the Handshake of Doom and THEY AUTOMATICALLY WIN TEH ARGUMENT!!!

 But what’s even more amusing is how Obama himself seems to be mocking the wingers:

Obama, in short, ridiculed the very idea that we should see Chavez as a threatening figure, and threw in a bit of mockery of the reporters, to boot.

It’s worth recalling that there was a time when Dems would quake with fear about national security attacks coming from the right, let alone respond to them with outright mockery. In this sense, Obama’s tone underscores how much the political climate has shifted on such matters.

It’s also a sign of his confidence that the public is with him — and has little trust in the Republicans — even on questions of national security.

Conservatives are talking almost exclusively to themselves these days, unaware that the broader country finds them more and more irrelevant.