There was the gift to President Obama from Venezuelan president-for-life Hugo Chavez (democracy, anybody?) of a book about the international (read U.S.) rape of Latin America penned by noted Uruguayan leftist intellectual Eduardo Galeano, which elicited this response from Mr. Obama: “It was a nice gesture to give me a book. I am a reader.” No state-run-Venezuelan-film-industry DVDs needed here.

This is the same Eduardo Galeano, by the way, who appeared on “Democracy Now” a few years ago and told Amy Goodman:

I think that Chavez is being demonized . . . a good demon, useful for an international war machine who is always hungry of demons. I mean, they need demons to justify the fact that the world is just spending fortunes in the military industry. So, weapons need wars, and wars need alibis, and alibis are demons, the evil forces which are our daily danger. And so they have invented that Chavez may be a danger for humanity and that he’s a tyrant and he’s a despotic dictator. He won eight elections. It’s strange, being a dictator, eight clean elections won by him.

Strange indeed. After all, we know that dictators never win elections.

Of course there was also the handshake that rocked the world, a bleak moment no doubt for the Venezuelan opposition-in-hiding.

And then there was the Ortega diatribe, followed by some Obama applause:

All in all, not a bad day for the forces of anti-democracy.